Previously on the Best and Worst of Raw: Kane is main-eventing, having onscreen performance evaluations and hosting 3-hour conference calls, and nobody can figure out why the ratings are going down. This week, WWE counters that trend with a bunch of legends who aren’t going to wrestle, and two more who only wrestle on pay-per-views. ENJOY.
And now, the Best and Worst of WWE Raw for October 19, 2015.
Best: Stone Cold Steve Austin Is Here To … Intro The Undertaker? Sure Okay I Mean-
This week’s vintage Best and Worst of WWF Monday Night Raw opens with Stone Cold Steve Austin. He intros the Undertaker, then disappears because he’s not important and WWF doesn’t yet realize they should be pushing him to the moon. Eventually they figure it out and things are fine, but … wait, did Brock Lesnar just show up? Hang on, I think my clock’s broken. Nope, sorry, time’s just a flat circle, my mistake.
Stone Cold opens the show, which is great, then vanishes in the darkness during the Undertaker’s entrance. Maybe he wanted to get out of there before Taker remembered he ruined his Black Wedding. Taker’s been really into forgetting things for years at a time, then suddenly getting super mad about them. Seeing Austin is always pretty fun, especially after WWE’s weird will he or won’t he advertising strategy, but I wish they’d done more with him than have him shill a podcast and pop a “What” chant.
I’m not sure Austin can ever be forgiven for that chant. When he’s on his death bed, somebody’s gonna ask him if he needs anything and he’ll say “water,” and everyone in the room will yell “WHAT??” and stare at him with smiles on their faces.
Worst: The Thin Red Line
The highlight of this week’s Undertaker appearance is that gnarly, red indent his hat left across his forehead. Motherf*cker looked like Frasier Crane had just fallen and bashed his head against the coffee table.
He delivers one of his trademark “this promo’s terrible but nobody’s gonna notice because they’re excited to see The Undertaker” promos and brings out Brock Lesnar for a fight. I guess Undertaker is the babyface again, making challenges and explaining that Brock “took everything” from him, despite months of teleportation sneak-attacks, brutal dick-kickings and cheap SummerSlam victories. Lesnar is the heel again because he’s backing down from a fight. I don’t know. I think everyone involved knows that “Brock Lesnar vs. Undertaker in Hell in a Cell” is going to sell itself — cell itself? — and doesn’t need anything to make it desirable. As long as Brock Lesnar and Undertaker exist between the announcement and the match, they’re fine. They built one of the biggest and retroactively most important WrestleMania matches in history with a month of Brock looking like a chump and getting stabbed in the hand with a pen, so whatever.
Best: Unicorns
The New Day’s pre-match speech before their six-man with The Dudley Boyz and Big Match John revealed two important things: one, that the injured body parts of various Dallas Cowboys players are booty; and two, they are unicorns. They’ve brought magic back to WWE. If you needed an explanation for their amazing new t-shirt, there you go.
Worst: Sore Losers
The match itself was fun but mostly uneventful, as you can see Cena winding down before his post-Hell in a Cell hiatus. We’re six days out from a pay-per-view (do we still call them that? “Live special,” I guess?) and he’s not even feuding with anyone. There’s a U.S. Open Challenge announced for Hell in a Cell, which one would think means someone’s actually stepping up and beating him for real finally, but who knows?
The finish was Xavier Woods remembering he’s a pro wrestler for a minute and rolling up Brother Devon with a handful of camo pants. Because babyfaces, Cena attacks Woods after the match and stands guard so the Dudleys can once again Get The and put Woods through a table. Per WWE, one underhanded deed necessitates several violent responses as punishment. Usually these are great for story payoffs where you’ve set up the audience to feel the cheater really deserves comeuppance, but hey, we’ve only got 5 primetime hours of wrestling a week to work with, dude’s gotta eat finishers and go through a table 90 seconds after a dirty pin. Chop chop!
Worst: The Secret To Beating Sasha Banks Is “Hit Her With One Forearm”
You know what’d benefit the Divas Revolution, I think? More segments without the Bella Twins.
That’s not to get hacky and say the Bellas don’t deserve to be involved, it just might benefit the entire operation if you’d portray the Divas as a division of pro wrestlers, and not as women relating and reacting to the Bellas. The Bellas, for better or worse, represent the old guard. They’re the Kelly Kelly era. There’s definitely still a spot for them, they should just not be EVERY spot. Any time PCB interacts with Team B.A.D., it feels like filler, like they’re all waiting around for the Bellas to spark a conversation. Promos end with Bella interruptions, matches end with Bella distractions, the works. They’re like the world’s smallest sample size of nWo.
The first Bella-related Divas thing of the night is a tag match, pitting Sasha Banks (Spider-Man) and Naomi (Iceman) with Tamina (Firestar) against Nikki and Alicia Fox. Sasha’s contribution to main roster matches continues to be the weirdest stop-and-go thing. She’s clearly the most popular and engaging person in the Divas Revolution for smart and mark crowds alike, but her victories are always afterthoughts — “Sasha Banks has beaten the Divas Champion!,” Cole screamed into the Grand Canyon — and her losses always seem like technical errors. Here, Naomi does almost an entire match’s work, tags out for a brief flurry of Sasha, and after ONE Nikki Bella forearm Sasha’s incapacitated and tags out. She manages to climb back onto the apron, but Nikki hits her with a second forearm, and that allows the Bellas to utilize Brie’s non-stop attempts at distraction finishes to win. To their credit, they at least did a few move reversals after the distraction instead of going straight for a rollup.
I want to get into these matches, but nothing’s booked as pointlessly as these Divas tag matches. There’s nothing for them to fight for, you know? If Nikki’s in contention for the Divas Championship, there’s nothing really made of her losing, beyond maybe Cole yelling that she’d gotten pinned. Nobody benefits from the wins, or loses anything from the losses. It’s just wrestling the air for bragging rights.
I’m not saying we need Divas tag titles, but if you’re planning a “revolution” and want an operable women’s division, you’ve gotta have more ammo for stories than “one of them has a belt” and “the rest of them hate each other.”
Worst: Thank Goodness Shawn Michaels Looks Strong Heading Into Hell In A Cell!
I’ll never understand how WWE treats its legends.
Seth Rollins is the WWE World Heavyweight Champion. He’s won (at the time of this promo) one match out of nearly 20 since SummerSlam, and he’s got a championship match against Kane inside Hell in a Cell on Sunday. Shawn Michaels is one of the greatest of all time, but he isn’t and doesn’t any of that. He’s not the champ, he’s not an active wrestler, he’s not getting back into the ring — if he didn’t give Daniel Bryan a match after their mini-feud, he ain’t getting into the ring for Rollins — and he doesn’t have a match on Sunday. He probably won’t even BE there on Sunday. Still, this Raw segment is not only built around Michaels successfully emasculating Rollins, it’s a loud, blatant statement that the old version of WWE mattered, and the one we’re sitting through now doesn’t. The production team won’t even play Rollins’ music, because he’s a fake-ass Shawn Michaels and they don’t want to make the real one mad.
To be clear, that’s not Michaels’ or Rollins’ faults. It’s the fault of creative, I guess, for creating an environment where WrestleMania doesn’t get to feel important unless a bunch of dudes who were popular 20 years ago show up to have showcase matches, and everyone else is booked in this wishy-washy, 50/50 toilet swirl where wins don’t matter and championships matter even less. Say what you will about how Michaels handled himself during his first WWF Championship run, but maybe a little complaining, manipulation and crybaby grandstanding would keep Rollins from losing a legit 90% of his matches as champ.
We didn’t even get a Sweet Chin Music. That’s how sad this was. Rollins lost a fight without even getting hit. The kid who had part of his pizza stolen got more of a rub.
Best: Seth Rollins Manages To Defeat Pepto Bismol
Hey, good news, though! The goddamn World Champion gets his second win since mid-August against Ryback, who I’ve decided is either a Pepto Bismol bottle bombarded with gamma radiation or Nintendo’s Kirby after he’s sucked in and swallowed The Absorbing Man.
My favorite part of the video is at 1:34. Rollins is in the ring waiting to dive, and off-screen we hear a loud crash and Ryback going AAAHHHHH. I’m pretending dove into the table to sell the dive before it happened. Other than that, what can you say? Rollins and Ryback have always had solid chemistry, and it’s nice to see the champ get a win against a guy who absolutely should not be beating the champ. It’s concerning that “the WWE World Heavyweight Champion won a match” feels like a refreshing anomaly though, right?
Worst: Doing A Match To Sell The Same Match Less Than A Week Later
At Hell in a Cell, Neville will team with Cesaro and Dolph Ziggler to take on King Barrett, Sheamus and Rusev. To set this match up, Neville teamed up with Cesaro and Dolph Ziggler to take on King Barrett, Sheamus and Rusev, and it ends with Sheamus Brogue Kicking Ziggler and Barrett pinning him. So … why are we doing it again? We saw it, and we saw who’d win. Cole called it “round two,” but I don’t think that’s how wrestling matches work.
I feel like such an asshole complaining about this stuff sometimes. I’m not on the creative team and I’m not trying to sell WWE tickets, so my opinion of how things are booked really doesn’t matter, but holy sh*t you guys, in what universe is doing a 5-minute match with a clean finish a great way to build up a 10-minute version of the same match? I feel like I wouldn’t care about any of this if Vince hadn’t done his “no wrestling for wrestling’s sake” speech and just admitted that 75% of this sh*t is filler between Chrisley Knows Best commercials. “We need that ad revenue so we have to be on TV as long as possible. Watch the Hulu version of Raw, that’s closer to what we’d be doing if we hadn’t backed ourselves into a lucrative but creatively empty corner.”
These matches are the Website With No Content And Too Many Ads of pro wrestling. Not that I’m pointing any fingers.
On The Bright Side
There are a lot of great wrestlers in this match, and I hope this is the false start to a really show-stealing pre-show match at Hell in a Cell. The pre-show is 30 minutes, right? Give the match 25 of it, and have Renee and Corey Graves say everything they need to say about how excited they are in the final 5. They don’t really need more than that.
Worst: We’re Just Gonna Keep Letting Roman Give Long Speeches, Huh?
Remember last week, when Roman Reigns cut a pretty good promo recapping his beef with Bray Wyatt, but Chicago ate him alive with “what” and “boring” chants anyway? WWE saw that and thought, “hey, that worked, let’s do it again.”
This week, Roman Reigns cuts another pretty good promo recapping his beef with Bray Wyatt, and once again the crowd just “whats” and “borings” him. Wyatt shows up to give the promo some gravity, but it’s still not working. “You’re afraid of me! You should be afraid of me! VERY VERY FRAID OF ME.” Having Ric Flair do his proud daughter speech for Roman didn’t do him any favors. We’ve been watching these guys punch and complain at each other for almost two years now. Directly, one-on-one, since the spring. When they punch each other, magic can happen. When they punch each other, the crowd’s usually into it. When they talk? They just talk and talk and talk and talk. It numbs the brain. It’s one of those situations where neither guy’s performing badly, they’re just performing bad.
This sets up a handicap main event for the night, and gives us a hilarious moment where Dean Ambrose makes the save and the announce team’s all, GASP, ROMAN REIGNS FOUND A PARTNER FOR TONIGHT AND IT’S DEAN AMBROSE! That’s like Matador Diego needing a partner for the night and finding Matador Fernando.
Also, Erick Rowan Is Back
Erick Rowan is suddenly back from what I can only assume was an International Vintners Convention where he picked up a sheep-themed gas station onesie. Braun Strowman had been subbing in for Rowan, and now Rowan’s subbing in for the mysteriously absent Luke Harper. I hope he wasn’t the cause of something trivial that would piss off management!
Harper’s absence (and Rowan’s return?) are tied into the big mystery of the night, which is the disappearance of Randy Orton. He was supposed to be on WWE’s tour of Mexico but didn’t make it, and now he’s AWOL (cough) from Raw. JBL’s sources (Ron Simmons and Zeb Colter, I’m guessing) say that Orton GOT GOT by the Wyatts, and apparently there’s a legitimate injury that needs explaining. So, here we are. Dean Ambrose and nobody are heading into Hell in a Cell to face Braun Strowman and Maybe Nobody. Or Erick Rowan, whichever’s worse.
Best: Why Don’t You Shut Up, PHIL DONAHUE
This is the face you make when a 70-year old tells a 23-year old to call you “Sally Jessy Raphael.”
If you aren’t familiar with Sally Jessy Raphael, she’s an American talk show host who started in 1959 — yep — and had a popular show in the ’80s. Here she is interviewing the Fabulous Ones in 1984, 8 years before Paige was born. Not only is Paige a millennial, she’s a BRITISH millennial, so the reference is even less believable. It’d be like me going on Raw, being interrupted by Byron Saxton and yelling, HEY SHUT UP EAMONN ANDREWS, THIS IS MY LIFE I’M TALKING ABOUT. Renee should’ve been all, “go f*ck yourself, Shirley Solomon.”
Worst: It’s Okay, Go Watch The Star Wars Trailer
Charlotte defeats Brie Bella in the night’s second Bella-related Divas thing. It’s plodding and kinda terrible, and positioned on the show so you won’t feel bad for turning away to watch the new Star Wars: The Force Awakens trailer on Monday Night Football. The trailer is really, really good.
Really the only thing I want out of a Charlotte match right now is for someone to counter the Figure-Eight by moving in any direction. If you scoot backwards, she’s gotta fall on her head. If you scoot forward, she’s going to collapse in on herself. If you roll to either side, she’s got no center of gravity to hold you in place, and is gonna just flop over. We’re not exactly studying tape to find a counter to the Chikara Special over here.
Best: The Unexpected Brilliance Of Kevin Owens vs. Mark Henry
If there was a true highlight to Monday’s Raw, it was accidental soulmates Kevin Owens and Mark Henry meeting each other.
YOU’RE A BULLY? I BEEN A BULLY FOR 19 YEARS! Kevin Owens is the kind of in-ring chatter, but Mark Henry’s always been great at that, too … remember when he used to yell about people about charging them for air? Put those guys in the ring together and let them just yell at each other for five minutes, and you’ve got something great. It’s ESPECIALLY great if it ends with Henry getting air on the pop-up powerbomb, which he totally did.
I’m happy that Owens is having all these quick, under-the-radar matches against guys like Henry and Kalisto who never get title shots, so he can not only make the Intercontinental Champion look competent, but freshen up the secondary title scene. If Cena’s taking off for a while, Owens is the best possible (and most thematically ironic) person to take his spot.
Best/Worst: The Not A Shield Reunion, Featuring Not The Wyatt Family
Finally, we have what should be the greatest moment of the year for me: Triple H and Shawn Michaels fantasy booking a Shield reunion, and it actually happening.
Seth Rollins was goaded into volunteering to be partners with Dean Ambrose and Roman Reigns against The Wyatt Family, because The Authority still has him convinced he needs to “prove himself” despite being WWE World Heavyweight Champion since f*cking April. Nobody hates Seth Rollins more than The Authority. Anyway, Rollins assures us that this is not a Shield reunion, but it IS, completely out of nowhere and with no build.
Despite that, and despite pretty much everyone in the building and/or at home and/or with a working brain stem knowing Rollins was gonna bail and bait-and-switch everyone, we got excited. The crowd’s chanting “this is awesome” before the match begins, and pop huge for Rollins’ delay on standing up to the Wyatts. The interplay between the changed characters sorta took the wind out of their sails, but it was good character work … I’m not sure why they chose to blatantly set up Rollins as full of sh*t if they were gonna do the hot tag tease and walk-out, but whatever. You could hear the crowd deflate and sorta sit on their hands waiting for the other shoe to drop.
The great thing, though, is that when the shoe finally dropped, the crowd got back into it. Reigns and Ambrose are never better than when they’re in a tag match together against the Wyatts, and the Wyatts (even without Luke Harper, who is the best worker of the group by a mile) are never better than when they’re running against a united Shield. So the pre and post-Rollins stuff was magic, and the Actual WWE World Heavyweight Champion content was disappointing and obvious. What the hell are they doing with him?
If they made a point to do this seemingly out of nowhere in Dallas, the site of WrestleMania 32, chances are they’re going to finally gives us our formal, for-real, high-stakes Shield triple threat at Mania. They’re big on the “we started something here, so let’s FINISH IT HERE” thing. I’m hoping that match features a Saul-to-Paul religious experience for Rollins, so he can stop being the most neutered wrestler in the world and start being the creative and performance centerpiece a guy with this much TV time is supposed to be. I love a chickensh*t champ, but he’s supposed to be more “chicken” than “sh*t.”
Best: Top 10 Comments Of The Night
Sammy Davis Jr.
WWE: Then
Then
Then
TakakoInoue_JustGetsPrettier
The Undertaker’s really going dark to try to sell these Fudgie the Whale and Cookiepuss cakes, isn’t he?
The Real Birdman
Maybe Shawn can ask God to tag with Dean Ambrose against the Wyatts
Mr. Piemerica
I wish HBK came out dressed like King Cuerno
Beerguyrob
“I’m sorry I took your pizza, young man.”
Not the apology Marty Jannetty was expecting.
Kevin Nash Booked This
I guess Rollins really is HBK 2.0. He went out there and forgot he was supposed to lose.
Mr. Royal Rumble, TheCensoredMSol
After the six man tag, all the guys go out for drinks, and Neville listens as the other five try to convince him that they’ve got the best “John Cena’s an asshole” story.
Captain Spinmove
Strowman, Roman, and Rowan. A dyslexic commentator’s dream.
Cami
Seth is not a coward, he just adheres to minimalism when it comes to wrestling architecture.
Mr. Royal Rumble, TheCensoredMSol, with a second comment of the week to finish us off:
If Branden Weeden was your quarterback, you’d chant “This is awesome,” too.
Reminders:
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