The Best And Worst Of WWE Raw

Pre-show notes:

– I did a lot (a lot) of writing this weekend, so make sure caught up on it all. Check out The Best and Worst of NXT TakeOver: Brooklyn and The Best and Worst of SummerSlam 2015 before reading.

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And now, here’s the Best and Worst of WWE Raw for August 24, 2015.

Best: Oh No, Bo

Brock Lesnar and Paul Heyman challenge the Undertaker to a SummerSlam rematch right here, right now, and Bo Dallas (of all people) answers their challenge. It’s like walking a stupid dog, losing control of the leash and helplessly watching him sprint into traffic. The end result is Bo getting German suplexed nearly half a dozen times, F-5’d and left for dead in the middle of the ring.

I love when characters you’d never expect to meet cross paths. Did you ever think you’d see Raw open with Bo Dallas telling Brock Lesnar to bo-lieve? That sh*t doesn’t even work on Neville. Maybe Bo should’ve put on a bunch of Jimmy John’s and tried to coax Brock out of the ring with the Ultimate Porker™. “Brock, it’s me, your friend! Jimmy John!”

Becky Lynch mentions ghosts when she’s rambling off the different character types Divas are as good as, so why not bring Bo back as a ghost? He’s already dressed in all white, just throw some powder in his face and give him some Junkyard Dog chains and you’re set. He doesn’t even have to be scary, he can be friendly. Instead of “Bo,” he can say “boo.” All you have to do is BOO-LIEVE. Bring in Christina Ricci to guest host and have them fall in love. It writes itself, people.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qMYnDR6Ch0

Best: Xavier Woods, Tromboner

I didn’t think it was possible to top The New Day singing a parody of ‘Empire State Of Mind’ and calling their opponents “booty” at SummerSlam, and then Xavier Woods walks around the corner playing a trombone. In case you missed it, they performed a ‘New York, New York’ parody about themselves with live musical accompaniment. Also, Brooklyn is now booty. You know, some moments are beyond analysis. Citizen Kane clapping dot GIF.

Look at The Prime Time Players’ faces. That’s all you need to know:

If that wasn’t enough, the motherf*cker tromboned in time to corner strikes and played Taps during the pinfall. Xavier Woods deserves some kind of award for going from the most expendable guy on the show to its most essential entertainment tentpole in such a short time. The New Day is on another level right now. I want to say they’re my new favorite thing, but I don’t want to seem hyperbolic. I say everything’s my new favorite thing. The New Day might actually be my new favorite thing.

And then, because the post-SummerSlam Raw is the new post-WrestleMania Raw, THE DAMN DUDLEY BOYZ RETURN.

Best: Get Those Tables!

In a moment exactly zero of us predicted, The Dudley Boyz returned to Raw as a unit for the first time in a decade to jump The New Day and put Xavier Woods through a table with a 3-D. I’m not a huge fan of the Dudleys, especially not after the past 10 years or so of watching them beg for attention in Japan and anchor invasive biker gangs in TNA, but I’d be stupid if I said this segment wasn’t hot fire.

Bringing back the Dudleys for a quick run to (I assume) put over the current talent is a great idea. They’re the most decorated tag team in wrestling history, as I’m sure they’ll remind you every time they appear. They’re the only team to hold the WWE, WWF, ECW, WCW, NWA, TNA and IWGP Tag Team Championships. They only held the WWE versions of the WCW tag titles, but apparently it still counts. I say send them down to NXT when this is done (like another ECW original, Rhyno) and let them feud with the Vaudevillains over the NXT tag straps. Put them in the Dusty Rhodes Tag Team Classic. They’re advertising the “past, present and future” of tag team wrestling in the tournament, so if WWE wants a Tag World Grand Prix, you could do a lot worse than Bubba and D-Von.

I’ve gotta be honest, though, I feel like I jinxed The New Day by calling them the new Edge & Christian.

Best: The New Colossus

I never quite understand it, but I like trying to figure out the exact point of alignment for The Authority. When they’re at NXT, they’re these giving saints who are responsible for everything you love in wrestling. They move their hands and HERE’S KENTA, and HERE’S PRINCE DEVITT, and WOMEN IN SPORTS ARE REVOLUTIONARY~! We jump to Raw and suddenly they’re passive-aggressive villains, doing what’s “best for business” with ulterior motives, always ready to take credit for something they didn’t do or, say, unnecessarily defeat a WCW legend in his WWE debut at WrestleMania. The truth lies somewhere in the middle, doesn’t it?

Instead of thinking of NXT Triple H and Stephanie and Raw Triple H and Stephanie as different characters from different universes, we should start trying to find that middle point and discern the reasons why they do what they do. Maybe they aren’t heroes on one side and villains on the other … maybe they, like Jon Stewart, are simply WWE’s representation of “smart fans?”

Think about it. On NXT, they’re happy and positive and want everyone to succeed. They aren’t undermining anyone or manipulating the system. When smart fans watch NXT, what happens? They’re happy and positive and want everyone to succeed, and aren’t complaining about people “burying” each other or protecting spots. Everything seems constructive, like it’s leading to an end goal. On Raw, Triple H and Stephanie are jaded, sarcastic, hateful villains. They undermine top stars to protect their favorites, and sometimes act totally irrationally to keep things from happening against their will. When smart fans watch Raw, what happens? They’re jaded, sarcastic, hateful. They boo or sh*t-talk top stars who may objectively be very good at their jobs or a crucial part of the show as a money-making enterprise because they don’t like it, and are overly protective of their favorites. They want John Cena to lose so Kevin Owens can win, whether it makes sense or not. Everything feels like a dead end, and fans have to gather up everything they like about an otherwise dreary, regressive enterprise and defend it at all costs. That’s The Authority.

They aren’t bad guys; they’re us. We wouldn’t listen to the f*cking WWE Universe, either.

Best: Bah Gawd Black Sheep, Have You Any Wool

Dean Ambrose and his wacky, beer-drinkin’ brother Roman Reigns get a SummerSlam rematch against Bray Wyatt and Luke Harper, and swerve, it ends with Bloodsport‘s Ray Jackson interfering and throwing The Shield out of the ring to win the Kumite. Seriously though, a giant man who may or may not be Bray Wyatt and Luke Harper’s time-traveling love child from an apocalyptic future is BRAUN STROWMAN, “Sister Abigail’s black sheep.” You can tell he’s from NXT because his name is “Braun Strowman.” You might recognize him as the center Rosebud in charge of catching Adam Rose on trust falls.

What I love about Braun (besides the fact that he looks like Ogre from Revenge Of The Nerds and gives me an infinite number of Donald Gibb references) (and the fact that he’s strong, so his name is “Brawn”) is that he’s an old school, Zeus type of character. He’s the scary new guy with no ceiling, because he’s bigger and stronger than everybody and if he can manhandle Roman Reigns, there’s no telling what he could do to your favorites. I used to be fascinated by guys like this as a kid, and nowadays the closest WWE gets to having them is bringing out a 6-foot tall guy and having him beat jobbers for 8 months until someone important shows up and nerfs him.

Strowman showing up as Erick Rowan on Bane Venom and incapacitating Reigns and Ambrose by picking them up and choking them to death was great, and I like that he jumped from NXT to WWE without a lot of baggage. Like, as uptight smark wrestling fans we don’t have to worry about the main roster “ruining” all the good work they did at Full Sail like we might with basically any other new wrestler of note right now … he’s a fresh concept, assuming we didn’t frequent local Florida NXT house shows, and he’s got a clean slate. I’m never going to advocate taking NXT off The Network or whatever, but sometimes it’s nice to get introduced to a new character on Raw without 2+ years of expectations.

Suggested catchphrase: “I ain’t your pal, dickface.”

Best: Stardust, Or “Wade Barrett Is The Saddest Wrestler”

He is. I was hoping when Stardust laid him out that we’d go to commercial, and come back to Barrett and Bo Dallas both unconscious in the ring. The rest of the night people would have to wrestle around them. Even when Barrett regained consciousness, he’d choose to lie there and not move, because what’s the point?

Stardust turning on Barrett and getting confronted by Neville accomplishes two major things: it rids Cody of the flotsam and jetsam of Wade Barrett (as cool as the “Cosmic King” was for a week), and moves Stardust into direct competition with Neville. Those guys could do great work together, and Stardust’s increasingly absurd slash wonderful weirdness can give the Raw version of Neville a personality by proxy. Plus, if you stretch out their feud, you can have Stardust triumph over him in some ridiculous comic book way (a freeze ray, preferably) just in time for TV’s Arrow to return and boxing glove his ass at Survivor Series.

Worst: Three Cackling Women With A Hashtag

So, uh, this is where Raw falls off a cliff.

For a while now I’ve been writing about how the great failing of the Divas Revolution is that it thinks “longer matches” is the only step between a bathroom break and cultural relevancy. Longer matches where women are treated like wrestlers instead of pretty diversions is a step, yes, but it’s not the only one. You have to give the women characters that wrestling fans and crowds can understand, identify with or against and want to see in interesting stories. Then you have to write interesting stories, and give the women you’ve trained well and given workable characters trust and time to perform them. Then you have to position your announce, production and promotional teams to all understand what you’re doing so you’re all on the same page, and nobody forgets what’s happening and steps on your effort’s toes. Then you have to sustain that, all of it, until you’ve trained your audience that this is the way it is, this is the way it should be, and that they can expect the same great entertainment from women’s wrestling as they do from the men. If you pay attention, NXT has done this. They created characters, put them into stories, trained everyone surrounding them to give it an honest shot and reaped the rewards. They did not take WWE’s existing women’s wrestling product, extend it by 10 minutes and say, “what’s wrong with you, why don’t you like this more?”

The Divas Revolution is being crippled by WWE creative, and there isn’t much the performers can do about it.

As an example, Paige, Charlotte and Becky go on Miz TV to develop their characters a little. Paige is Paige, Charlotte’s related to Ric Flair and Becky’s the “crazy one” who speaks her mind, and says she’d wrestle a cyborg or a dinosaur. That’s not much, but it’s something, and it’s immediately drowned by the combined efforts of The Miz and the Bella Twins to remind us that WWE’s only character type for a woman is CRAZY AND JEALOUS AND EMOTIONAL. Now, on paper, this could still work. The Miz is a heel, so he should say sh*tty things we disagree with. The Bellas are heels, sometimes, and often say sh*tty things we disagree with. The answer from PCB doesn’t need to be immediate comeuppance, because there’s a story to tell, but here’s the problem: there’s nothing that established what they were and why they were a team or how exactly they were revolutionizing women in sports. You just had Stephanie McMahon hold out her hand and say “here they are,” and the only good will they’ve gotten is in relation to an adjacent product that established everyone in a completely different way.

All PCB can do is stand up to Miz and shake their heads at the Bellas and call them mean, which in turn causes Miz and the Bellas to reassert that they’re just jealous. PCB instantly becomes “jealous,” and when they don’t get to stand up to EITHER, they become weak. Miz calls them, “three cackling women with a hashtag,” and without any evidence to the contrary besides “no they aren’t,” that’s what they are. Creative has put them into a sack and thrown them in the river, and now they’ve got to fight their way out or drown.

What they’re given, surprise surprise, is a long match. 14 minutes. It didn’t have a reason to exist already, and then Nikki Bella explicitly pointed out that wins and losses don’t matter to her because she’s the Divas Champion. So why is she in here trying to win this match, why was it signed, and what happens if she wins or loses? You’ve got the kayfabe top star of your division saying, “none of this matters.” The Bellas go back and forth between heel and face so often we don’t even KNOW if we’re supposed to disagree. We kinda feel that way, too.

The match happens after the face team is established as catty and weak, and the heel team has explained that there’s no point in wrestling. Then it goes for almost a quarter hour, and everyone involved is shocked when the crowd loses interest and starts trying to get themselves over. To be frank, any crowd that does the wave should go f*ck themselves, especially if they chant “we are awesome” after doing it. They chant “boring,” and the wrestlers take it as disrespectful towards their broader efforts, and it is … but you know what? The match was boring. It was dirt boring and we’ve seen it every week for a month. The question is why was it boring, and that brings us back around. It’s not boring because The Bella Twins “can’t wrestle” or because women aren’t as good as men or NXT’s “overrated” or any of that bullsh*t. It’s boring because even great wrestling with no point, bookended by the wrestling show itself saying “this is pointless,” is boring.

I don’t like the “boring” chant, because it too often says, “the people in the ring who can hear this are boring, and it’s their fault.” Sometimes it isn’t, but sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes what you actually feel when you want to say “boring” is an impossible emotion to chant. The greatest disservice done to the Divas wasn’t this dippy crowd pretending they’re a group that got acknowledged on commentary 3 years ago, or The Miz or the Bellas. It was the people in charge of making sure this worked, who are already willing to throw it in WWE’s specifically-shaped garbage can after a month.

Don’t give up on this yet. What you’re doing isn’t perfect, but it’s the closest thing to a good step you’ve made with women’s wrestling on your biggest stages in decades. Hold onto it, and if this week’s episode is written by a writer who disagrees and hates what you’re doing, put someone else in charge for week two. Sustain it.

If you help create a world where people don’t want to see Sasha Banks, you’re the f*cking devil.

Best For Business: John Cena Beating Up Jon Stewart
Worst: John Cena Beating Up Jon Stewart

From one point of view, Jon Stewart deserved to get beaten up. He’s a non-wrestler who inserted himself into a marquee title vs. title match at SummerSlam, hit John Cena with a chair and cost him the match for personal reasons. Even John Cena, if we’re pretending he’s as noble and forthright as he always says he is, has a reason to show up on Raw and punch him in the face.

From another point of view, come on, seriously?

Noble-ass John Cena not only physically assaults a 52-year old, non-wrestling comedian who is roughly 1/3 his size, he does so only after emasculating him on the microphone and making him grovel for forgiveness. That’s a little much, right? Cena’s version of human decency has always been a little too “I WILL HURT YOU IF YOU DO SOMETHING I DON’T THINK IS RIGHT” for my tastes, and I feel like making the dude feel bad and dragging him through the mud for 5 minutes before attacking him was a dick move. Maybe I’m just biased, and not Fair and Balanced.

Worst: Speaking Of Terrible Babyfaces

The main event, not counting the mime trapped in a box, was an 8-man tag pitting Randy Orton, Dolph Ziggler, Ryback and Cesaro against Sheamus, Rusev, Kevin Owens and Big Show. That brings us to only four matches on a 3-hour episode of Raw, but a lot happened in the non-wrestling segments, so whatever. It is what it is.

The match ends with Big Show accidentally hitting Sheamus with a KO punch, allowing Orton to RKO Sheamus and win. Because it’s Big Show, we instantly interpret this as a face turn. As a wise man wrote on Show’s TV Tropes page, “He’ll turn heel, turn face, then turn heel again in the span of a match. It’s his defining trait. You hear ‘Big Show’ and think ‘heel turns that don’t matter’ before you think ‘tall.'” That’s reinforced after the match when Kevin Owens and Rusev team up to beat him up.

Now, you’d think the segment would end there, but nope. All four babyfaces get back into the ring and stalk a recovering Show. Ziggler kicks him in the face, allowing Cesaro and Ryback to pick him up and throw him into an RKO from Orton. Even understanding that Show is the least reliable character in Raw history, what the hell’s the point of this? The guy helped you win, and his own team turned on him to beat him up. What’s the point of your “good” characters, as personally questionable as they all are, ganging up on him and kicking him when he’s down? Is this supposed to make us feel bad for Show? The poor guy’s limping around at ringside after the attack while JBL points out that he has no friends. What, do you want me to boo him for having a hard life? What brutal f*ck wrote this hour of Raw? “Women are sh*tty, your hero has to beat up a tiny old man to prove a point and only the coolest, most indifferent people should be loved!”

Best: The Boxed Has Become The Boxer

1. Triple H and Stephanie breaking character to sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to Mr. McMahon it was adorable, but it just further complicated how we’re supposed to feel about their characters. “We’re so nice! Haha okay now seriously everybody, start booing us. Aw c’mon. Wink wink.” If you guys want to be nice and beloved, just be nice and beloved. Pull the trigger. “Evil GM” is the most tired thing in wrestling anyway. Be William Regal and let us be happy every time you show up.

2. take it home, Seth

3. MIME IN A BOX. After at least 40 minutes of Seth Rollins promoing at nothing, they pull back the curtain on the Rollins statue to reveal STING, who I guess who had been standing in there so long that his facepaint had started to melt. What happened to the statue? Did he bungee it up the rafters? Also, if they’d decided not to reveal the statue, how long was Sting willing to stand in that sweatbox and wait?

The best part of this for me is pretending Sting got the idea from that time Abdullah the Butcher hid in a present to attack him and had to wait 25 years before he could do it to someone else. They should reveal that Sting’s actually Dean Ambrose’s dad, and that’s where he got his hiding skills. It turns out Dean’s dad wasn’t a deadbeat who abandoned him when he went to prison, he abandoned him when he went to The Great American Bash.

Sting vs. Rollins is an interesting match, because you know there’s no way in hell they’re gonna give 0-1, WCW-representing-ass Sting get a run with the WWE World Heavyweight Championship in 2015, but a part of you thinks they might just so Triple H can beat him again at WrestleMania. They should just do a weird, Elseworlds version of the Sting/Triple H match at Night Of Champions, with Sting bringing out Nikita Koloff and Dustin Rhodes as backup, and Rollins bringing out The Shield. How stupidly into that would I be?

Best: Top 10 Comments Of The Night

bigpale

Rough couple days for Cena fans. First they see him lose to Seth Rollins, then they find out there’s no Santa Claus.

Wait A Minute Rice

Big E: “Xavier…*shove in stomach*…GET THE TROMBONE!”

Mr Grift

Xavier seemed to be really confused by the Dudleyz. Not that they were there but that black wrestlers were allowed to be in teams with white wrestlers.

Breaking Hurd