Previously on the Best and Worst of WWE Raw: We lived through WWE Backlash 2018. Have you heard anything about this show? I bet you’ve only heard good things!
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Here’s the Best and Worst of WWE Raw for May 7, 2018.
Best: The Show Gets Its Shit Together
We almost had to!
After the figurative and also probably literal shit storm that was Backlash, it’d be easy to get depressed and assume WWE’s ongoing quest to build the best roster of talent in the history of professional wrestling and use them exclusively to do the least logical and most brain-damaged shit possible would continue.
The first few months of the year are so awkward for WWE now. Everything from the beginning of the Rumble build to the end of a 7-hour WrestleMania is in the service of putting together a WrestleMania card, and making everybody talk about the WrestleMania card, and nothing else. Then, as soon as WrestleMania’s over and you think you can move back into compelling weekly television without a definite end point, you have to do the post-WrestleMania Raw and Smackdown for an international crowd full of debuts, surprises and swerves. Then as soon as you’re done with that you’ve got the Superstar Shake-Up™, which moves around most of your rosters after you’ve used the WrestleMania build to establish rivalries and presumably set up a few matches for the post-Mania pay-per-views. So that’s all jumbled up. Then you’re suddenly like, “what if we immediately fly to Saudi Arabia and do another 6-hour show full of WrestleMania matches?” And when THAT’S done, you’ve got one (1) week to build to your NEXT pay-per-view, full of matches that made sense a month ago but are now Raw vs. Smackdown exhibitions where no titles can change hands without messing everything up, so nothing can really happen.
It’s gotta be a nightmare for the lower level creative types who are basically being Tanner Family Fun Night’d into writing four months of television, like 18 wrestling shows a week, that play it completely safe but are also UNPREDICTABLE AND ADVENTUROUS but also make sure nobody gets hurt and also do exactly as this one guy in charge says no matter WHAT the crowd is saying or doing or thinking.
Last night’s Raw wasn’t perfect, or even that notable, but what it did was reposition the show as a, you know, sports-entertainment wrestling show again, and not a several weeks long, publicly-traded commercial for celebrity guests and improving the economy of the world’s biggest cities. It’s cool wrestlers doing cool wrestling stuff! I AM VERY INTO THAT, LET’S KEEP DOING THAT PLEASE AND THANK YOU. Give me the Summer of Rollins, a Brock Lesnar title change (finally), and all the stuff you would’ve done in March if you hadn’t been handcuffed to expectation.
Best: Everything About The Opener Except The Bit About The Tree House
This week’s show is built around Money in the Bank qualifying matches, which allow you to compete in one of [checks notes] three? Money in the Bank matches at WWE Money in the Bank® brand pay-per-view. The good news here is that Braun Strowman’s getting into one of the matches, which means lots of wonderfully ridiculous moments like him ripping ladders in half or someone climbing him like in Shadow of the Colossus or whatever. Also good news: he’s up against Kevin Owens in the qualifier, and Owens looks better than he’s looked in-ring since the beginning of that god awful AJ Styles and Shane McMahon feud visibly zapped his will to live.
The only bad news really is that Strowman’s officially popular enough to get hand-delivered “WWE top guy” promos, which come from the fertile brain of a dying 72-year old white Republican and are among the worst things ever written. This one’s about the story of Braun Strowman’s friends building a tree house when he was young, not asking him for help building it, then not letting him play in it. Strowman knocked over the tree and, if I’m reading between the lines here, killed all of his friends. I’m making that part up, but yeah, the last thing we need from cool-ass juggernaut Braun Strowman is a bunch of jokey asides about how he bought magic beans. More trying to murder folks with grappling hooks, less suffering succotash.
The match is good, though, and I’m happy they fixed one of the major problems of Backlash by having former Universal Champion Kevin Owens be a functional, talented wrestler who has a CHANCE to beat Braun Strowman in a match whether he actually does or not. Braun beats him, of course, but Owens gets in a ton of offense and enough big hope spots to make it look like he didn’t lose via, you know, passive-aggressive shoving and general helplessness.
General helplessness.
Worst Best: Even The Boring Parts Of The Show Are Full Of Wrestling And Trying To Accomplish Something
Outside of the Money in the Bank qualifiers, Raw didn’t have much going for it. Instead of cramming it with bad comedy and video packages, however, they danced with the one that brought them and filled the middle hour-and-a-half with decent little matches that while not really doing anything for anyone, allowed the less notable talent to get some work in and make valuable “we work here too” appearances. Compare and contrast this with the pile of jokes shoehorned into the middle of Backlash.
No Way Jose debuted on Raw less than a month ago and he’s already been slotted in as the fourth most important person associated with Titus Worldwide, behind Dana Brooke but ahead of Akira Tozawa. Tozawa has to send in his Titus dues by mail at this point. They team up to take on the “sorry, we’ve got no idea how to book you” super team of Baron Corbin and The Revival, which if you rewound a couple of years would be my favorite trio ever. I can only complain so much, though, because hey, The Revival technically won another match on Raw! And the heels didn’t even have to cheat, they just took turns doing moves and won. Perfectly cromulent Raw content.
The worst match of the night (which wasn’t even that bad) had to be Bobby Roode vs. Elias, based almost entirely on how insufferable babyface Bobby Roode and his skunk twerking are. Brother’s hard to watch in or out of the ring right now, and I don’t know how many times I can type “having a theme song people like singing doesn’t invalidate the fact that he only has this job in the first place because he’s such an exceptional natural heel, and every second you have him on TV as this fun-loving loaf of aged Canadian Wonderbread is a waste of you and him.” Probably as many times as I have to type, “Elias greater than.”
But hey, even this relates to their match last week, and follows up on the only action involved in the comedy from Backlash. That’s something. I just don’t want any more Bob Roode promos where he builds to saying “glorious” until they feed him into an AJ Styles feud, and they just stand there yelling GLORIOUS! PHENOMENAL! GLORIOUS! PHENOMENAL! at each other like they’re arguing about duck and rabbit season.
Chad Gable gets another one-on-one match with Jinder Mahal, and while I’m not into Gable completely abandoning his promising heel persona or watching Jinder Mahal matches, I appreciate them continuing to try to draw blood from a stone by putting Jinder in the ring with people who can work. At some point they’ve gotta lean into the reality that Jinder’s this 6-foot-5 veteran with all the muscles in the world and might be able to just show up and beat somebody’s ass without interference. We joke that his finisher is “the Singh Brothers cause a distraction,” but seriously, Jinder looks like he could put his fist through somebody’s entire skull. Let him kick some ass, and back away from the “all foreigners are cowards” thing. Mahal, Owens, Zayn, Rusev, all of those guys could kick a regular person’s ass. Let them do it sometimes, you know?
Anyway, I think I speak for every good-hearted person when I say how much I hope this Jinder Mahal and Remaining Singh beat down Chad Gable angle ends with Jason Jordan returning from obnoxious oblivion to right some wrongs and get the band back together. A Raw tag team division with The Revival, American Alpha and the Authors of Pain feuding is something I very much want, in this reality where Gargano and Ciampa are never (ever ever) getting back together to join them.
All of this was better than the backstage followup of Kurt Angle trying to impress underpants Zack Ryder by woo woo wooing at Jinder. Jinder’s big violent ass should’ve left those office curtain walls stained with blood and broken Funko Pops.
Probably the least eventful match on the show was the Deleters Of Worlds (who should still be called Twisted Sister) handily defeating Bo Dallas and Curtis Axel, who I’m pretty sure are calling themselves “Stay Tuned” now? That’s not confirmed, but that’s how they ended their promo, and Coach called them that. But Coach thinks Kane is the Undertaker, so maybe it’s nothing. Still, I won’t hate them being named after my favorite wrestling-related supernatural John Ritter comedy from the early ’90s.
Worst: The Most Uninteresting Man In The World
The worst part of the show, and possibly our adult lives, is this interview with Bobby Lashley. My first impression watching it was that it was like the Mankind sit-down with Jim Ross if Mick Foley was a white noise machine. If you missed it, basically Renee Young sat down to find out about the “real” Bobby Lashley, and instead of saying anything about who he is, he told a bunch of Grandpa Simpson “onion on my belt” stories about his sisters. At the end Renee’s like, “yes, that was an interview,” and Bobby’s like, “before we go, I would like to say something. I like my family.” And Renee’s smiling her ass off, but on the inside she’s a billion percent like, “you are literally made out of cardboard, wtf.”
I’m honestly surprised Lashley didn’t pause in the middle of the interview to ask Renee for a glass of milk to help him deal with the spiciness of the tap water he drank before they started. Dude’s used to be into watching paint dry, but he thought the colors were too exciting. He’d watch grass grow if it’d just go a little slower. I know this is WWE and not Lucha Underground, but shit, at least put Bobby in a shirt with a dragon on it or something so I have something to think about when he’s on TV.
To put it another way,
https://twitter.com/RavenCyarm/status/993819490696613889
Best: Drewdolph
I hope they’re still a team by Christmas, I have so many jokes to make.
So it turns out the impromptu tag team of Drew McIntyre and Dolph Ziggler — who we’re calling Rebrand McIntyre until we’re told not to (h/t @tjfuchs) — is pretty great. It solves so many problems at once. Dolph Ziggler gets to win a bunch of wrestling matches instead of SAYING he’s going to do those things over and over while losing. Drew McIntyre gets to focus on being a very tall, very strong ass-kicker instead of trying to have a “fun” personality. Raw gets another strong tag team, everyone seems motivated to make this combination work, and their finish looks like it would shoot put you in the hospital.
Good stuff all around. I’m sad The Bar is gone before those two teams could tear it the hell up, but I’m excited to see who they find the right chemistry with over the next few months.
Best: Seth Rollins, Miracle Worker
We’ve made a lot of noise about how great Seth Rollins has been lately, but all you need to see it is a working brain and a pair of functioning eyeballs or ears. The guy’s doing the best work of his career at a time when WWE DESPERATELY needs an organically popular babyface, and now he’s pulling a John Cena by upping the prestige of a secondary championship by defending it against a variety of opponents in good-to-great weekly wrestling matches. I can’t clap my hands for this hard enough.
This week he debuts the open challenge gimmick and has it accepted by Mojo Rawley, a guy whose camera phone promos clued us into the fact that he might have a tremendous upside if he could be a serious character involved in non-Zack Ryder-related feuds. Mojo’s still got a long way to go, but the match they have acknowledges and builds on that. Rollins is confident, maybe a little overconfident, but figures out the threat level as Mojo keeps coming, keeps kicking out of shit, and keeps hitting bigger and bigger offense. When it’s over, Rollins knows he won because of his incredible endurance and ring acumen, but also takes a second to emote and illustrate how yeah, Mojo isn’t a championship-caliber WWE Superstar yet, but he almost is, and could beat someone like Rollins on any given night.
That’s the best part of this new open challenge series; Rollins isn’t this bulletproof commodity like John Cena, so he can be challenged and given a believable fight by ANYONE. Which not only makes Rollins look like a bad-ass fighting champion, it makes everyone he wrestles look better for being in there and hanging with the hottest guy in the company.
Best: Money Outside Of The Bank
The selling point of this show, as mentioned, is the Money in the Bank qualifying matches. There are two big ones: a triple threat main event involving Sami Zayn, Finn Bálor and A Large Dog; and a women’s qualifier featuring probably the three best female superstars on Raw — and three of the five best on the WWE main roster — Ruby Riott, Sasha Banks and Ember Moon.
The match accomplishes a lot. It sets up Money in the Bank, obviously. It puts Ember Moon over Sasha Banks, technically, which is “surprising” without really being an upset. Ruby and Sasha get to be the in-ring workhorses they are without any of the out-of-ring stuff that drags them down sometimes. The Riott Squad hangs out long enough to realize it’s no disqualification and they can just get in the ring to stop pinfalls, which took them a while, but at least they got there. And by doing that, it allows Raw to bring out Bayley to fight them, furthering the Sasha Banks V Bayley issues without doing another passive-aggressive mope fest. It’s wonderfully booked if only for how constructive it all is. Plus, good wrestling! What a crazy concept!
My only complaint is the Ember Moon post-match interview, where we all at the same time realize, “oh no, moon puns are the only idea they have for her.” She’s going to RISE, you see. Because moons! All she needs is SPACE. MAKE AMERICA CRATER-GAIN.
The Ascension are ALSO going to rise, but we can neither confirm nor deny that being moon-related.
And then finally we get to our main event, in which an entire WWE Universe (moons included) wills Roman Reigns out of another title opportunity. It’s getting pretty hilarious to see this guy get non-stop title matches, including two headlining pay-per-view title matches this month and the main event of a third, complain about how he’s being held back and not given any opportunities. It’s gone past bad writing and into purposeful, absurdist comedy. You know who has it rough? The guy who has gotten 375 title matches in the past year and somehow lost 376 of them. They should just give him his own championship belt so he leaves us alone about the Brock one.
Anyway, Roman’s still awesome as shit in the ring when his vibe’s not ruining it, so of course a Reigns vs. Zayn vs. Bálor triple threat with actual consequences and time to work is great. The best part is that Finn wins, even, which … uh, clears up Roman for another one-on-one championship match? I don’t think Lesnar’s going to be at Money in the Bank, so we can get some more choice “I’M HERE AND BROCK ISN’T” content that gets funnier every time Brock shows up and kicks his ass.
Plus, it’s so, so good to see Kevin Owens and Sami Zayn booked like real, threatening wrestlers again. I know their true joy is in being Putties for more important wrestlers, but they’re also two of the best wrestlers in the entire everything, and even when they lose they should like, do well. They didn’t at Backlash, but they did on Raw, and that’s the most direct evidence of the show getting itself together. Bálor’s gotta be your favorite to win the ladder match now, because he’s a spritely little jumper who desperately needs another title shot, could use the briefcase to turn heel like everyone with good taste wants him to (because babyface briefcase winners don’t work), and keeps us from the ridiculous happenstance of Braun Strowman needing a novelty briefcase to get title matches.
Also, raise your hand if you’re hype for the upcoming Roman vs. Jinder Mahal feud.
Anybody? Anybody?
Really good show this week, or maybe it was an okay show that felt like WrestleMania X-7 after sitting through Backlash. Either/or.
Best: Top 10 Comments Of The Week
The Real Birdman
“Why do you need a briefcase to walk out and get title matches whenever you want?” – Roman Reigns
Harry Longabaugh
1) Ernie Pantusso
2) Damon Wayons Jr.
3) Craig T. Nelson
…
9999) A knockoff handbag
…
9999999) Jonathan Coachman
With Elias, you’ve got to listen to the punches that he’s not hitting.
Endy_Mion
Well it makes sense that Ember won, she just got called up from NXT and is Hungry Like a Wolf, she took her opportunity and Duran Duran with it.
troi
Bo Dallas should team up with Baron Corbin so we can call them Corbin Dallas.
Ja Gi Kyung-Moon
OK, so name Dolph and Drew’s finisher:
1) Zigmore? Clayzag?
2) Kickyfacer-headysnapper
3) Zig Zag: Sword of Doom Edition
4) Yeah, I know, I’m kinda surprised Dolph is winning matches again, too.
Wolfman92
Bobby Lashley took 10 minutes to say hi to his sisters. Contestants on the Price is Right do it in the span of a showcase wheel spin.
AshBlue
See, even Coach sees “a young Kurt Angle.” RE-CHECK THE DNA SAMPLES!!!
Brute Farce
As far as Roman is concerned, Vince is like an alcoholic… he keeps trying, but he just can’t hide the boos.
Clay Quartermain
Lashley: “ and then Braun Strowman murdered my sister and all her friends hiding in the treehouses”
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Hi. I love you.
