Previously on the Best and Worst of WWE Raw: Sasha Banks declared her love for Bayley, but neither of them can really act, so we spent a week wondering exactly what they were going for. We also had a couple of triple threat matches to set up a match to name a number one contender to the Universal Championship, even though we more or less did that the night before at Extreme Rules.
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Here’s the Best and Worst of WWE Raw for July 23, 2018.
Best: You Say You Want Evolution, Man
♫ yeah yeah yeah ♫
This week’s most important bit of news is the show-opening announcement that WWE’s replacing Clash of Champions on their pay-per-view schedule (or are at least filling in that October gap between the Bonzer Royal Rumble and Survivor Series) with “Evolution,” the historic first all-women’s WWE pay-per-view event. TLC and Hell in a Cell jump around a lot, so it’s less “replacing” than a reshuffle.
It’s still too early to throw too much judgment on the announcement in either direction, as it’s very cool to give the women a spotlight like this — especially after leaving them behind for the Greatest Royal Rumble earlier this year — but I really, really hope WWE remembers to give the women a month of pay-per-view build to establish stories and actually get people hype for seeing cool matches instead of treating it like one of those TNA One Night Stand specials. Pay-per-views need more than the 3+ hours of the show to make them really work. They can do it, so I hope they do.
If they don’t, I hope they at least sign LayCool vs. the IIconics finally, and that they give the NXT Women’s Championship the main event spot. Because seriously, no women’s championship in televised wrestling comes close to being as prestigious and built on great matches as that one. (It’ll open the show and be great, it’s fine.)
Some of the backstage segments of male wrestlers reacting to the announcement were really funny to me, by the way. You’d have Kevin Owens stagger backstage with a gunshot wound because Braun Strowman shotgunned a load of rock salt into his chest or whatever and KO’ll be like, “Kurt, I need to speak to you right now! Did you see what happened? That gunshot was almost as exciting as the FIRST WOMEN’S PAY-PER-VIEW, COMING THIS OCTOBER, WOW OUR COMPANY IS SO GOOD.”
Best: Raw’s Historic First Female Jobber Tag Team
Bayley and Sasha Banks are in love again and win an easy tag team match against, unless I’m forgetting someone, Raw’s first-ever female jobber tag team. They’re “Samantha Simon” and “Karen Lundy,” who sound like rivals Murphy Brown might’ve had. In case you’re wondering, they’re played by ARW Pro’s Moxie Molly, left, who looks like she belongs on the roster circa 1986; and Asshai Valley Wrestling’s Melisandre, whose gimmick is that she’s a Red Priestess in the religion of R’hllor. Her ring psychology needs work, but her fire-ups are GREAT. Sasha and Bayley win due to some heel miscommunication when Melisandre’s vaginal shadow demon misses Bayley and accidentally clotheslines her own partner.
Also of note: Corey Graves saving Jonathan Coachman’s entire life by cutting him off in the middle of a “WOMEN BE TRIPPING” joke set-up on the episode where they announce the all-women’s pay-per-view. They should replace Coach with one of those Halloween scarecrows where you stuff old clothes with old clothes and prop it up on your porch to mildly scare children. Just have this pile of laundry in the third seat and let Graves tell it to shut up a few times, at least we won’t have to always be mad at it.
The Thing I Was A Little Worried About: There’s Nothing Going On In The Women’s Division Right Now, Really
The only two stories of note in the Raw women’s division over the past month have been (1) Ronda Rousey’s suspension, and how badly she wants to judo throw Alexa Bliss into the ground, and (2) Bayley and Sasha Banks hate each other but also love each other, and if they don’t go to therapy and mysteriously vanish their therapist, they’re fired. Theory: Bayley and Sasha killed Dr. Shelby and covered up the murder, which is why they’re acting like friends all of a sudden.
But yeah, no, with Ronda getting an extra week tacked onto her suspension last week and Sasha and Bayley being totally fine, there … aren’t actually any women’s division stories on this show. The pay-per-view announcement is cool, but again, I’m worried that they’re going to run it like a novelty one-off instead of fleshing out the division, adding some character/personality in places where it’s lacking, and build to more stories than “title match, title match, title match,” and maybe a match for new titles. Are we gonna get a 10-man tag featuring the dudes on the pre-show?
The two matches illustrating this from Raw are Mickie James vs. Ronda Rousey’s Most Trusted Confidant Natalya (above), and Ember Moon vs. Liv Morgan (below). With Ronda gone for the week, the former really only happens to say, “when the avenging Terminator justice lady is gone, the heels can heel it up.” Nia Jax has been nerfed harder than Doomlands The Fucking Judge over the past couple of months and Ember’s busy weeding through the Riott Squad, so who’s gonna stand up to them?
As for the other match, Ember Moon is great, and Liv is trying very hard. She’s made a lot of progress from where she was originally — even a lot of progress from when she debuted on Raw — but she’s still clearly, clearly the in-ring weak link of the team. Still, getting Ember back on track after the loss to Sarah Logan’s a good idea, since she’s one of the people you probably want to book into an important match at Evolution. Maybe it’s just me, but I’d want to make sure my champions heading into that show aren’t chickenshit heels who have terrible matches. At least not both of them. If that show ends up main-evented by a Carmella match and an Alexa Bliss match, the Internet is going to have things to say. Throw us Charlotte vs. Ember or something and a for-realsies 20-minute main roster Sasha vs. Bayley match. Just please don’t book screwy finishes for the entire thing.
Bonus +1 again to Corey Graves for derailing the talking point that Liv can be 24-years old and still be a “juvenile delinquent.”
Best: These Battle Stars
I’m happy the B-Team won and retained the Raw Tag Team Championship, but man, how stupid are Matt Hardy and Bray Wyatt? Matt Hardy’s going for a pin, someone bumps into him, and suddenly he’s upside down and unable to kick out of an accidental crucifix from a nearly unconscious man. It’s unfortunately how they’ve booked those characters since they brought them in and paired them together. They can kick your ass if it’s a magical backyard woods fight with fireworks, but you can pin the 25+ year veteran with almost ANY offensive hold in an actual wrestling match. Bo should’ve just hip-tossed him over at the start of the match and pinned him.
Real quick though, I want to say how much I loved the backstage bit with the B-Team acknowledging their shitty pasts, clarifying that they’re changed men who are in love with the idea of winning and Building Momentum, and that they’re dedicated to being better people going forward. Also, they’re very excited about Evolution® brand pay-per-view. With the post-match attack on Raw, I hope they do a low key double turn so Dallas and Axel can be Raw’s top undercard whitemeat babies, and Hardy and Wyatt can get back the edge they are desperately, desperately in need of, heel or face. Bray Wyatt should be DESTROYING people like Dallas, Axel, and Hardy. He should be Brock Lesnar to them. Instead, he mostly just crab-walks and claps his hands. I don’t want to keep having these cold take opinions about Bray, he’s too Actually Good At This.
Worst: The Great Story Is RIGHT THERE
The most frustrating segment from this week’s Raw has to be the Braun Strowman oral presentation, which was interrupted by Kevin Owens. The set-up here is fantastic. Braun Strowman’s a hilarious murderer, but being that has real consequences. Kevin Owens, the man who got thrown off a steel cage to the floor at Extreme Rules, points out that (1) he’s a real human being with a family, and Braun’s ridiculous violent nonsense causes real-life pain that needs to be paid for, and (2) he won the match. So now he’s going to stop being afraid and dedicate himself to making Strowman’s life miserable. It’s a brilliant set-up that allows Owens to get his feet under him again and look tough for walking and being threatening this soon after the cage bump. It also calls into question some real issues with Braun Strowman as a character. Over the top violence is cool, but what happens when it’s not necessarily earned? Owens had already gotten killed a few times by now and was alternately trying to befriend the guy or flee from him. I also really loved Owens pulling a page out of the Jim Cornette playbook by bringing up things that supposedly happened with his family, but that we can’t verify, so we can assume he’s (at least partially) full of shit. It’s a nice little gray area that allows us to think about the story and decide where we stand.
And then immediately they transition the segment into Comfortable Corbin bringing out Jinder Mahal and a Singh Brother to do peace and tranquility chants with Braun, just so they can get beaten up. They set up an interesting match for SummerSlam to get the briefcase off a seven-foot tall killer who absolutely doesn’t need it, but is that enough? It’s like Owens introduces a problem, then attempts to solve it by making that problem worse. Big missed opportunity, I think. There are so many little bits where creative could take the story SOMEWHERE, instead of nowhere, but they don’t. For example …
Mojo Rawley hated No Way Jose because he was trying to have fun instead of taking wrestling seriously. Mojo kicked Jose’s ass, so Jose spent a few weeks demanding a rematch. They had a rematch, and Mojo kicked his ass even harder. Now Mojo hates Tyler Breeze for having fun instead of taking wrestling seriously, and kicked his ass. This week, Breeze is demanding a rematch, so Mojo kicks his ass harder.
I wish I could be confident that introducing this kind of character development was going somewhere. Going ANYWHERE, really. It ends up reading too much like fantasy booking, but can we do something with these throwaway character building time-killing segments and matches? Like, Breeze wants these rematches and gets his ass kicked. Mojo goes on social and calls out Breeze for his shitty performance after demanding another match. So what if we let Breeze get “serious” while Fandango’s gone and become Mojo’s friend, or partner? Have Mojo convince SOMEBODY that he’s right, and then you’ve got a built-in Goofy Fandango vs. Serious Tyler Breeze thing you can do when Dango’s better. You can immediately revert them back to Breezango if you want, but it’d give Breeze something “to do” instead of just showing up to lose. Because as we saw with the Red Woman, Raw still differentiates jobbers from Superstars. You can lose every time you wrestle and still be on the show for a reason.
And I’m not specifically asking them to do that story, but again, I want these bits I watch every week to build to something beyond “Mojo Rawley has intensity” and “Tyler Breeze doesn’t win many matches.” You “tell stories” in the ring. Tell some stories!
Here’s another example. The Authors of Pain spent a few weeks beating up Titus Worldwide. Beating them easily, in 90 second matches. This week, The Authors are like, “we want to wrestle somebody challenging,” but nope, they get interrupted by the team they’ve already fought a bunch. And now that team can beat them up and send them fleeing. Is the payoff another match between the two teams, that The Authors easily win? It’s that whole A to B and then back to A to build to a B we’ve already done thing. I hope the “Titus should retire” tease sets them up to maybe have a SummerSlam tag with Titus’ career on the line or something to give him that Vickie Guerrero polite sendoff, at least.
Best: O.A.R. Is In The Crowd Tonight
“O.A.R. they?” — Max Fischer
In a related note, I’m taking Elias’ advice and buying two copies of his debut album; one for myself, and one for the person I become after listening to it. I swear, one of these days they need to pull a Bret Hart or a CM Punk and turn heel-ass Elias into the world’s biggest babyface in the one city he visits and actually likes. I love the idea of a character who just travels the world looking for a place to belong, but is brutally disappointed by everywhere, so much so that he’s gotta make performance art about it.
Best, Mostly: The Long Road
We can’t go more than week without an authority figure showing up to restart a match as a Tag Team Match (player), so here’s this week’s. Finn Bálor has a match against Drew McIntyre because he didn’t act upset enough when Express For Men Baron Corbin gifted him a personalized child’s playhouse. I like that the coloring book Corbin provided is already opened and partially colored in, like maybe he got bored and decided to color some trees while his subordinates put together the house. But yeah, Finn wrestles Drew McIntyre for a few minutes and as soon as it starts to get good, it ends in a disqualification. Dolph Ziggler causes it, Seth Rollins runs out to make the save, and you know the drill.
That sets up the Tag Team Match (holler holler), which is also pretty good, because all four of these guys know what they’re doing and are working with varyingly obviously amounts of hunger. I don’t like the established team (Ziggler and McIntyre) taking a clean loss to the random assembly of top stars (Seth and Finn), but we had to get to another Ziggler vs. Rollins Intercontinental Championship match somehow, and McIntyre being banned from ringside at Extreme Rules only to show up at ringside anyway on a technicality and cost Rollins the match wasn’t enough, apparently.
The best compliment I can give this Raw is that they actually structured it like most of us think they should, with the big announcement at the top of the show and all the good wrestling in the latter half of hour two and entirety of hour three. If you’re investing this much time in a weekly show, the time spent should build to something gratifying, shouldn’t it? So we sit through a lot of filler, but we get a good Finn/Drew match leading into a better tag, then into Moon/Morgan (which is at least a wrestling match without a lot of overbooking) as a cooldown, then into the very good main event. I like that.
Best/Worst: HERE WE GO AGAIN
Finally we have the main event, which –
Oh, word?
Finally we have the main event, which sets up the extremely fresh match-up of Roman Reigns vs. Brock Lesnar for the Universal Championship at SummerSlam. It’s so blatantly obvious that it’s the final match in that series that Brock is ABSOLUTELY retaining, right? They have Owens get the briefcase somehow, have Roman hit Lesnar with 65 spears and kick out of 10 F-5s, only for the 11th to put him away. Then Owens drives a car over Lesnar or something and opportunistically pins him, to set up Owens losing to Reigns in the Hell in a Cell when Strowman shows up and tips the whole thing over. Right? Did I just black out while typing that
All you need to know is that if Roman Reigns and Bobby Lashley would shut up and have good matches all the time, the crowd would probably love them both. WWE’s so into pigeonholing these guys into Top WWE Babyface Characters that they ignore what they’re actually good at, as both Lashley vs. Reigns matches so far have been good-to-great, with nigh unbearable builds. Do we need to see two violent bad-asses trade insults for a month, when one of them just spent half a decade learning how to get through some sentences without fucking up, and the other sounds like he should be your Dungeon Master?
But god damn the wrestling was good. I think the accidental stinger tease into the flipping spear from Lashley should’ve been the finish, and another Reigns vs. Lesnar match at this point feels maddening at best, but I get what they’re doing. Let’s just hope this is the end of that story forever.
LOL.
Best: Top 10 Comments Of The Week
JerichoThat
So by beating Roman Reigns, Bobby Lashley won the number one contendership for the honor of fighting Roman Reigns for the number one contendership.
Yukon Cornelius
This is bullshit. I’m never watching WWE again….. See you all tomorrow night. Dammit.
The Real Birdman
*I Got You Babe goes off on the alarm clock*
IC Champion PdragolphZiggler
The Master Lock challenge!
AllGloryToTheHypnotoad
Coach: “It doesn’t matter what happened last week.”
The truest words ever spoken on WWE television come from Jonathan Freaking Coachman. Whoda thunk?
Ryse
“How can you learn us?”
Well I can think of something right of the bat.
Half of those Wacky Wavy Inflatable Arm Flailing Tube Men are just waiting for the right moment to stab the other half in the back.
JonSte13
Charly: This is Lashley we’re talking about. He’s the toughest there is
Roman: Well, he has never fought me.
Charly: Yeah he has.
Roman: He has never fought me twice.
DenseMan1
Mickie’s dressed like one of the New Mutants.
coolpeep
“Get these hands” proceeds to Kick Jinder….
Shane McMahon died on the way back to his home planet.
That’s it for this week’s show. Lots of talk about, so drop down into our comments section and let us know what you thought of the episode. Be sure to share the column on social to do us a solid, and be back here next week for Roman Reigns saying sassy things to Brock and getting beaten up so badly Lashley has to make the save.
