WWE Raw: Best and Worst of September 25, 2017

Previously on the Best and Worst of WWE Raw: We got No Mercy, Jesse Katsopolis’ least favorite pay-per-view, and saw John Cena slowly remove his hat and duster and leave them in the center of the ring after a loss to Roman Reigns. Also, that prawn Muppet is the Cruiserweight Champion.

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Here’s the Best and Worst of WWE Raw for September 25, 2017.

Best: Miztourage Vs. The Shield In The Ultimate Clash Of Developmental Eras

While I don’t believe Cena’s line about how Roman Reigns has grown into some kind of perfect performer and “the guy” thanks to the two of them cutting increasingly bad worked-shoot promos on each other for four weeks, I do think it might’ve finally chilled him out a little bit.

This week’s show opens with The Miz, who doubles down on getting cheered at No Mercy by bringing Roman Reigns to the ring to talk. It’s a roundabout way to set up “Roman Reigns has pinned the Intercontinental Champion!” later in the show, and to tease the rumored Shield reunion for TLC. I’ll forego my initial impluse — fantasy booking Shield reunions and Reigns pulling the plug on it at the last second for 15 paragraphs — and note that while I don’t like to see Miz get his ass handed to him all the time, leaving Reigns babysat with the artisan tasked with getting non-insulting art out of John Cena for the past entirety of his career is a good call. Miz anchored this segment and kept it moving forward, put over the Miztourage, and allowed Roman to be comfortable enough to be the best version of himself. I’m not comparing the two, but it’s the same thing that happened with The Rock. He spent too long trying to be something he naturally wasn’t, and when he decided to be himself turned up to 11, he was great. Roman Reigns isn’t affable humility. Roman Reigns is SASSY DISAFFECTED JOCK WHO CAN’T LOSE.

Roman’s response to Miz’s insanely overstated “what would happen if The Shield faced the Miztourage” was pretty great, I thought. The stunned face and bug eyes and open mouth and “we would whip y’all’s ass no problem” was good, but the deadpan followup of, “Bruh it would be terrible for you, are you kidding me,” is amazing. That’s the actual answer.

The followup match is watchable to fun depending on how furious you get watching a guy who “went to war” with John Cena and says his back hurts easily dispatch three dudes by himself, including a champion, and win. But honestly, you can’t put a guy over the Undertaker at WrestleMania and have him kick out of four (4) Attitude Adjustments to cleanly pin John Cena in the same half a year and have him take ANYTHING from Rotundo and McGillicutty. He should be able to knock them out cold by pursing his lips hard enough.

No matter what you think of that, the post-match attack stuff was lovely. I like the fearful symmetry of the Miztourage getting up on Roman by hitting him in the back with a chair, a la Seth Rollins. I do wish someone would rip off Roman’s thundershirt if they’re gonna spend a few minutes hitting him in the ribs with chairs. Otherwise it’s like a dog trying to get through the plush arm of a guy in a bite suit.

Better idea than a Shield reunion: they spend a month doing a “will they or won’t they” thing with the Shield, building all this tension for TLC and whether or not the guys will agree to team up again, only for Roman to throw on a dog mask with the Post-Crisis Usos and really kick Miz’s shit in.

Best: Integrating Stories

Here’s an interesting thing Raw did that it doesn’t do very often: it not only attempted to create a narrative throughout the episode, it tied together multiple, unrelated stories and/or character points to do so. It’s the most obvious, “why don’t they do this all the time,” thing ever, but I guess I’m not the one tasked with stretching pretend underwear fights into 10 hours of programming a week for 52 weeks of every year.

So yeah, point one is Curt Hawkins’ losing streak. He’s out here trying to be something other than “the guy with the 118 match losing streak,” so he once again throws out an open challenge. Unfortunately for him, one of the expected stories going into the episode was how would Braun Strowman deal with losing to Brock Lesnar at No Mercy, and spoiler alert,

OH MY GOD. pic.twitter.com/1h3H15pmRp

— frankie (@NOTORlOUSONE) September 26, 2017

When Hawkins is sufficiently trucked, Strowman pulls a classic out of the mothballs and says he demands satisfaction. That brings out Dean Ambrose, who is a crazy nut with hair like a drowned girl in a Japanese horror movie, to accept the challenge.

Ambrose is banged up from the previous night’s tag team championship mach, which doesn’t excuse the match, it just informs it. That’s an important distinction that needs to be minded on WWE TV more often. You can create reasons for things other than, “we decided it should be like this,” and acknowledge them without making them hammy distractions. Strowman doesn’t NEED Ambrose to be less than 100% to pin him, but having Ambrose taped up adds a little more gravity to LAST night’s match AND helps a little when you remember it’s another champion getting pinned.

Plus, Strowman needs it. It’s not going to be hard to get him back to legendary status, but that No Mercy main event was like taking a gulp of a drink thinking it’s champagne and getting a mouthful of rancid pond water. So, you know, this helps. Let’s move forward and get back to flipping vehicles and not worry so much about Braun’s emasculation at the hands of the Sandwich Man.

The beat goes on as that segment informs the Seth Rollins vs. Sheamus match. Ambrose and Rollins have had their issues, and their interaction brings up the most pertinent talking point (“we’re tag team champions and you’re injured, why did you challenge the toughest guy on the show and not tell me”), ties it in to the later affair (“I need you at ringside to help me against Sheamus, because Cesaro will be there”), references the PREVIOUS match (Cesaro got his teeth mangled, so he’s not going to be as much of a threat), sets up next week’s match (Rollins vs. Strowman), and nods to the established character differences between Rollins and Ambrose (one is predictable, one is impulsive).

This is what I wish they’d do more often. The moment isn’t particularly entertaining and I’m not champing at the bit for inches-apart, shoulder-to-shoulder backstage first-draft-ass character clashes, but like I said, it connects the show together and informs it.

(What’s with those Kingslayer suspenders, though?)

Once Sheamus vs. Rollins actually happens, it turns out Ambrose is right. All Cesaro can do, really, is stand around making sour faces. For real though, if what happened to Cesaro happened to me I wouldn’t have finished the match and shown up at ringside the next night, I would’ve spent a month melodramatically flopping around in graveyards, sobbing.

Rollins wins with the ripcord knee, and if I could give a major criticism to any of this, it’d be that the announcement of Rollins vs. Strowman made the winner of Rollins vs. Sheamus a little obvious. Still, I appreciate the show feeling more like a “universe” than usual, and wish they’d do more of that. Cramming guys together in a story and having them only fight each other on loop for months does more damage to the entertainment value of Raw than almost anything else WWE does.

Speaking of that,

Worst: Pre-Show Match Loops

WWE’s really into putting a throwaway match onto a pay-per-view pre-show, then doing it again on Raw and Smackdown because they assumed nobody watched it. And then they’ve done two matches, so they’ve got to do a THIRD, and it just snowballs. How many times did Sami Zayn and Aiden English wrestle, you know?

Before No Mercy, Elias pinned Apollo Crews. So on Raw, Elias pins Apollo Crews. It’s a no-win situation, really, because if you have Elias win it’s just the same thing we saw on Sunday, and if Crews WINS, the complaint becomes “50/50 booking.” Which doesn’t really work because the first match established no stakes or consequences. I guess the answer is, “don’t book the same match over and over, and if you do, have a better beginning, middle and end of stories than YA WIN SOME YA LOSE SOME?”

Best/Worst: Goldust Is Chaotic Neutral

While I don’t know if I totally understand Goldust turning heel, wrestling once, going away for 15 shows and coming back as a scrappy babyface to give Finn Bálor vs. Bray Wyatt some weight only to immediately turn heel again, I DO like him holding down Finn Bálor and palming him in the center of the face, so we’ll consider this a wash. At least it gets Goldie on TV and in matches again! Let’s forget that Wyatt thing happened and refocus on Goldust Classic and his latest “masterpiece,” what do you say?

Worst: WAIT NO

are you fuckin’-

Enough with the Bray Wyatt, guys. Enough. Give it a break. You had Finn defeat Bray Wyatt as The Demon, you had Finn defeat Bray Wyatt as “the man.” What’s he gotta do now, dress up like a kitty cat and pin him? “FINN, I AM THE EATER OF WORLDS, ARE YOU A COWARD OR WILL YOU PAINT A SMILEY FACE ON A CARDBOARD BOX AND WRITE ‘FINN’ ON THE SIDE AND TRY DEFEATING ME AS THAT.”

Also, shout-out to the announce team for being spooked by Wyatt’s nonsense and not remembering that Bray calls in a favor to Michelle Tanner’s friend Derrick to use Kidz Bop for evil year or so.

Best: Oh, Mickie, You’re So Fine

In another in a string of good little decisions this Raw made, Alexa Bliss believes she defeated the “entire Raw women’s division” at No Mercy by winning the five-way, but forgets the division is actually a little bigger than that, and contains a few people like Mickie James who could really use a refreshed chance to shine.

I’m not sure why WWE’s go-to insults for women are so illogical — remember when they said Molly Holly had a “fat ass” somehow, and it was a bad thing? — but they’re going all-in with the “Mickie James is old” angle. Keep in mind that Mickie’s the same age as Samoa Joe and a year younger than Sheamus, and you don’t see either of those guys working cagey veteran gimmicks. I dunno, at least we get to see Mickie speaking confidently into a microphone again, and someone calling Alexa Bliss on her shit in real-time.

This could be good, and is a nice way to kill time before Asuka shows up and begins literally killing.

Eh: And The Rest!

The fatal five-way losers get paired off in a tag team match that’s fine, but only really happening because someone saw the feedback from No Mercy and thought, “shit, we should’ve had EMMA take the pin.” So Emma takes the pin here, to Bayley, via a Jim Duggan-esque kinesthesiology tape-assisted Bayley-to-Belly. Poor Bayley’s rocking more k tapes than the Korean pop scene. She’s wearing so much k-tape it looks like she’s wearing Sasha’s gear under her own.

Also in tag team action so memorable I forgot it happened until I got this deep into the column, Matt Hardy teamed with Jason Jordan (because Jeff needs surgery) to defeat Bo Dallas and Curtis Axel.

I think the most interesting note here is Realist Booker T, who has I guess decided to be a heel color commentator by nonchalantly shit-talking everyone. When Matt’s in the ring, Booker’s going on about how Matt’s old and can’t be a singles competitor anymore and needs his brother’s help. He doesn’t believe in Jason Jordan, either, and when Apollo Crews was trying to wrestle Elias Booker was on the stick calling all of his moves “smoke and mirrors.” He’ll come back a few sentences later like, “oh but he’s doing fine HERE,” but you know he’s just getting braver about working in the criticisms he actually believes. Pretty soon we’re gonna be in “screaming at Hulk Hogan about wanting the gold” territory.

Best: The Cruiserweights, Suddenly

Like a lot of people, I was worried that Enzo Amore’s character had gone completely off the rails, and that WWE was pushing him at the expense of the cruisrweight division by having him cheat to beat them all the time TO CHEERS and kicking Neville in the balls, figuratively and literally. If where the story went last night had always been the plan and wasn’t just a brilliant audible, bless the person who came up with it. I am never more pleasantly shocked and happy to be worked than when character alignments come full circle and actually start to make a little sense.

Here, Enzo celebrates his extremely cheap, bullshit win over Neville by bragging about it relentlessly and trying to retire his own jersey. The cruiserweights and eventually Neville show up to confront him about what he’s doing, and they manage to turn Enzo from “annoying babyface it’s increasingly hard to like” to “absolute dick-bag” by just having him turn up the arrogance a notch. Just one notch. The “this is the main event and you’ve never been close to this without me” stuff is great, too. It’s a fine line, but when Enzo’s going on about being a “real man” and hiding behind a piece of paper that says Neville can’t touch him if he ever wants another title shot, it’s easy to see the intent of the characters and finally, FINALLY root for his destruction.

Neville, of course, sacrifices ever having his precious Cruiserweight Championship again for the chance to murk Enzo, and it’s glorious. And on top of the joy of seeing Enzo stomped into the ground, the stipulation means that Neville gets airlifted off 205 Live for a while, and someone else — Mustafa Ali, LOUDEST COUGHING NOISES EVER — can get a shot.

I liked the off-the-air stuff less, because not having them attack as a group and just stand back applauding Neville only to wait until Enzo was COMPLETELY destroyed and THEN attack him 14-on-1 or whatever seems less “Nexus” and more “opportunistic jerks,” but off-the-air doesn’t count.

I do like the idea of Braun Strowman being a friend of the little people, though. It’s like the real life illustration of that “how many 5 year olds could you take in a fight” question. They should start riding him to the ring like he’s the heel car from Hulk Hogan’s Rock ‘n Wrestling.

Regardless, so happy to see this go from an incredible disappointment to one of the most interesting developments on Raw in a while. Let’s keep it going!

Best: Top 10 Comments Of The Week

Jushin Thunder Bieber

“Enzo has nowhere to go and he has no friends.”
Cole reading from Enzo’s roster page

Harry Longabaugh

I don’t want to spoil “Murder on the Orient Express,” but the Cruiserweight division is about to reenact its ending.

TheBazz

This is where it’s revealed that the Cruiserweights link together Voltron-style to form Braun, right?

WalkingWithAGhost

I hope Enzo’s side plates are just a bucket of chicken with a hole in the bottom.

pdragon619

Seth: “Should we like…go out and help him?”
Dean: “what? nah, he’s doing a story with Cena right now, so he’ll come out and save him, don’t worry”
Seth: “yeah I guess you’re right, Cena would never let someone he developed newfound respect for get triple teamed”
Dean: “……”
Seth: “…….”
Both: “crap we gotta get out there!”

nushney

+continuity with Kurt Angle, who lost multiple Title matches to Eddie Guerrero, being very against Enzo cheating to win his Title.

Brute Farce

All that’s missing is Asuka starting to crawl out of a TV screen or a well.

6forSorrow

Is this how the sad saga of La Luchadora must end?

JonSte13

Dean: You coming with me bro?
Seth: Uh…yeah just give me a few minutes I got some architect things to work on…I’ll be right there though…promise.
Dean: ….alright see ya out there!

The Real Birdman