Previously on the Best and Worst of WWE Raw: Bo Dallas got covered in B-Team baked beans at a tag team-themed cookout, everyone mailed it in for Memorial Day, and Bobby Lashley and Sami Zayn continued to have the worst feud most of us can remember.
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Here’s the Best and Worst of WWE Raw for June 4, 2018.
Worst: Night Of 1,000 Horrible Finishes
So, here’s where we are.
The build to Money in the Bank started off really great with some exciting qualifying matches. Then WWE (or someone) realized they had another month to fill, so they went into “Money in the Bank cycle autopilot;” namely, that once the ladder matches are set, “a ladder match is happening” is the only story you can tell. Characters drop their characters and motivations to compete in a round robin of singles matches, which turns into a couple of tag matches, and when they’re over, somebody either climbs a ladder to be “symbolic” or hits their opponent with one. You could slot in any eight wrestlers in the WORLD and tell the same story WWE tells with this. Owens and Bálor have years of history with each other, but that’s irrelevant, because it’s all about building momentum. And it’s super hard for anyone to BUILD momentum, because WWE’s overly careful to make sure everyone has “momentum.” So nobody has momentum. It’s just a lazy Susan of placeholder matches while the team figures out how to book shows without a pay-per-view on the weekend.
Because of this, and because of last week’s Memorial Day holding pattern, last night’s Raw suffered tremendously by being too afraid to do anything with its own content. They want to be safe and establish that everyone in both ladder matches is kind of the same; everyone on an equal playing field, so it’s not “obvious” who the winner will be. There’s nothing they hate more than correct speculation. Like, paying attention to a story and making an educated guess about how it ends is INFURIATING to them for some reason.
Let’s just go through and run down all these terrible finishes. Presented in their own context.
Up first I guess we should talk about how there were seven matches on the show and three of them ended in disqualification, including both the main and semi-main events. The worst of these has to be the women’s six-person tag, which combines everything wrong with what Raw was doing DURING matches with everything wrong they’re doing AFTER them.
It’s supposed to be the Riott Squad (oi oi oi) versus Sasha Banks, Ember Moon, and randomly selected player Alexa Bliss. Bliss doesn’t want to be there, clearly, so she fakes a leg injury to abandon her partners. It’s important to quickly note that this is one of two leg injury angles they do on Raw, and that both of them happened in the women’s matches. The only two women’s matches on the show, and they have the same pretend hook. Eventually Bayley shows up to do the big triumphant “babyface substitution makes the tag and is a house afire” spot the National Wrestling Alliance loved so much, and wins the match. Rightfully, Corey Graves is like, “Bayley’s not even in this match, how can she run down and start attacking people?” It’s one of those tropes you either have to avoid, or do with a straight face. If you lampshade it, everyone notices how little sense it makes, and you aren’t limited to jerks like me writing dense paragraphs about it on the Internet for like 1/100th the audience.
After about 12 minutes of investing in a match, we find out that Kurt Angle’s actually going to reverse the decision, because hey, Bayley wasn’t in the match and shouldn’t be able to run down and start attacking people. This is pointed out to him by Raw’s new “constable” Baron Corbin, who felt he was being overshadowed so he went to WWE headquarters and I guess convinced Stephanie McMahon to make him an authority figure? Can just anybody do that? If Curt Hawkins is mad about losing, can he go to Shane McMahon’s house and come back as commissioner?
So we see Bayley, Sasha Banks and Ember Moon trying to out-act each other in the hall, and they’re all like, “it’s so great that you helped us, Bayley, we appreciate it, we were wrong about you being a fucking moron.” And then Kurt shows up and reverses the decision, and they’re IMMEDIATELY like, “ugh, way to ruin the match for us, Bayley, you fucking moron.” So what was the point of that match? That the Riott Squad can’t win, the babyfaces don’t know the rules of their job, and the top level heel can just split and it doesn’t matter? Who gained something from that? Even the authority figures looked bad here, and we’re supposed to boo Baron Corbin for knowing how wrestling works?
The finish to the other women’s match of the night is almost as bad. It’s supposed to be Nia Jax vs. Natalya, as a follow-up to Jax weirdly turning heel last week and trying to throw jobbers under the bus to intimidate Ronda Rousey. Natalya’s doing fine, but she “tweaks her knee,” and that leaves her open for Jax to Samoan drop her. You’d think the angle here would be that, okay, Jax challenged a green-as-gooseshit Ronda Rousey to a championship match, dedicated a week to showing how she didn’t take her seriously and wasn’t afraid of her, and now she’s hurting her friends. It’s a basic Chong Li/Frank Dux dynamic.
But here’s the problem: Jax didn’t hurt Natalya. Natalya hurt herself. Nia didn’t even take advantage of the injury, she just got up and hit a move that has nothing to do with Natalya’s knee. And when it was over, she stood around acting like a total babyface for some reason, practically crying about how she “didn’t mean to hurt” her. In a WRESTLING MATCH. She didn’t mean to do wrestling moves to her to win? Rousey’s in the ring huddled over Natalya like Jax just pulled out a pistol and shot her in the chest, and we’re left with an INCREDIBLY awkward 20 seconds or so of Jax acting apologetic while Rousey cycles between mad and sad faces.
Then we jump backstage to do the segment all over again. Natalya’s hurt, Jax shows up to say she’s sorry, and Rousey — presumably remembering last week’s heel turn, which Jax has completely forgotten — tells her to beat it. The story then becomes, “Natalya is MY FRIEND TOO, not YOUR friend, MY friend, not YOURS!” Which would be fine if we were still dealing with PSA babyface Nia Jax and smiling babyface Ronda Rousey, but last week made such a point of changing the dynamic you have to wonder if that was a mistake, or THIS was. Did they just change writers between weeks and decide to reboot them in the middle of the angle? Are we writing comics?
It’s hard to even explain. Raw can get pretty bad when it feels like even the people in charge of it don’t know what it is.
Now that we’ve established the two themes of the night — bad finishes and “Baron Corbin’s a cop now” — we can tie them together with this, a taco-themed Curt Hawkins jobber squash that he loses. By disqualification, even!
Hawkins is 0-199 apparently, and wants to beat some can to end his losing streak. He comes across “local talent” by the name of “James Harden,” because that’s literally the only person from Houston WWE can name. He’s played by Booker T student Will Lockhart, if you’re wondering. To make the match have purpose, Hawkins decides to bring a table with like 30 tacos on it and promise to give “everyone in the arena” free tacos if he wins. A real Jesus Christ fish-and-bread scenario.
Sadly 10,000 people don’t get to split a handful of tacos because Baron Constable shows up and attacks Harden, causing a disqualification. Hawkins loses, going to 0-200. If that’s not enough, Corbin then beats up Hawkins and throws him into the tacos. Normally “Baron Corbin beats up a guy with tacos” would be a surefire “Best,” but in the context of this disqualification-heavy toilet of an episode, I can’t even deal with it. Also, did we really need two weeks in a row of food fights? Are we letting Little Kid Nicholas script these shows?
The main event is Finn Bálor vs. Kevin Owens, to BUILD MOMENTUM heading into Money in the Bank. Because you need to win a lot of matches in a row over a month’s time to convincingly climb a small ladder and pull down an object!
Like everything else on this episode, it has the skeleton of something good, but the muscle and organs and skin and circulatory system of the garbage monster from Fraggle Rock. These poor guys wrestle for almost 20 MINUTES before the referee decides to grace us with pro wrestling’s worst regular finish, “you’re disqualified for doing too well.” Owens is stomping and punching away at Finn in the corner, so the referee stops the match. 20 minutes into a Raw main event. Stopped for EXCESSIVE WRESTLING. After you JUST did a DQ with the women’s match and spent three hours jerking us around.
Owens loses the match by disqualification, then ALSO fails to execute a post-match attack and ends up eating a Coup de Grace from near the top of the ladder. You know, I think I’d accept the “building moment” idea if it actually had some kind of effect on the actual ladder match. Like, if you won five or six matches in a row, you did better. Instead, pro wrestling has trained us to believe the person who loses on the go-home show has the best chance of winning, meaning “momentum” from a WWE booking standpoint is a detriment. It’s why Money in the Bank briefcase winners have to lose all the time. Because it has to be surprising when they cash in. EVEN THOUGH EVERYONE IS ALWAYS EXPECTING THE CASH-IN and you booked this person to win one of your marquee yearly matches. I also would probably like it more if the build to Money in the Bank wasn’t building to a fun cash-in moment we probably have to wait 6-8 months after the actual Money in the Bank pay-per-view to see.
I hope you weren’t reading this week’s column for affable jokes about how good the show was.
Even the show opener had a screwy finish. You know what you shouldn’t open a show when you’ve got three disqualifications already booked? Having your “top guy” and the show’s hottest and most over babyface team up to lose to two lower-mid-card heels via cheating the referee clearly saw, but pretended didn’t happen. Elias DDTs Rollins onto a steel chair and it’s just right there, and the referee lets the match continue anyway. How much do you want to be the original finish here was “disqualification,” and Michael Hayes or somebody was like, “we should keep the DQ finishes under 50%.” So they just did three out of seven instead of four out of seven. Way overbooked.
The sad part here is that it was still the best match on the show. Nearly 18 minutes of wrestling to set up a disqualification finish they just choose not to call. Blink if you need help, bookers.
Then we have the tag team battle royal, which is happening because a jobber henchman team with two wins ever (both against the same team) wanted a Tag Team Championship match, the general manager told them they have to convince the other teams to let them have it even though he’s the one with total matchmaking authority, they held an in-ring pro wrestling cookout with no grill to the tag division and ended up getting embarrassed in a food fight. So this is happening, with the winners getting a shot at the Tag Team Championship. I guess everyone agreed to it on Tuesday? It’s such a clusterwhat that half the guys start wrestling while Jojo’s talking, and then they have to keep pretending to battle royal because it’d be embarrassing to start over. Good times.
Drew McIntyre and Dolph Ziggler are the only team in this with any clout right now, so the entire opening of the match is Ziggler bouncing around like a pinball for everyone. He gets eliminated like, right away, and that’s it for them. McIntyre beats up everyone and leaves. I get that you can’t have them in there at the end of the match with the damn B-Team, but are we already building to McIntyre getting upset at Ziggler and turning on him? Teams don’t even have to be teams now, you just pair up two guys and put them in a breakup angle.
So after two wins against Breezango and two food fights, we get to the finish: the B-Team eliminating the guy who ate all the baloney sandwiches last week. Now Bo Dallas and Curtis Axel are getting a Tag Team Championship match, and they’ve got official Shopzone t-shirts you could make with eight of for ten bucks with a pack of Hanes undershirts and a Sharpie. This week’s show is so bad they’ve got me upset about Bo Dallas winning a battle royal. The nerve.
Also, remember the Authors of Pain? Do they have to wait for D-X to show up and beat them up to get on the show again?
The only match without a bunch of nonsense drowning it is Braun Strowman vs. Bobby Roode, which only lasts about four minutes and is happening because (1) building momentum, and because (2) Roode celebrated Strowman’s destruction last week a little too long. These are the stories we’re working with, people. “Someone thinks a co-worker is kind of annoying” is the most tangible Money in the Bank story we have beyond “who will win the ladder matches” and “which person is Natalya’s friend, because she can only have one at a time.”
The highlight of the match (and the night) is this, which is a fun GIF to show to people who don’t watch wrestling and ask them to explain:
It was pretty cool, although aesthetically I wish he’d just kept running in plowed right through it. Using the theory of reverse momentum, there’s no way Strowman wins Money in the Bank after this cycle, right? There isn’t even anybody his size he can wrestle, I don’t think he needs Deus Ex Match-ina to convincingly win the championship. Especially if he has to bring it to the show every week and only gets like four chances to cash it in annually because “Brock Lesnar.”
Finally we have the next step in one of the worst feuds I can remember, Bobby Lashley vs. Sami Zayn. Zayn is tasked with the absolutely Sisyphian challenge of getting Bobby Lashley over with this material, which so far has ranged from “say his sisters are men in drag” to “wander around the arena vaguely threatening him for 10 minutes” with nothing in-between. This week’s content is seriously just Zayn meandering around saying nothing, and Lashley standing in the middle of the ring like the world’s biggest geek to simultaneously “not care” and be super mad about it. This is all to get us to an accusation that Lashley was never actually in the military, which I suppose isn’t a Google-able fact and is so much worse than insulting a man’s character and family. “I bet you weren’t even THE TROOPS!”
I hope WWE signs Kenny Omega and turns him into a sniveling, slanderous coward who spends a month trying to make Nathan Jones feel bad about himself before losing to a goddamn vertical suplex.
Best: Top 10 Comments Of The Week, If There Are Any
krabbas
Baron Corbin: Lawful Evil
SHough610
You can tell that Ember’s new to the main roster because she wants to celebrate winning a match that has no consequences.
The Voice of Raisin
“You better break it to them that their little win doesn’t count.”
“Why bother? Nobody’s does!”
Endy_Mion
“The ref is doing his job on Ambien” nah bro, if he was doing his job on Ambien he wouldn’t have let the team with three minorities get a victory over a blonde chick
LUNI_TUNZ
Renee:”Jinder says you’re a basic bitch, Roman. Thoughts?”
troi
Bobby has a gig with his Boyz 2 Men cover band after this
FeltLuke
I can’t tell if Lashley wearing a blank hat is ironic or intentional.
Mr. Bliss
Bobby Lashley is getting less reaction than the first year of 205 Live.
The Real Birdman
This is a who’s who of future endeavors
Ryse
*To the tune of OPP by Naughty By Nature*
Hey you seen AoP? ( or SaNitY? )
Hey you seen AoP? (or SaNitY? )
That’s it for this week. I’m leaving you with Big Show making a bunch of Special Olympics athletes feel good, because it’s cute.
Be sure to drop us a comment, share the column on your social media things, and be here next week for the fallout from this show, which ensures vegetation can’t grow on Raw for the next thousand years.
