The Best And Worst Of WWE Raw 3/4/19: Man Down

Previously on the Best and Worst of Raw: Roman Reigns announced that his leukemia was in remission, Dave Batista showed up to literally drag Ric Flair on his 70th birthday, and Becky Lynch got pro wrestling arrested. Plus, Ronda Rousey vacated the Raw Women’s Championship, but not really.

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And now, here’s the Best and Worst of WWE Raw for March 4, 2019.

Best: Rise Up With Fists

I don’t know if he’s just more comfortable now that he’s had a life-changing shift in perspective or that the crowd has become welcoming, but Roman Reigns has been really great on the microphone since returning last week. I don’t necessarily mean in anything he’s said, because a lot of what he’s said on the mic is just what he actually thinks and feels, but this week’s Raw opening made it clear to me. The guy is finally comfortable on a microphone, and is able to effectively communicate what he and/or his character thinks without sounding like he’s reading tough guy Mad Libs off a teleprompter. Huge plus.

I said it on Twitter last night, but Roman sold me on a “final” Shield reunion match, whether I wanted it or not. All you ever really have to do to make wrestling things make sense is acknowledge that they don’t, and find some kind of rationale or perspective to explain it. Like, as wrestling fans, we watched Dean Ambrose heel out on Seth Rollins on the night Reigns announced his fight with leukemia, and we watched him get vaccines on-camera because he was so grossed out by the fans while claiming God was punishing Roman by giving him cancer. That’s some unforgivable shit. But by having Roman Reigns himself acknowledge that yeah, it was bullshit, but also Ambrose is very publicly leaving the company soon, his request to look at the bigger picture instead of the personal grudges and “get the band back together” one last time works. It just does. It’s one of those situations where even a jaded nit-picker like me has to go, “well, if Roman acknowledged it and is willing to move past it, what right do I have to tell him not to?” So many issues on Raw would be solved by characters saying or showing how they feel beyond WWE’s basic three emotions: anger, jealousy, and caustic indifference.

Ambrose shows up to answer the request, but Elias jogs out and El Kabongs him in the back to stop it. That allows the situation to be stretched out throughout the show, which isn’t particularly fun as a viewer, but makes sense from a production standpoint.

Real Quick Worst: The Production

I’m not going to rant about this because I get that Raw is just a three-hour infomercial for WWE’s other shows and a way to keep dorks and children mildly occupied between Popeye’s commercials, but WWE really needs to take a look at how bad the show’s production was last night. I watched the episode with someone who’d never watched before, and their big takeaway was how weird it was that the show blatantly wasted as much time as possible, then immediately threw it to commercial as soon as anything started happening.

For example, Roman Reigns opens the show with his entrance theme at 8 PM, but doesn’t say his first word on the microphone until 8:05. We’re super used to it as diehard, emotionally abused fans, but it’s not normal by television standards. Any other show in the universe would be panned into oblivion if they spent their first five minutes on watching a character walk down a ramp before even beginning a long speech that begins the show. Then as soon as a match starts, we go to commercial. And when we’re back from commercial and watching some restholds, the match picks back up and starts getting physical … only for Raw to go BACK to commercial. Often the SAME commercials.

It’s kind of a nightmare, man, and I don’t know what to do without a complete deconstruction of the business model and a vague, loud, open questioning of the value of lowest common denominator fried chicken sales. It’s like a show that’s afraid of its own content, backed into a corner where its creativity has been completely and it can’t even die because it makes too much money. We might as well be watching a three-hour ShamWow commercial.

Anyway, Back To The #Content

The matches that result from the opening segment aren’t great, but they serve a purpose, and that earns them a Raw-equivalent Best from me.

If the story of the episode is The Shield reunion — somewhere just behind “a triple threat match for the Raw Women’s Championship at WrestleMania” on the list of things WWE keeps teasing us with even though everyone in the world expects it to happen — the B-story needs to be the development of The Shield’s opponents. Bobby Lashley, Drew McIntyre, and Baron Corbin have been a loosely affiliated heel posse for a while now, but actually showing them be dominant over a “dream team” of Raw babyfaces is key to convincing the WWE Universe they’ve got a chance to defeat the greatest three-man unit in company history in their last-ever match together.

So Lashley, McIntyre, and Corbin go over Kurt Angle, Braun Strowman, and Finn Bálor in the opener. Relatively cleanly, too. Lio Rush gets involved a little, but he doesn’t directly affect the result of the match. He’s mostly there to get Braun Strowman to charge him through a barricade and temporarily take himself out of the action, which frees up My Man® to spear Finn and score the win. They continue the beatdown afterward to suggest that yes, this wasn’t a fluke, and that yes, they’re smart enough (and have the 0.5 man advantage necessary) to do the impossible-in-our-brains and send The Shield out on their asses.

The other match that results is Elias vs. Dean Ambrose, which I have to give some love to for Ambrose’s momentum getting cut off when he’s forced to sell the back, injured in the earlier guitar attack. Elias actually gave himself a shortcut that allowed him to win by cheating, as opposed to that normal Raw heel thing where cheating guys just arbitrarily cheat all the time whether it benefits them or not. Asking yourself, “why would the heel cheat here,” is an underrated quality check.

And hey, if you need a super rushed way to get Ambrose back on the same side as his Shield Brothers, having him at least internally realize that he’s weaker without them is a strong place to start. That was the whole impetus for his defection in the first place, and something they devoted WEEKS of character development to only to seemingly drop. Ambrose has an inferiority complex, and watching him get outsmarted by a literal wandering vagabond troubadour while his two wildly successful friends are like COME ON MAN, LET US HELP YOU, is the perfect kind of emotional quandary to splinter him off in both directions.

Also the best:

Give Me A Gritty Vs. Elias Match At WrestleMania, You Cowards

This made Gritty so mad he’s using shoot names on Twitter like he’s Rowdy Ronda.

Gritty already looks like Warbeard Hanson, just dress him up like a Viking and send him out to kick Elias’ ass in New Jersey. If you’re worried about regional sports fan support, have Elias try to run away only to get thrown back into the ring by the NJ Devil.

Best: Fist Of The First Men

Ultimately this all leads to Rollins and Reigns showing up after Ambrose’s loss, and “what’s it gonna be, boy, yes, or no,” him into the stands. The heel team from earlier shows up looking to pick the bones 3-on-2, assuming Ambrose is too far gone to ever bury the gross of hatchets and work on his gracious friendships, and end up luring him back to the ring by mistake. The Shield fights off the bad guys, formally reunites for what we’re assuming is the actual last time — at least for a while — and we head into Fastlane with a big 3-on-3 finale.

It’s not the Shield reunion I would’ve booked, or the one I wanted, but I’m lying if I say I’ll be in that crowd doing anything but happy clapping. Fist ’em, baby, one more time.

The Rest Of The Matches, Which Did Not Matter

Look, if you’ve got a good reason why Natalya should be out here winning and Ruby Riott should still be the one to lose, you’ve got a better outlook on this than me. Remember when they were feuding over broken sunglasses? This is like that, but without the sunglasses.

Also during this segment, Lacey Evans walked out into the arena to fart without anyone noticing, then walked back.

The show also featured a TAMINA win, because that’s what 2019 needed. Pushes for Natalya and Tamina. It’s better than a lot of Tamina matches, at least, because (1) the focus was barely ever on her, instead focusing on what was happening outside the ring, and (2) she never hit a splash. Just let Tamina kick people, she’s better at that. I mean, I’m guessing she’s better at quantum physics than she is at the Superfly Splash, but you get what I’m saying.

Tamina and Nia Jax “build the all-important momentum” heading into Fastlane, where they definitely won’t beat the team that just showed up in NXT promising they’d return to defend the championship. Building to a standalone NXT TakeOver in San Jose, where one half of the champions is from, that will need some star power at the top to fill the arena without a WWE PPV the next night.

The Revival and Two Black Guys spend a few minutes having the best match on the show until Bobby Roode and his weird stepson cause a disqualification. It’s one of those matches that presumably exists to cause a triple threat match at Fastlane [checks notes] Kickoff. That should be pretty fun. It’s legitimately insane that you can put Dash Wilder, Scott Dawson, Bobby Roode, Chad Gable, Alesiter Black, and goddamn Ricochet in a segment and not have it be spectacularly good.

Raw creative out here ruining the 19th-century fresco of Jesus on the weekly.

Finally — yes, finally, somehow, on a three-hour show — Heavy Machinery somehow organizes a gauntlet match with Raw’s three worst tag teams after snitch-ass Charly Caruso shows them taped-for-some-reason locker room talk about how everyone thinks Otis is stupid. Viktor chimes in with maybe the worst insult in the history of Raw, and that includes everything Road Warrior Hawk ever said:

“Of course he’s at the gym … he’s a dumb … bell! HA HA HA!”

Good one, Vik. Which one of Shane McMahon’s sons wrote that line, the dreaded Laramie?

That gives us three barn-burner matches that run less than six minutes total, in which an NXT mid-card team that couldn’t consistently hang with the Forgotten Sons goes over basically Raw’s entire tag team division. They beat the B-Team, The Ascension, and Zack Ryder and Curt Hawkins, all in a row. The closest thing to a highlight in any of them was Curtis Axel flossing. Absolutely brutal.

Torrie Wilson (?) Is Going Into The Hall Of Fame

Four notes here:

• Torrie Wilson was pretty good at the job they hired her to do back in the day
• Torrie Wilson was and is still very pretty
• Torrie Wilson was available
• the WWE Hall of Fame is not a real thing and is literally just a platitude handed out to former employees who are friendly or in good standing with the company, and while yeah, I wouldn’t have chosen Torrie Wilson for a wrestling Hall of Fame either, it’s pretty absurd to get too confused or upset that a person who didn’t really do much is getting honored in the same way as Koko B. Ware or Kid Rock or the hateful racist baby President

Plus, Torrie deserves two Hall of Fame inductions for going along with some of the shit they wrote for her to do, whether it was seducing Maven with banana blowjobs in a hospital room, Frenching Vince McMahon, wife-swapping with Billy Gunn and Jamie Noble, or submitting to lesbian blackmail and sexual assault for the benefit of her father, whom they then killed.

Worst: SNL Redemption

Saturday Night Live’s Weekend Update hosts Michael Che and Colin Jost “guest starred” on Raw, mostly in service of the announcement that they’ll do the same thing at WrestleMania 35, and spend the entire night wandering around backstage. The highlight, if there was one, was this bit where they wander down the weird NXT Redemption hallway where EC3 and Titus O’Neil are living these days.

Later in the episode they run afoul of Braun Strowman, because he needs something to do at WrestleMania I guess, and Jost gets choked against the wall for an entire commercial break. Dude should’ve been legally brain-dead when they returned.

Jost: “He’s not really going to WrestleMania, right?”

Well, at least he watches the shows.

Best/Worst: Dave’s Not Here, Man

I really liked this promo when I watched it live, but the response online made me revisit it, and I decided to just present it from two perspectives.

The first is that Triple H is very good at this kind of promo, and it might’ve been one of the best he’s ever cut. He gets legitimately emotional bringing up his friendship with Ric Flair, mentioning the good and bad times (including the death of Ric’s son, Reid), and even makes a little joke in the middle about Ric getting married too many times. He shits on Batista for sending in a taped promo bagging on the Local City instead of showing up to face him, after calling him out from backstage last week and running away before he got there. It had fury, it had malice, and it built an instant, believable narrative for a big-time WrestleMania match featuring one of the Guardians of the Galaxy.

The second is that while yeah, it was well performed, it’s still a microcosm of everything wrong with WWE’s attitudes toward WrestleMania, their fan base, and kayfabe as a whole. Ronda Rousey’s on Twitter calling Becky Lynch by her real name and getting slagged for it, so why should Triple H get to go on Raw and do the same “everything else is fake, this part is REAL” worked shoot nonsense from the worst part of the ’90s to use a retired 70-year old without a great reputation to bolster a match between two part-timers? That’s going to get a big marquee spot at WrestleMania while the Usos or the cruiserweights or Asuka get shuffled into the Kickoff show where nobody watches very closely or cares. It’s another in and endless line of examples of Triple H standing in the ring and figuratively jacking himself off to the thought of himself dressed like a golden Conan. Triple H is really great at playing any on-screen role, so he tries to play all of them at the exact same time. Do we cheer him for defending Flair’s honor, or boo him for shit-talking Becky Lynch, or cheer him for being the NXT Dad, or boo him for trying to crush the Undertaker’s head with a hammer, or what?

The truth is probably somewhere in-between. I still think I liked the promo, because at this point I’ll accept well-performed bad ideas on Raw over the three hours of forgettable nothing they’ve been serving up for months, and because I think heel Batista rules. And because I grew up watching the company where Ric Flair got beaten to death every time somebody needed heat for like a decade, and I’m used to it. Not to mention the entire 2000s, where WWE did the same thing, usually with Triple H.

I hope they de-emphasize the “worked shoot” stuff during next week’s face-to-face confrontation and just let two guys who are good at playing wrestling characters play the characters they spent the past 20 years developing.

Help Me! Ronda!

I could write an entire column about the main event segment (and how funny it was that they missed the 11 PM out so hard they had to make Stephanie McMahon improvise a promo for like three straight minutes), but let’s just take a second to appreciate the labyrinthine path WWE has taken to get us to Ronda Rousey vs. Becky Lynch at WrestleMania.

The match wrote and hyped itself late last year when Lynch got an edge, flipped out on Charlotte Flair, and competed in a series of big time, memorable matches that validated the idea that yes, the women in WWE were finally ready to main-event WrestleMania. You also have Ronda Rousey, one of the biggest female stars in the history of sports, to help bring casual fans and new eyes onto the product. All you had to do was get from there to April without fucking it up.

Since then we got Lynch vs. Asuka being announced for a pay-per-view only for them to rescind the announcement only to build to the match anyway, and then have Lynch pull double-duty and win the women’s Royal Rumble. That guaranteed her a spot at WrestleMania against one of the Women’s Champions. You stumbled a bit, but you were there. Then the Internet shootin’ went off the rails, four general manager characters got involved, Stephanie McMahon and Triple H both started feuds with Lynch only to apologize to her to set up VINCE McMahon suspending her. Charlotte Flair got put into the match instead, and everyone was like, “okay, Becky will start some shit and it’ll be a triple threat.” And then Becky kept starting shit, and we were like, “you stumbled a bit, but we’re still there.” AND THEN they have Rousey appear to vacate the Raw Women’s Championship when Stephanie refuses to reverse the suspension she didn’t make, have Stephanie announce that this was the case, un-suspend Becky somehow and sign Becky vs. Charlotte for the Raw Women’s Championship at Fastlane. Two Smackdown women’s wrestlers competing for the Raw Women’s Championship. But then Ronda Rousey shows up again and says she actually DIDN’T vacate the championship, which causes Stephanie to just nonchalantly give her her title back and add some “if Becky wins at Fastlane she’s IN” bullshit that doubles back and cancels out BECKY LYNCH GETTING A GUARANTEED TITLE SHOT AT WRESTLEMANIA FOR WINNING THE ROYAL RUMBLE. The suspension was the only thing keeping her from that. By lifting it, don’t you go back to that? Did the suspension cancel out her win?

Rousey then randomly “turns heel” by yelling at the audience in the exact same speed-talk she’s been yelling at everyone in for months, and beats the ever-loving crap out of Becky Lynch. The drama now is that Becky has to overcome injuries to defeat Charlotte to get back into a match that she already earned the right to have by overcoming injuries and defeating Charlotte. And instead of just saying, Becky’s back so she’s in, Charlotte’s been added so she’s in, it’s a triple threat, we have to have qualifying matches for the sake of contradicting general manager figures with no clearly established power hierarchy to set up the thing we already set up in goddamn November.

Best: Top 10 Comments Of The Week

The Real Birdman

“Does that answer your question?”
“Well you were choking me for 5 minutes straight & I’m fine. So yeah”

“I was there when Ric fought The Repo Man”

Can you please be more specific?

AJ Dusman

This crowd is so intoxicated by Roman, Arn Anderson is gonna let them perform.

LUNI_TUNZ

Charly: “Was that in the script? And if so, what idiot wrote it?”

Daniel Valentin

You know, this wasn’t a bad episode of Raw… Except for Stephanie closing the show… And the tag division being buried… And Tamina pinning Sasha Banks… And that Hunter promo… And them dragging their feet on Lacey Evans… And EC3 being relegated to a backstage joke… And Che and Jost laying an egg in their segments… And Dean Ambrose being relegated to jobber for the stars… And…

Redshirt

(on the phone)
Stephanie: “This is Ms. McMahon. I would like to drop the charges on Becky Lynch.”
Police Sergeant: “We’ve already dropped the charges on Ms. Quin.”
Stephanie: “Why’d you do that without me telling you too.”
Police Sergeant: “Your husband in the last segment just admitted to the whole world that Professional Wrestling is fake and you guys are portraying fictional characters.”
Stephanie: “That’s just for his issue with his former friend. That’s different.”
Police Sergeant: “You can’t have it both ways, ma’am. That’s not how Suspension of Disbelief works.”

Big Baby Yeezus

Roman: It’s ok. We don’t need Dean. We found an even better partner.
*Gritty comes down from the rafters like Sting*

Imagine being a fully functioning adult and choosing to be a Mets fan

Obi Wan Jabroni

If WWE Creative telegraphed this Shield reunion any more, they’d be heirs to Samuel Morse.

Pdragon619

Charlotte playing the writing team’s avatar by giving up half way through and washing her hands of the whole thing

Another week, another Raw.

Thanks for reading, as always. I hope I made some sense in here somewhere. If you enjoyed your reading experience on any level, please consider dropping us a comment below and sharing the column on social, so we can get more eyeballs on the product and, hopefully, more voices on our side. Things aren’t going to get better if we just politely nod about everything. I don’t know how they get better, I’m just saying.

See you this weekend for Fastlane Pay-Per-View™, featuring the Last Ride of The Shield. Maybe Big Evil will show up.