Big Show

Wrestling Review: WWE Raw (2/23/15)

February 24, 2015 by Colette Arrand Leave a Comment

This week, Raw was a mix of everything wonderful, weird, and awful about World Wrestling Entertainment. After an underwhelming pay-per-view redeemed by a fantastic main event that still left people wanting the other guy in the WrestleMania main event, Raw finally started moving towards its usual killer January-March pace. The show was bookended by two very good wrestling matches. There is some intrigue at the top of the card, depending on how one reads the post-Fastlane interaction between Daniel Bryan and Roman Reigns. Despite that, and despite some offbeat, enjoyable stuff from unexpected contributors, Raw is still a two-hour show trying and failing desperately to fill a third hour. Writing that third hour, according to Triple H, is the hardest job anybody in the WWE has. It’s also one they routinely, consistently fail to achieve. I’m hardly one of those “It says wrestling on the marquee!” kinda guys (though I do cringe whenever they refer to me and my ilk as “sports-entertainment” fans), but when certain members of the roster are in the ring watching a music video that has nothing to do with them longer than they’re in the ring wrestling, then there are big, big problems with pacing that not even the most cheerful advertisement for one’s place in the zeitgeist can patch up.

The opening promo, at least, felt fresh, if only because Randy Orton hadn’t been in it for about four months. At Fastlane, Orton returned to exact his revenge upon Seth Rollins, who purposefully injured Orton because he, as the “face of the WWE,” felt that The Authority were trying to push him out of the picture. Orton says that he’s not the type of dude to talk for twenty minutes (not true) and gets right to the point: He wants Seth Rollins’ ass. Out comes The Authority—Triple H, Stephanie McMahon, Kane, and Big Show—without Seth Rollins. Triple H is all sad, besuited muscle, his tuff guy leather jacket having led him to an ass kicking at the hands of the old man called Sting. He doesn’t say anything during the segment, which is actually pretty great. Stephanie McMahon thus takes charge of the situation. She, for one, is really excited to see Randy again, and in the killer mode The Authority was begging for last year and didn’t get. She’d be glad to welcome Randy back into The Authority, provided he can find forgiveness in his heart for Seth Rollins. But this is Randy Orton, and he has no heart. All he wants is to bash Seth Rollins’ brains in. But Stephanie, she thinks things can still be smoothed out. Big Show tells Randy that joining The Authority again is the right move, the best one he ever made, and that was after a year of Stephanie and Triple H making him cry and threaten to foreclose on their house. Besides, Stephanie says, it’s not like Randy Orton is a nice guy. As a matter of fact, he once physically assaulted Stephanie in order to get to Triple H. But she can forgive him for all of that, because this is business. Stephanie McMahon is such a great heel. Everything she says is logical and true, and is thus absolutely heinous. And that’s why, when she offers Randy a business meeting with Seth Rollins, he takes it. The crowd, obviously, would have loved for Orton to RKO the hell out of everybody in that ring, but we’re all about delayed gratification for the moment, even when it doesn’t make much sense for Orton to reconsider joining a group that’s been largely useless without him.

Because the opening promo didn’t go twenty minutes, we head straight into a non-title match between Intercontinental Champion Wade Barrett and Dolph Ziggler. Barrett is without his title because Dean Ambrose stole it after being disqualified at Fastlane. Dolph Ziggler is without a feud after losing cleanly to The Authority in that show’s opening match. Oh, and R-Truth is out there doing guest commentary because he beat Barrett in a non-title match on SmackDown! and he wants a shot at the championship. This is the most significant microphone time he’s had since 2011. And you know what? He’s pretty good when he’s not being asked to play a heartless stereotype. He tries and succeeds in getting the hashtag #GiveTruthAChance trending, which will become important later in the evening, too. Meanwhile, Ziggler and Barrett have a good match, which is only something of a surprise since Barrett has largely struggled to find himself since his return. At this point, Dolph Ziggler can be trusted to have a good match with just about anybody. This, and his undeniable charisma, are why the crowd react to him as though he’s being booked much better than he is. There is no good outcome here: Either Ziggler continues losing or Barrett continues losing, and both, honestly, deserve better. Ziggler continues to be one of the best on the roster at picking up a match’s pace towards the end. After taking a hideous looking powerbomb, he avoids Barrett’s finishing elbow and nearly scores the win with a roll-up. He misses a fameasser, ducks Barrett’s boot, then gets taken out with a huge slam. Ziggler gets the Zig Zag after moving out of the way of a charging Barrett, and gets the win. Now, it seems, there are three contenders for the Intercontinental Championship. And hey, here’s Dean Ambrose with the title. He just shows up, taking Ziggler’s spotlight, and seethes in Barrett’s general direction. Barrett continues to do his whiney big man routine, deadpanning “That’s my title!” from the corner. Ziggler checks the title out, and Ambrose mean mugs him before leaving. R-Truth doesn’t get involved at all, so he’ll probably lose to Barrett on SmackDown! and shuffle off to the Andre the Giant Memorial Battle Royal by the time WrestleMania comes around.

Backstage, we’re privy to The Authority’s business meeting with Randy Orton. This, if you’ve never been in a business meeting before, is what they look like:

Everybody gathers in the corner of a tableless, chairless room, squeezed together and standing at a three-quarter turn to the camera that must, of course, be there to document the business. A good negotiating tactic is to show up to these things in a t-shirt and a pair of briefs. Try it at your next job interview. Seth Rollins is thrown off by Orton’s gambit, interrupting Stephanie to say that he doesn’t want him back. Stephanie goes on a tear once Rollins interrupts him—what he wants is not the issue. The Future and the Face of the WWE can and should coexist. Kane isn’t too convinced, but Stephanie doesn’t care what Business Kane thinks. She wants Randy and Seth to bury the hatchet. She throws Rollins under the bus while Triple H pouts about his fateful meeting with Sting, who is pretty much the templar from the end of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Orton doesn’t think too long about rejoining The Authority. It’s a good business move, this is a business meeting, and it’s all business. He shakes Rollins’ hand. Stephanie is so hyped up about this that she books the reunited Authority against Roman Reigns and Daniel Bryan for the main event. Orton isn’t exactly a character actor, but man is he good tonight, smugly lording it over Rollins while making it pretty clear that he’s going to drop him and The Authority the first chance he gets.

The Prime Time Players reunited last week on Raw, the formerly promising tag team coming back together because The Ascension needs more mid-card tag teams to make them look worthwhile. Michael Cole says that there’s a reason the two are back together, but never gets to say it. Oh well. The reason why they broke up wasn’t that good, either. Meanwhile, The Ascension heard that The Bushwhackers got inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame, and they’re pretty sure they could destroy those guys. They’re totally right, but oh man is it hilarious to see two painted-up weirdos in terrible leather gear cut a straight 1980s promo on a couple of goofballs who wandered around the ring during their matches to like people’s heads. “HALL OF FAME?” one of them yells, setting up the other for “MORE LIKE HALL OF SHAME!” They should do this on every old tag team, every week. This match is nothing, really. The Ascension beat up Darren Young, who has gotten beaten up exclusively since making his return from an injury. Titus O’Neil gets involved for a little, which lets his partner score a roll-up win. This is The Ascension’s first loss, but that’s not exactly impressive since they got their asses kicked by JBL a month ago.

Roman Reigns’ victory over Daniel Bryan was the expected outcome at Fastlane. It was also a very good match, showing a side of Reigns that I honestly didn’t know existed, which is that he could remain interesting and look good for the duration of an entire match, not just when he punches and spears his opponent for the win. The bigger problem with Reigns, though, is that he can’t speak. He just can’t do it. And the only thing that’s made him seem interesting in the space beyond his matches was The Shield, which he already leans on so heavily that it’s like the group ended for him. All Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson had for his cousin was “Roman I make it Reigns in this bitch” and the look of a man who would rather be anywhere but next to the albatross of a forced WrestleMania main event push.

But Reigns is going to have to learn how to speak for himself to really make it as a top-tier draw, so here he is with a hot mic in front of a live crow. And you know what? He does pretty well. After a month of being booed in favor of Daniel Bryan, he has a nice, organic talking point to go through, and before he can go on for too long, Daniel Bryan comes out to address his loss. Obviously, he’s there to put Reigns over, which is not what the crowd wants. Until that point, he really tears into Reigns’ shortcomings as a title contender, in this vicious, mean way that reminds one of how great Bryan was as a heel and would be again if he wasn’t so universally beloved. But that match at Fastlane made Daniel Bryan a believer in Reigns, regardless of what he felt beforehand. Honestly, it’s pretty depressing watching Daniel Bryan just roll over and die for Roman Reigns, but maybe it’s going somewhere unexpected. Bryan, after all, is still without an obvious match at WrestleMania, and maybe knowing that he gave it his all and came up short will make him desperate enough to interject himself in the main event in some fashion. Bryan’s effort to put over Roman Reigns isn’t enough, so Paul Heyman hits the ring and really goes over the top. In a match, he would have picked Reigns over Bruno Sammartino. He would have picked him over Hulk Hogan and Andre the Giant. He would have picked Roman Reigns over Steve Austin or The Rock, John Cena or Randy Orton, Daniel Bryan or his brothers in The Shield. Heyman lays all of this on so thick that he has legitimate heat with even the smart fans in the crowd. His point isn’t so much that Roman Reigns is a smart bet, but that all of those men were just that… men. Brock Lesnar, his client, the WWE World Heavyweight Champion, isn’t a man. He’s a beast. It’s the same promo Heyman has been cutting since Brock Lesnar defeated The Undertaker at last year’s WrestleMania, but it’s a really good promo and continues to be, even with Roman Reigns at its center. Reigns tries to get sassy with Heyman, but after a heartfelt promo by Bryan and the cold, harsh light of Paul E. Dangerously’s truth, all he’s got is his catchphrase. Whatever. I am in for whatever physicality there will be between Lesnar and Reigns, especially given Lesnar’s ability to flip the switch between merciless destruction and awe-inspiring superhuman selling within the same match. Still, if Reigns’ victory at WrestleMania is etched in stone (and I’m not convinced that’s the case), he’s going to need to figure out how to look good even when he’s being outshined on the microphone.

Every WWE championship has, buried within the unseen contract the champions sign upon clinching the title, a rematch clause. It’s a bit of lazy storytelling that allows an ongoing championship feud continue without having to stop and think of what a title change really means, the faux-strategy often being that cashing in on that clause early will give the former champions a mental advantage over their rivals. That’s why The Usos used their clause on Raw, one presumes, and hey, the story plays out that they really do have an advantage early, befuddling Kidd and Cesaro with their high impact, tag team offense. It’s immediately a better effort than at Fastlane the night before, as the chaos that let the match down at the pay-per-view actually comes to define this contest, both teams throwing caution to the wind because they really want that pair of big pennies. There’s a lot of good double-team stuff here, even if what’s happening isn’t tag team wrestling in its classical sense. And, as Naomi and Natalya finally got physically involved, there’s a chance that this issue may evolve into a showcase for them, as well. Natalya shoved Naomi to the ground for stopping Tyson Kidd from cheating, then got her team disqualified by getting involved in the match. The post-match altercation between the two women, while brief, got a good reaction from the crowd. If this becomes a six-person tag team situation in time for WrestleMania, and if Natalya and Naomi aren’t kept to their own corner of the ring, this might yet become the interesting Tag Team Championship feud the division has been sorely lacking.

The tag team match is a spike in a show that begins to drag pretty severely. The Andre the Giant Memorial Battle Royal from last year’s WrestleMania has not been forgotten, so The Miz and Damien Mizdow’s ongoing will-they-or-won’t-they over their odd partnership is part of that match, now. Stardust and Goldust appear to be moving towards another singles match, but now they’re in the mid-card singles feud holding pattern where the way to continue things is to distract somebody with your music. Curtis Axel still hasn’t been eliminated from the Royal Rumble some twenty-nine days and counting, which rules. He is going to put his experience in not losing battle royals (and not entering them, either) to good use in the Andre the Giant Memorial Battle Royal. His old buddy Ryback comes out and says that he and the AX-MAN were one of the greatest tag teams of all time, which is legitimately hilarious. RyBaxel explodes…in a thirty-second squash match. Ryback is a good pick for that battle royal. If you put Roman Reigns against Ryback, my money is on Ryback.

Raw has to deal with a lot of Fastlane fall out. Bray Wyatt fooled the crowd in Memphis when he came out with The Undertaker’s druids and music. I can’t say that his promo that night or any of his pre-tapes about vaguely defined dark forces were anything that much better than Wyatt’s usual schtick, but with his intentions finally public, he cuts a scorching promo about how the evil that once possessed The Undertaker was now calling on Bray Wyatt to put him down. I wish there was more faith in Wyatt to deliver without the use of spooooOOOOOoooOOooooky props (tonight: a smoking funeral arrangement—oooooOOOOOoooooOOOoooo), but it’s not like Bray Wyatt is the only guy being given unnecessary props. His opponent at last year’s WrestleMania, John Cena, is now ALL ABOUT AMERICA, JACK after his loss to Rusev. Though he hit all of the expected John Cena beats, he actually did a tremendous job playing the role the announcers discussed during the actual match during Fastlane, an aging master of wrestling coming to terms with the fact that he really can’t win them all anymore. He was cheated, but he failed. Rusev, though, has nothing to be proud about, winning after a low blow, and if he’s the kind of person Russia props up as a hero (he isn’t), then, well, everybody there should be ashamed. This brings out Rusev and Lana, the best full-time act in wrestling. After his victory, what he wants from John Cena is an admission that America is inferior to Russia. That really gets Cena’s dander up. “Watch your ass when you run down the United States of America,” warns the star of The Marine, before praising the men who took Iwo Jima as heroes to Rusev’s garbage. That… that’s a fair point, maybe, but Russia also did stuff in World War II. Like, they exhausted Nazi forces on the eastern front and eventually took Berlin. Compared to that, John Cena is garbage, too. He challenges Rusev to a WrestleMania rematch, but the burly Bulgarian says no. Then he drops his flag from the ceiling and leaves John Cena standing there like he just found out he was grown in a lab and his memories are a lie. That’s what you get for shameless patriotism, John. Oh, and the Rollins/Orton thing continues to play out, with the two having a meeting where they hash things out. Orton hasn’t put anything behind him, but he’s willing to give Rollins a chance, if only to show that Roman Reigns and Daniel Bryan were lucky he wasn’t in the Royal Rumble. They’re going to have to compress this a lot with their destined singles match just over the horizon, but an Orton/Rollins team could be quite compelling over a long stretch. It seems like Orton is playing his rejoining The Authority much straighter in this segment, which is a confusing narrative decision, but all roads lead to him finally landing an RKO on Rollins.

Because Triple H vs. Sting is happening at WrestleMania, and because many of WWE’s most passionate fans weren’t alive when WCW folded, they play a Sting highlight package. It is quite good, as most WWE highlight packages are, but man, it is not encouraging. The last great Sting match happened in maybe 1994, and his biggest year, 1997, was him not talking and not wrestling. A lot of people you’ve heard of do their best to put over how great Sting is and was, and it’ll be really great when they play this again in the context of inducting Sting into the WWE Hall of Fame. Maybe by then we’ll be past the new World order being the primary narrative engine of professional wrestling and we can look back on the year Sting laid everybody out with the Scorpion Death Drop more fondly than we do now. Maybe the hero, whoever that is, will be allowed his triumph over The Authority, which will then fade away and never return

The problem with the Sting video, the Bushwhackers Hall of Fame Video, and the newest version of the Seth Rollins/John Stewart video is that they exist on live television in an era where a YouTube video (or a 24/7 online streaming network/on-demand service) could present this information at any time. TMZ did WWE’s job of playing that John Stewart video. Some website in New Zealand announced The Bushwhackers. Meanwhile, the sequence of events on the live show is this: Paige’s music hits, and she does her entrance. Sting video. Emma is suddenly in the ring with Paige. The Bella Twins enter. The bell rings after Emma keeps Paige from attacking Brie. Nikki knocks Paige from the apron, kicks Emma in the gut, delivers a facebuster, and wins. Paige and Emma spent more time in the ring watching a video about Sting than they did wrestling from bell to bell, or continuing to develop the Paige vs. Bella Twins storyline. This did nothing for nobody, and, at the risk of sounding like I’m overreacting, reflects rather poorly on a company that is supposedly in the business of promoting strong women. This did not go unnoticed on social media, where R-Truth’s hashtag became #GiveDivasAChance and trended, of course, without mention. The fact that I gave the match an F isn’t a reflection upon the performers involved, but on the way the situation was presented. It suggests either a belief that what the women are doing isn’t valuable, or that they don’t have faith in their ability to perform up to a television standard. I’d suggest that both are wrong and misguided and, if the fault lies anywhere for the lack of a reaction the Diva’s division is getting this early in 2015, then it’s on whoever decided to shutter the program between Nikki and Brie from last year, re-teaming them without explanation, and moving them into yet another storyline that’s a mashup of the Bellas’ usual we-look-better-than-you angle, the challenger’s usual I-don’t-look-like-your-typical-Diva angle, and liberal doses of both the Crazy Chick gimmick and a character’s insistence that her rival(s) can’t wrestle. Last year, Brie Bella and Stephanie McMahon had a match that was practically one of the main events of SummerSlam. It was good, it told a story, and, when it ended, the earth upon which the loser stood was not salted. Live audiences popped huge for that angle, were engaged with AJ Lee and Paige, and so on. But you don’t even have to look that far back in history (or to the alternate universe that is NXT) for an example of a women’s match on the main roster that was good: On the 1/6 edition of Main Event, Nikki and Paige had a very good match that should be used as the measuring stick for the division. Instead, it’s an exception, a thing that’ll happen once every few months for a couple dozen people who look for that kind of thing. #GiveDivasAChance is a warzone (predictably), as trending on Twitter doesn’t equate to unanimous support. But the main arguments against the division, at least when I dipped into the feed, is that the workers aren’t good and the product won’t draw. Well, you can’t prove either with a kick and a facebuster, and you can’t improve on it, either. Regardless of their function as Vince McMahon sees it—eye candy, a rest between big matches and angles, or a trojan horse for a lucrative reality television show—the potential is there for so much more. It’s not about women being given a chance. It’s about giving them a platform.

That being said, the main event was great, full of character development and worked at a similar level as Fastlane‘s main event. Seth Rollins is out first with Kane, Big Show, and J&J Security, and he gives Randy Orton a custom ring introduction befitting a prodigal son. The Authority hang around outside the ring, clapping and cheering Orton, giving his fragile, permanently bruised ego as much of a lift as they can. Meanwhile, Bryan and Reigns continue their own fragile partnership, something that’s a staple of WrestleMania season though not at all stale since this partnership is entirely new. They’ve got some good ideas as for how to work together as a unit, too. Daniel Bryan starts by putting Rollins in a surfboard, then tags in Reigns, who throws his former Shield ally to the mat from that position. The announcers seem to mostly forget that Reigns was in the middle of a program with Rollins when he was lost to a sports hernia, and Reigns wrestles Rollins like nothing too bad happened between them, but Rollins is a smart heel and tags out to Orton as soon as he can. When Reigns tries to outpower Orton, Orton responds to his veteran savvy. He takes a shoulder tackle and responds with a dropkick. During a commercial break, The Authority take over, running a distraction on Roman Reigns that allows Rollins to sneak in a few cheap shots. They work in a rolling series of hot tags and outside interference spots from The Authority that keep the crowd engaged. Though they’ve both been back for a few months, Bryan and Reigns seem much fresher than before, and Orton, in this weird, in-between space where the fans want him to crush The Authority but he’s still just thinking about it, feels like a wrestler worth watching for the first time since he and Evolution feuded with The Shield. Rollins, feeling pretty good about himself because he has a tag team partner who moves a bit quicker than the glacial titans The Authority usually sticks him with, makes a blind tag on Orton while he’s in the middle of a DDT. Orton bails and complains to Kane and Big Show, sitting the rest of the match out. Rollins takes too long to hit the Curbstomp and gets a Superman punch from Reigns. Bryan tags in while Reigns is setting up the spear, and, for the first time in the history of blind tags, Reigns laughs it off and lets Bryan take the victory with the running knee. When Orton gets back into the ring to confront Rollins, J&J Security try to get between the pair. Jamie Noble takes an RKO, and then nothing happens. Seriously. The announce team recaps what just happened, complete with replays, and that’s it. Good thing they only gave the women two moves, because that post-match angle was hot.

Results

Dolph Ziggler def. Wade Barrett via pinfall. GRADE: B
The Prime Time Players (Darren Young & Titus O’Neil) def. The Ascension (Konnor & Viktor) via pinfall. GRADE: C
WWE Tag Team Championships: The Usos (Jimmy & Jey, w/Naomi) def. Tyson Kidd & Cesaro (champions, w/Natalya) via disqualification. GRADE: B
Jack Swagger def. Stardust vis submission. GRADE: C
The Bella Twins (Nikki & Brie) def. Paige and Emma via pinfall. GRADE: F
Ryback def. Curtis Axel via pinfall. GRADE: C
Daniel Bryan & Roman Reigns def. Randy Orton & Seth Rollins (w/The Authority) via pinfall. GRADE: B+

Wrestling Review: WWE Fastlane (2/22/15)

February 23, 2015 by Colette Arrand Leave a Comment

World Wrestling Entertainment decided to re-brand their February pay-per-view event Fastlane to play off the fact that they call the long stretch between Royal Rumble and WrestleMania the Road to WrestleMania. In every documentary I’ve seen about the event, the 31st edition of which takes place on March 29, a member of creative or a wrestler, perhaps Triple H or Vince McMahon, even, will claim that the Road to WrestleMania starts the day after the show, when the exhausted crew gathers in the basketball arena adjacent to the stadium they’d just occupied and begins plotting out the next episode of Raw. This was true once, perhaps, before World Wrestling Entertainment was the only game in town, before it had to fill five hours of broadcast television and yet more for their online outlet, but the days of WrestleMania being plotted out a year in advance have been over for some time. If anything, it’s called The Road to WrestleMania because that’s when the pieces for the show really start to fall into place. The fallout from the big show may string things along until SummerSlam, but everything from that August show until about the Royal Rumble is about the promise that WrestleMania will be worthwhile.

This year, unable to promote an Elimination Chamber event because the titular construction is expensive to set up in arenas that can’t easily accommodate it, Fastlane held the promise, due to its punning title, of accelerating the company’s storylines heading into WrestleMania. One problem (the problem) is that the WWE hasn’t had much in the way of success with many of its storylines of late. Really, they’ve been treading water since Daniel Bryan, fresh off his triumphant double header at WrestleMania XXX, suffered an injury that took him out of the picture for nearly a year. There were glimmers of hope, here and there. Brock Lesnar destroying John Cena at SummerSlam. The finish to Team Cena vs. Team Authority at Survivor Series. Daniel Bryan’s emotional return to Raw and his declaration that he would not have to retire. But 2014 was something of a lost year for World Wrestling Entertainment, and the Road to WrestleMania has been a hard one thus far. Last year, Raw was must-see television. This year, one had to pin one’s hopes to this new, generically-titled pay-per-view to kickstart the build necessary of a show that’ll be held at Levi’s Stadium, that glittering beacon of publicly subsidized, corporately overseen athletic carnage. And, on paper, Fastlane looked like a great card, the sort of show that would get lost because it was between Royal Rumble and WrestleMania, but that would be discovered again and again by those curious enough to put in the time on the WWE Network. To be blunt, that’s exactly what this show was not.

The crowd at the FedEx Forum were pumped for Fastlane for about the first three seconds of Dolph Ziggler’s theme song, then dead from the minute Erick Rowan’s theme hit to the closing stretch of the main event. I can get over a bad crowd (the way WWE has paced their shows over the last year, one has to get over a bad crowd), so I settled in for the expected sleeper classic. And the opening six-man tag team match, with a muddled storyline dating back to November, had me hopeful. Ziggler/Ryback/Rowan vs. Big Show/Kane/Rollins looked like it had no reason to be on this (or any) card, despite how much I dig Ziggler, Ryback, and Rollins. After Ziggler’s win at Survivor Series over the Rollins-led Team Authority went nowhere, another meeting between these two teams in any configuration was the last thing I wanted. Ryback, a physical freak who won me over by being a physical freak, may be the most improved wrestler of the calendar year. Erick Rowan, himself a huge man, may prove to be the most surprising. The story of any match involving The Authority is that they always have the numbers advantage and have more of a reason to stay a cohesive unit. Seth Rollins is on another level when it comes to his ability to put together creative, amazing sequences. Early, he rolls out of the way of a Ryback splash and has his curbstomp countered into a big powerbomb. Later, he looks to hit Ryback with a blockbuster, but is caught in the Shellshock. These are big, impressive spots to be landing in what’s essentially a throwaway match to end (hopefully) a long stagnant feud, but Rollins is so good that he’s able to elevate whatever material he’s given. In the end, though, it’s a nice bit of double teaming from Kane and The Big Show that gives The Authority a somewhat surprising win. After the match, a five-on-three assault (J&J Security are involved, of course) is too much for Ziggler, Rowan, and Ryback. Just when things seem hopeless, Randy Orton finally returns, dispatching the majority of The Authority with his RKO. Waaaaaay back in November, Triple H officially chose to back Seth Rollins over Orton, leading The Authority to injure his former Evolution running buddy. This is his revenge, though it’s hardly complete. Rollins was pulled from the ring by Big Show, and he ran at top speed to the parking garage. Orton vs. Rollins seems like a lock for WrestleMania, and it should be a good one. Where it leaves Ziggler, Ryback, Rowan, Kane, and Big Show is a mystery that’ll either be solved over the next five weeks, or during the catch-all battle royal that exists to eat 20-minutes of time at the show.

Backstage, Dusty Rhodes is with his son Dustin, garbed, as he customarily is, as Goldust. It’s been hard times for the Rhodes family of late, what with Cody going crazy and figuring that he really is the cosmic entity known as Stardust, but Dusty doesn’t want Dustin beating up his youngest son too badly. Love, Dusty Rhodes believes, is what will heal this freshly developed rift. Goldust, however, doesn’t think so. To bring Cody Rhodes back, he’s going to have to beat Stardust out of him. This match, Dustin Rhodes vs. Cody Rhodes or Goldust vs. Stardust, is what I’ve been waiting for since Goldust came back for yet another WWE run, and in the best in-ring shape of his career. It seems to be the one Dustin wants to retire on, too. This match, then, was crushed somewhat by the weight of expectation, as well as by a serious error on the part of referee Rudy Charles. Everything is good, at least in the early going. Stardust’s new gear, essentially his Goldust tribute gear without a top, was a nice, weird twist on his brother’s most famous look, and the psychological aspect of the contest—Stardust getting distracted by “CODY!” chants, Goldust using his experience to outsmart his brother, Stardust taking advantage of Goldust’s reluctance to cause any serious damage to take control—was quite excellent, especially as a first chapter. The WWE’s dead crowd problem plagued it, though, as did the finish, which saw Goldust roll Stardust up and the referee make a two count before calling for the bell. Usually, mistakes that happen during the course of a match can be worked through. The referee forgetting how to count to three, however, is egregious. That’s the function of a referee. The look of confusion on Goldust, Stardust, and even Dusty Rhodes’ face at the end of the match was not good. Stardust was able to redeem things a bit afterwards with another killer promo on his family and how Cody Rhodes died when Dusty sent Goldust to fight Cody’s battle against The Authority. His beatdown of Goldust, complete with one last no-look kick after the promo, saved their night.

The WWE Tag Team Championship, like everything that isn’t the World Heavyweight Championship, are albatrosses, title belts that are spoken highly of on commentary but which doom their owners to the relative obscurity of four or five minute matches on Raw and SmackDown!. The “art” of tag team wrestling has largely been lost (Vince McMahon reportedly isn’t a fan, and most teams don’t stay together long enough to build anything like real chemistry), but The Usos are a solid enough foundation for a division that always seems to be in the midst of a rebuild. Cesaro and Tyson Kidd are “the best new tag team we’ve seen in awhile,” meaning “the tag team we are focusing on this month.” This match stems from the scripted marital drama of Total Divas, where Natalya is seemingly always on the verge of ending things with her husband Tyson Kidd, and Naomi is enjoying her new marriage to Jimmy Uso. Natalya thought it would be fun to have a double date with Jimmy and Naomi, but Tyson Kidd invited Cesaro along (their relationship being an interesting one, too), and the ensuing altercation at a “restaurant” gave us this match. Kidd and Cesaro are still a new team, but they seem to be meshing well. Cesaro’s power and Kidd’s speed are impressive when combined, particularly on moves like Cesaro’s deadlift superplex and Kidd’s slingshot elbow drop. They spend most of the match working on Jimmy’s leg. Cesaro even alters his swing so that he whips Jimmy Uso around by the damaged leg before sinking in a single-leg crab. It’s good stuff, then it falls apart when The Usos go into their comeback. It’s hard to explain why, but it just does. The flying Uso stuff leads to some convoluted action at ringside highlighted by a Samoan drop into the crowd barricade, and then Kidd manages to win once the match moves back inside the ring with a fisherman’s neckbreaker. The Kidd/Cesaro/Natalya character work continues when Cesaro pulls his partner away from a celebratory kiss with Nattie, but it’s tough to say where any of it is going. Tyson and Natalya have been playing a will-they-or-won’t-they game since Kidd re-debuted on Raw last year, and the Cesaro stuff gives the angle the appearance of a love triangle with Kidd being pulled between the affections of his wife and his tag team partner. That can’t be where they’re going with it, though, so we just have this weird angle where one member of a tag team was trying to respect dinner and the other brought his angry, well-dressed friend as a third. Now we enter the period of title feuds where the former champion talks about automatic rematch clauses. How exciting.

The face-to-face meeting between Triple H and Sting existed as a means of setting up their match at WrestleMania. Really, the whole “confrontation” was had on Monday, when Triple H shoved his sad, old mentor Ric Flair to the ground after Flair insinuated that Triple H was perhaps taking Sting too lightly. We got the gist of Triple H’s issue right there: Sting’s a WCW guy. WCW has been dead since the year 2001. But in 2014, Sting finally showed up to a WWE event, temporarily causing Triple H to lose control of a company that he sees as his and his family’s legacy. So he came out to Fastlane not in his suit and tie, but in his tough guy leather jacket, with his hands taped so heavily he could hardly make a fist. He went through those talking points again, which brought out Sting. Without his WCW music and with 18 years between him and his 1997 peak, all silent, “Crow” Sting accomplishes at this point is to give us a match between Sting and Triple H without being given a reason for the guy’s reemergence. WWE is calling him “The Vigilante” because Batman, but really? The injustice Sting chose to fight was the off chance that some big dude in a sheep mask might be fired for losing a wrestling match? Triple H tries to catch Sting off guard, but his play to grab his customary sledgehammer allows Sting to grab his trademark baseball bat, which he backs Triple H up with by sticking it to his throat. Sting says that he wants a match at WrestleMania, which he gets. Triple H’s second attempt at attacking Sting ends with him getting hit in the gut with the bat and dropped with the Scorpion Death Drop. This segment existed to give Sting a reason to point at the great WrestleMania logo in the sky with his baseball bat. Even today, it seems the general consensus is that Sting vs. The Undertaker is the preferred match-up, but this overlooks two crucial facts: Sting’s last great match probably happened in 1994, and The Undertaker wasn’t having great matches until around 1996. Of any “marquee” guy who can still have the occasional match, Triple H, garbed as Ric Flair’s protegé, is the one most able to do something with a 55-year-old man whose shine and mystique were largely wasted through a decade spent in TNA. Of all the “realities” wrestling has to face now, the biggest one is that a name like Sting’s “disappearance” can be explained by Wikipedia. Sting’s “legacy” has long been tarnished, and a match against The Undertaker at WrestleMania, even without The Streak on the line, is not how one rebuilds a legacy. I don’t have much faith that a Sting/Triple H match will be any good, let alone coax Sting into wrestling without wearing his goddamn t-shirt, but Triple H is smart enough and driven enough as he ages and starts to write his own legacy that he’ll get out of Steve Borden whatever he has left.

Sting and Triple H were going to be a hard act to follow even if the crowd was feeling it, but after a revisionist history of WCW lecture and a 30-second brawl that left two middle-aged men winded, the FexEx Forum was practically somnambulist for both the WWE Diva’s and Intercontinental Championship matches. To be fair, it’s not like they were given much reason to care about either, beyond the cult charisma of Paige, Bad News Barrett, and Dean Ambrose. While I am bone tired of women’s storylines centered around one woman or another not looking like a supermodel, the Bella Twins are rather natural heels, so it makes sense that they’d try to embarrass the pale “Anti Diva” by spray tanning her, stealing her mall punk gear, and so on. Tiresome but sensible is not high praise. The two had a great match on Main Event last year, and Nikki is nose-to-nose with Ryback for most improved wrestler, but nothing clicked here. Just a pile-up of moves until the Raw women’s match finish of a surprise roll-up. They tried to use a GoPro camera to show that Nikki had Paige’s belt, but a) if she cheated, she barely cheated, and b) if you’re going to wear stupid stuff in the ring, expect to have it used against you. Really, 90% of any Paige/Nikki Bella match should be Nikki trying to rip out Paige’s body piercings. Over on the men’s side of inadequate championship matches, Dean Ambrose wanted him some of Bad News Barrett because he thinks that the Intercontinental Championship should be worth something, and Bad News Barrett, on his fifth reign, hasn’t done much to raise that title’s prestige. That’s a fair enough critique, I suppose, though it really doesn’t help the previous few years of booking to point out how poorly the Intercontinental Championship has fared. Barrett’s a talented dude and Ambrose remains one of the more fascinating guys on the roster, but this match had nothing going for it. Nothing. Dean Ambrose is an UNHINGED LOOSE CANNON, but his spots are so routine you could compile a supercut of John Bradshaw Layfield saying that dropping an elbow on a standing opponent is crazy. Rudy Charles, already the goat for his performance during the Goldust/Stardust match, looks pretty bad again when he disqualifies Ambrose for beating Barrett up too much in the corner, ignoring the count which skips from three to five without much drama. That finish, I swear, is the worst thing the WWE has come up with over the past 10 years. What does it accomplish? Ambrose looks about as confused about the disqualification as Goldust was by his victory. He continues to stomp at Barrett, hits him with Dirty Deeds, then leaves with the title. Did he steal it, or did he give it back to Barrett backstage? I guess we’ll find out on Raw. Speaking of which, Bray Wyatt cut a live version of his pre-taped Raw promos on The Undertaker, this time employing the Deadman’s entrance music, druids, and casket motif. I really like Wyatt in the ring, but after a few years of hearing him speak I’m past the gimmick, which is pretty much listening to a sophomore in a dumb hat talk about Nietzsche. That’s not exactly Wyatt’s fault and he does it well, but he’s in a situation where they really need to pull the trigger on his winning a big, meaningful match or two, something to build on the following he’s managed to build and sustain despite every obstacle. A classic against The Undertaker at WrestleMania would help. Whether or not The Undertaker is capable of one at this late stage will remain unknown until March 29.

This was a wasted show until the United States Championship match. I say that as if the title matters, but really, it’s just the garnish to John Cena vs. Rusev, WWE’s spin on Rocky IV where Cena, fifteen time champion of the world, must play Apollo Creed first before he can become Rocky Balboa. John Cena has been the end game for Rusev since the Bulgarian debuted on the main roster during the Royal Rumble, and his rise serves both as a crucial ray of light in an otherwise dark period of WWE storytelling, and as proof that wrestling’s oldest formula’s still work. Cena, throughout this contest, is treated as an aging fighter whose best years may be behind him, as if he roundly crushed every wandering monster who passed his way. That’s not necessarily true, but the thought of Cena as a less than sure bet because he’s an old-model heavyweight against a guy like Rusev is appealing and works very well. Rusev and Cena hurl themselves at each other for nearly twenty minutes—even Rusev’s rest holds look snug enough to cause some damage. Where plenty of Cena matches lately have made his Attitude Adjustment finish look like an automatic two count until the twenty minute mark, Rusev’s strategy is to effectively avoid the move altogether, to counter out and hit Cena with one of his big, bruising strikes. Cena, meanwhile, needs to avoid Rusev’s Accolade. That a camel clutch works as a finish in 2015 is nigh miraculous, but Rusev and his opponents are able to make it look like a struggle. Mark Henry managed to shed a single tear for America before tapping out to it, and here John Cena pays a tremendous amount of respect to the big stomp Rusev uses to set the move up, rolling away or countering it into his own submission, the STF. John Cena’s character is never going to pull an about face and the boos he gets are never going to be the WWE’s intent, but its interesting to see him grow as a character in other ways. Getting older, for example, or the way he’ll add a new move to his arsenal because he knows everybody expects two shoulder tackles, a power bomb, a five knuckle shuffle, and an Attitude Adjustment. Here, it’s a tornado DDT that catches Rusev off guard, not to mention the rarely seen Crippler Crossface. Rusev is able to break that with his bare hands. He’s actually able to effectively counter or kick out of most of Cena’s bombs. When Cena finally lands the AA late in the match, it’s a triumph. When Rusev kicks out, it’s a surprise. The Accolade that finishes the match is great, due largely to Cena’s positioning and facial expressions. When Cena digs down deep and manages to stand with Rusev on his back, gets into the ring, United States Championship in hand, and argues with the referee. This gives Rusev an opening to kick Cena between the legs, kick him again in the face, and reapply the Accolade. Thus compromised, Cena is unable to fight back, and the referee has to call for the bell. This is a great match, one that leaves a little left in the tank for WrestleMania. I see criticisms of Rusev’s storylines all the time online, usually with the hashtag #RusevIsAFace, that say Rusev is either a bad heel or the folks who book his routine are stupid because he’s a proud immigrant with a smart woman by his side who wins most of his matches cleanly, and so on. That’s a fine argument for a smart fan to make, and there may be some merit to it, but most of the folks packed into a 15,000 seat arena aren’t “smart,” or, if they are, then its in the sense that they know this proud immigrant is a super athlete whose every action is meant to glorify the regime of a political figurehead who has committed a good number of human rights violations. Against John Cena, Rusev has moved beyond the tenants of Cold War wrestling storytelling by attacking the institution of John Cena. He’s a heel all the way, from the lack of respect he shows John Cena at the start of the match to the way he kicks him in the dick at the end. Cena’s Rocky moment is coming, and I can’t wait.

For most, however, the prospect of a good WrestleMania began with and was ended by Fastlane‘s main event, Daniel Bryan vs. Roman Reigns with a shot at Brock Lesnar and his WWE World Heavyweight Championship on the line. During the pre-show, Paul Heyman, interviewed by The Miz, said that his client didn’t care who won the main event. Daniel Bryan has the adulation of the crowd and Roman Reigns has the family pedigree, but Brock Lesnar has an inhuman desire to destroy every human he sees in a wrestling ring. Paul Heyman’s suggestion that the entire WWE roster line up to fight Brock Lesnar for the title was no joke: Lesnar is an otherworldly presence, and he is here to destroy the WWE Universe. It’s been obvious from the start that Roman Reigns would be the one to challenge Lesnar for the WWE World Heavyweight Championship, but Bryan was thrown in there to complicate things a bit by insinuating that he deserved a championship rematch, which, considering the circumstances under which he was stripped of the title last year, he certainly does. In my opinion, Daniel Bryan hasn’t been written too well since his return. He was booked poorly during a very bad Royal Rumble match, then came out on Raw as a man who felt so entitled to a championship match that he’d play The Authority’s game just for a shot. Reigns hasn’t been done any favors either, but he needed something to further validate him in the eyes of a die hard audience of Daniel Bryan fans who are never going to cotton to him and will go into WrestleMania chanting “YES!” until they’re blue in the face. So we’re given this match, its outcome dreaded and certain. What happens?

Well, first off, Daniel Bryan returns to the throne he abdicated to Seth Rollins as the best overall wrestler in WWE. Seriously. This is his first match of true consequence since returning, and he kills it, leading Reigns to what will likely stand as one of his best matches at the end of his career, but that probably isn’t even top 20 for Bryan. Too many times in “wrestling” matches, the competitors go through the motions of chain wrestling, working through wristlocks and hammerlocks and headlocks until some dude in the crowd yells “WRESTLING!” to get the crowd clapping politely. From the start, this is a fight. Daniel Bryan is the wrestler. Roman Reigns is the brawler. Bryan can and does outwrestle Reigns, but the Royal Rumble winner makes the former champion fight for everything. Daniel Bryan claims to have mastered over 100 submission moves. Focusing on Reigns’ legs, he breaks out more than a few, but those often bring him close enough to Reigns that one or two stiff shots are enough to cause a break. Reigns can live with Bryan that close, but needs space so that he can land his big moves, the spear and the Superman punch. The first time he goes for the punch, Bryan is able to sidestep Reigns and kick him in the stomach. This staggers Reigns for the rest of the match, as Bryan’s more pronounced mean streak comes out and his kicks move from trying to charlie-horse a leg to trying to make a man vomit. Reigns stays on his power game, though, powerbombing Bryan after blocking an attempted top rope rana and stopping a suicide dive with a belly-to-belly suplex. Despite that, Bryan is always a step ahead, always the veteran wrestler. He moves just in time to avoid a spear, sending Reigns into the ring steps. He counters a spear with a small package after being knocked for a loop by the Superman punch. Bryan seems to clinch the match with the running knee, but Reigns is the first to kick out of it. From there, the two take it into another gear. Daniel Bryan kicks Reigns in the face until Reigns catches the foot and dares Bryan to do something. Bryan responds with a number of slaps, but Reigns is having none of it until Bryan goes for a cross armbreaker. When that doesn’t work, Bryan transitions into the YES! Lock, which Reigns manages to slip before laying Bryan out with some nasty forearms. The sequence gets even better from there, with Reigns over a seemingly prone Bryan, as the wrestler manages to surprise the brawler with a triangle choke attempt. Reigns uses his overwhelming power advantage to pick Bryan up off the canvas with a sit-out powerbomb. After an eight count, they exchange punches and kicks from the ground until Bryan gets the advantage and hits his big kick to Reigns’ temple. This is the set-up for a second attempt at the running knee, but Reigns recovers while Bryan is mid-sprint and manages a spear, which sends him to WrestleMania. Nobody is happy about this finish, but that does nothing to diminish what is a great effort on the part of two men. One found his footing again and is in good position for another chase at the championship depending on what his WrestleMania program is. The other pulled his weight, too, so much that any doubt about his ability to perform at a high level on a big stage should be assuaged. Should be, but who knows. Reigns is still wrestling with the crutch of The Shield supporting him. He’s still got their music, their entrance, and their gear. What he doesn’t have, even at the end of the night, is the crowd’s support as a WrestleMania main eventer. The WWE has five weeks to make that happen. Luckily (or unluckily, depending on how you see it), every move the WWE has made since WrestleMania XXX goes to show that, in wrestling, even just one week can feel like an eternity.

Results

Seth Rollins, Kane, and Big Show def. Dolph Ziggler, Ryback, and Erick Rowan via pinfall. GRADE: B-
Goldust def. Stardust via pinfall. GRADE: C
WWE Tag Team Championship Match: Tyson Kidd and Cesaro (w/Natalya) def. The Usos (Jimmy and Jey, w/Naomi, Champions) via pinfall to win the titles. GRADE: C+
WWE Diva’s Championship: Nikki Bella (w/Brie Bella, Champion) def. Paige via pinfall. GRADE: C-
WWE Intercontinental Championship: Bad News Barrett (Champion) def. Dean Ambrose via disqualification. GRADE: C-
WWE United States Championship: Rusev (w/Lana, Champion) def. John Cena via referee stoppage. GRADE: A-
Roman Reigns def. Daniel Bryan via pinfall. GRADE: A

Wrestling Review: WWE Raw (2/16/15)

February 17, 2015 by Colette Arrand Leave a Comment

Quietly, the WWE has done a very good job of building up to Fastlane, which they’re billing as a “new pay-per-view concept” though, really, it’s just a regular pay-per-view without the usual February Elimination Chamber main event. The lack of a Chamber match, I think, is the reason why Fastlane is so compelling. The WWE calendar is littered with pay-per-views that are branded by one kind of match or another that the matches themselves, no matter how violent or how good, feel more inevitable than special. Without the crutch of putting six guys in a goofy chain-and-plexiglass rig with the absent WWE Championship on the line, instead what we have is the supposed fast lane on the road to WrestleMania. Considering how slow that road has felt thus far, having a date on the calendar where everything will supposedly get back in gear feels like a blessing. “Quietly” in this case also means “glacially,” especially compared to the stretch between last year’s Royal Rumble and WrestleMania, when nearly every Raw had a standout match or segment. Raw will need to pick up the pace sooner rather than later, but, as the last show before a pay-per-view that looks, on paper, like the strongest card since SummerSlam, the WWE does a good enough job of getting everybody in place.

That includes Rusev, who gets trucked by John Cena in the opening segment. This is not the first time a foreign monster has charged the 15-time WWE Champion with losing a step before Cena Rises Above Hate and proves him wrong. I doubt it will be the last. Since the beginning, it seemed like the endgame for Rusev was going to be a loss to John Cena, who, quite honestly, is going through the motions at the start of Raw. Every John Cena promo from 2007 forward is thrown in the blender. Cena loves the WWE. He loves when fans cheer him. He loves when fans boo him. He hates that there is a monster out there who isn’t from America and who can’t be beaten, and he promises to destroy him. This brings out Rusev and Lana, who are, really, a politicized make-over of the old Armando Estrada/Umaga pairing from 2008, an act that has risen above cartoon parody to become one of the most enjoyable aspects of a show that is frequently hard to enjoy. Lana in particular continues to evolve, relying less and less on the merits of Vladimir Putin and the Raw audience’s hatred of being told to shut up (by a lady who ain’t from here to boot!) and more on the merits of her freakish charge, who I also enjoy on the microphone. Rusev is a blunt object used to smash the opposition, a warhammer who only knows how to kill. John Cena’s gambit is that bringing Rusev down relies on taking the fight to him, which he does by charging up the ramp and hurling the burly Bulgarian into a panel of LED lights. Beyond some shoddy camerawork (really, why would you zoom in and out on bodies in motion?), the physicality of Cena vs. Rusev was quite satisfying. Cena proved his point about his strategy, but wrestling matches don’t work like street fights. Whether or not his plan will work when a referee calls for the bell is the story now, and it’s a good one. Rusev’s mystique isn’t compromised unless he’s pinned or he taps out to the STF. Only an idiot would pull the trigger on that at Fastlane.

The rest of Fastlane‘s undercard was built solidly here, as well, with the exception of the upcoming match between Paige and Nikki Bella. That should be a good match (Nikki Bella is easily the most improved wrestler on the main roster over the past year), but its plot is stuck in the muck and mire of the past ten years of the Diva’s division. It was actually somewhat brilliant when the Bella Twins attacked Paige and spraytanned her, as Paige had been clinging to the frankly stupid notion that simply not looking like a model made her better than all the other Divas. But now we’re in the usual Bella Twin holding pattern where they’re “pranking” (read: assaulting or stealing from) Paige in a variety of ways designed to brag that they look better than her. This week, they steal Paige’s clothes, which forces her to wrestle a match against Summer Rae while dressed in a Rosebud’s clothes. Considering that Paige kills Summer Rae handily, it hardly matters. Women have also factored into the Tag Team Championship storyline between The Usos and Tyson Kidd and Cesaro, as a blown double date between Kidd and Jimmy Uso and their respective wives Natalya and Naomi (sample line: “I’m here trying to respect this dinner”) led to a husband and wife mixed tag team match. The mainstream format of such matches is really dated, but Kidd’s unwillingness to wrestle Uso leads to three good minutes between Natalya and Naomi. Naomi, as is standard in non-title Divas division matches, wins with a roll up, allowing The Usos to celebrate that they got one over on their rivals while continuing to build on the will-they-or-won’t-they saga that is the relationship between Kidd and Natalya. Right now, it wouldn’t be at all surprising if Kidd left Nattie and got an apartment uptown with his buddy Cesaro, but I’m probably just authoring mental slash-fiction. Probably. The tag team division has been a long-running quagmire, but the Usos vs. Kidd and Cesaro match looks enticing, and the Prime Time Players reunited when Titus O’Neil stormed to the ring to help his returning buddy Darren Young escape a whooping at the hands of The Ascension. With the Miz/Mizdow team slowly breaking up, The New Day entrenched in the wasteland that is their racist gimmick, and tonight’s official dissolution of the Rhodes Brothers/Stardust and Goldust, a full-time return of the Prime Time Players, who always seemed on the verge of making some noise in the division, is a good thing.

Speaking of Stardust and Goldust, this Raw, like most, was built around promos. There was John Cena’s opening promo, Triple H’s Ric Flair-assisted promo about a confrontation (read: promo) with Sting at Fastlane, and the promise of Dusty Rhodes addressing the problems between his sons (not to mention the usual Seth Rollins interview). Only Dusty didn’t speak much and, of all the interviews, tonight, the one that most stole the show was Stardust’s declaration that Cody Rhodes was dead and never coming back. Dusty Rhodes’ are shoes no man can fill, but Stardust stood there, painted purple and silver and wearing a rubber suit, and delivered fire right in his father’s face. Stardust has, to this point, felt like a needless, pandering rip-off of Goldust, which was unfortunate given their role in the early iteration of the Authority storyline, but on Raw Stardust was given a purpose and a mission. It’s obviously impossible to separate the character from the Rhodes lineage, but it’s good heel motivation coming out of a brother/brother tag team, and this all should culminate in the Rhodes vs. Rhodes match that Goldust has been rather open about wanting to retire on.

Dusty looked (and is) old, but still acquits himself rather well. That’s less true of his lifetime rival Ric Flair, who surprised Triple H mid-speech to remind him that Sting, ancient old man or not, is still Sting and needs to be respected. Flair sounded drunk, but getting drunk and talking about his glory days is pretty much his job now, so he did well enough that Triple H shoving him on his ass felt sad because The Game was disrespecting a legend he openly admires, not because Flair’s condition continues to darken his legacy. Fallout from Sting’s debut at Survivor Series continues to be the theme heading into Fastlane, as Dolph Ziggler and Seth Rollins seem to be moving into a singles program. Rollins’ promo, unnecessary though it was, signaled that he is being shifted away from the WWE Championship for the time being to focus on the Zigglers, Rybacks, and Rowans of the card. Ziggler continues to be an unconvincing babyface on the microphone, (I’m not interested in white meat, I guess) but an incredible one in the ring. The match between Rollins and Ziggler was good. Not up to the pace they established at Survivor Series, but a good teaser for what the two should be able to do without distraction. They’ll wrestle on SmackDown! in this week’s Raw rematch, though another contest at Fastlane (and perhaps another at WrestleMania) isn’t out of the question.

Beyond Rollins/Ziggler and the main event between Big Show and Daniel Bryan, most of the wrestling on Raw this week as an afterthought. Even a singles match between Dean Ambrose and Luke Harper, while solid, existed more to set-up a later contest than to tell its own story. There were plenty of good spots, but Harper is wandering aimlessly at the moment, and WWE doesn’t do a very good job of protecting big dudes who aren’t in an active storyline. Harper lost clean to Ambrose to establish Ambrose’s credentials against current Intercontinental Champion Bad News Barrett, who beat Damien Mizdow in a match that nudged forward the issue between Mizdow and The Miz. Barrett was fantastic when Ambrose ziptied him to the ringpost and forced him to sign the contract, screaming for a knife to cut himself free and how it wasn’t his signature on the sheet and that the contract wasn’t legal. Had they cut bait on a weird skit where Ambrose “auditioned for Weekend Update,” announcing that he’d make Barrett sign the contract, everything on this front would have been great. Barrett is an effective heel, and, well, if Ambrose is going to be a goofy dude whose popularity the writing team doesn’t understand or know how to harness, he’s best when his goofiness is channeled through a bit of menace, rather than a bad suit. The Intercontinental Championship is always on the verge of meaning something. What matters more than Barrett vs. Ambrose at Fastlane is whether or not the issue continues to build, or if the title reverts to its usual miserable pattern, where the champion loses every non-title match until he is required to defend the title.

The confrontation that will set up Sting vs. Triple H at WrestleMania is an important part of Fastlane. Bray Wyatt’s continued promos that are (vaguely) about The Undertaker (this week he hammered some nails into a coffin) continue to be important. Those are two of the marquee matches at WrestleMania. They are happening. There is no turning back. Less certain is the fate of the WWE World Heavyweight Championship, currently held by Brock Lesnar. He’ll be there, defending, but his opponent is yet to be decided. Roman Reigns earned a shot by virtue of winning the Royal Rumble. Daniel Bryan feels that he deserves one because he was stripped of the championship in 2014 without having lost it and, as he points out, made only one fewer defense of the championship. Reigns wrestled Kane and Bryan wrestled Big Show, but the matches and results were secondary to the simmering issue between the two men, which threatens to boil over into something personal in the main event of Fastlane. After an interview where Reigns questioned the manhood of Bryan for going about a championship match by asking for one instead of earning it, Bryan came to ringside for Reigns match and participated on commentary, where he did a very good job of making clear how slighted he felt by Reigns’ assessment of the situation. He thought there was mutual respect between the two, but there clearly wasn’t. When Reigns had an advantage over Kane, Bryan would stand and lead the Orlando crowd in a YES! chant, which succeeded in distracting his man. Reigns won the match, but not in his usual dominant fashion, and Bryan would later say that, if he wants to beat him, Reigns had better get used to the crowd being in Daniel Bryan’s pocket. During the main event match between Big Show and Bryan, Reigns sat at ringside and watched (he didn’t join the commentary team, for good reason). Reigns took to the crowd, signing autographs and giving away t-shirts, and this caused Daniel Bryan no end of distraction. An exchange near the announce table led Big Show to spear Reigns, who would recover and hit Show with the Superman Punch with Daniel Bryan perched on the top rope for a missile dropkick. With the match over, Bryan would instead hit Reigns with the dropkick, sparking a brawl that closed the show.

This sequence was fantastic, a sprint around the ring and through the crowd that ended in a pull-apart with Reigns bleeding from the mouth and Bryan seething. Initially it looked as though they were going to do with Roman Reigns what they did with Batista last year, turning the hand-chosen WrestleMania main event guy into a heel due to the overwhelming popularity of Daniel Bryan, but this year is much more vague than last. Batista was universally despised from the moment it was clear that Daniel Bryan was not in the Royal Rumble, but Reigns plays pretty well in all but the hottest towns in wrestling. And where Batista had little reason to respect Bryan, Reigns has some respect for the former champion, not only for his in-ring accomplishments and what history they had together when The Shield clashed with Team Hell No, but for his resilience in the face of a career ending injury. But both men want to fight Brock Lesnar at WrestleMania, and it doesn’t look like there will be an opening for a third man in the main event, so that respect had to give way towards animosity with so much on the line. Daniel Bryan is a master at his craft, so the reemergence of his pre-rise mean streak has been subtle and brilliant. The wrinkle that they’ve added to Reigns’ story, that he’s trying to accomplish something not even the most legendary member of his family could achieve, is the most compelling angle Reigns has had since The Shield folded, and has managed to find some interesting space here, too (the t-shirts he was throwing to the crowd were Uso shirts, after all). What initially seemed like a capitulation on the part of WWE in the face of post-Royal Rumble fan revolt has turned into their best story since the SummerSlam domination of John Cena. The match at Fastlane will be telling in Reigns’ ability to become what the WWE so obviously wants him to be, but for now, the table is set. Sunday night will be an interesting one for a number of reasons, none moreso than this. For the WWE to pull itself out of the rut it has so clearly been stuck in since September, Fastlane is going to need to be that rare February pay-per-view that’s more about wrestling than WrestleMania. For once, the uncertainty surrounding a pay-per-view event feels like a good omen.

Results

Dean Ambrose def. Luke Harper via pinfall. GRADE: B-
The New Day (Kofi Kingston & Xavier Woods w/Big E) def. Goldust and Stardust via pinfall. GRADE: C+
Roman Reigns def. Kane via count out. GRADE: C
Paige def. Summer Rae via pinfall. GRADE: C-
Dolph Zigger def. Seth Rollins via disqualification when J&J Security interfered. GRADE: B
Darren Young & Local Talent vs. The Ascension never officially started. GRADE: N/A
Bad News Barrett def. Damien Mizdow (w/The Miz) via pinfall. GRADE: C
Jimmy Uso & Naomi (w/Jey Uso) def. Tyson Kidd & Natalya (w/Cesaro) via pinfall. GRADE: C+
The Big Show def. Daniel Bryan via disqualification when Roman Reigns interfered. GRADE: B-

Wrestling Review: WWE Raw (11/25/14)

November 25, 2014 by Colette Arrand Leave a Comment

BEFORE THE SHOW:

If you need to catch up with last night’s Survivor Series, here’s my review. Here it is on the WWE Network.
If you want to check out more Raw reviews, do so here.
Social media garbage: I am at @gh0stplanet. Follow me if you wish. I’ve got a few wrestling Tumblrs you may enjoy. Those are Date with a Wrestler and Wrestling Fashion. Also, you can follow Fear of a Ghost Planet on Facebook, if you dig it. You should dig it. Ohh, yeah.
I’m sure you have friends who will be impressed that somebody can write 5k words about a wrestling show. Why not share this post with them? There are buttons to the side and at the bottom to do all of that.

Of course, the big news is Sting. Of course, there’s already a phenomenal video of him just hitting the ring. Of course, to see this, you’re going to have to get the network, chump. We’ve got fallout to get to. Michael Cole and Jerry Lawler are positively ecstatic that a regime that did nothing to them personally is out the door. John Bradshaw Layfield is bummed. The Authority’s music hits, and here we go. It’s actually kind of incredible that, on their way out the door, The Authority are still coming out to “Bow Down to the King.” Having desk jobs, I guess, is their punishment. Busted down from their beat, guns and badges turned in to the chief. They’re also on the cover of Muscle and Fitness because they’re muscular and fit, but this is hilarious because they’re no longer a power couple. Only one of them is still the principal owner of WWE and the other is still its COO. Again, man, it must suck to be the McMahons. The reaction to Stephanie and Triple H’s mere presence is phenomenal. When Stephanie mentions Sting, there’s a pop and a Sting chant, and Triple H looks at his wife like a sad, muscular puppy dog. There’s even a pop when she mentions that only John Cena can bring them back. Really, the mere fact that they love each other makes them great heels. Mick Foley once wrote that the best heels are those who believe what they’re saying, and it’s clear that Stephanie McMahon and Triple H really do. They love WWE. They love running it. And they know the fans in the audience want to see them lose and cry. And now that those fans are getting all of that, they’re going to air their grievances. Triple H and Stephanie McMahon exit playing the nuclear option, asserting that the WWE lasts maybe three weeks without them. That means Sting’s first night in the WWE will be his last. What will Sting do, then? What will any of us do? Are we happy now?

I am. And maybe that’s just because I love business Triple H, lecturing me about the choices he assumes that I made. I love that he calls The Authority “seemingly grotesque and incomprehensible.” It turns out that we were playing a zero-sum game: Whoever won at Surviver Series, we all lost. This is a career best promo from Triple H. And then DANIEL FUCKING BRYAN’s music hits. The arena goes insane for him, as they should, and poor Triple H and Stephanie McMahon have to stand there and take it as the man responsible for their greatest professional failure (before last night, at least), rubs it into their faces. Daniel Bryan could have shown up and done nothing but the “YES!” chant in Hunter Hearst Helmsley’s general direction and it would have been a great moment.

As it turns out, Daniel Bryan is tonight’s General Manager of Raw, selected by John Cena. I guess he gets to make decisions, though he technically did not win that Survivor Series match. Still. I’ve been wondering why Daniel Bryan hasn’t been on television at all, and now here he is. The first thing he says is that it feels great to be in the ring again, and I 100% believe that. Daniel Bryan is here to decide the fate of Team Authority, at least on this night. He brings them out, so that the fans might voice their displeasure. Daniel Bryan claims not to be spiteful (historically not true), so he’s not going to strip anybody of their titles or punish them unfairly. He’s just going to book people in matches. He starts with Seth Rollins. He’s going to put him in a handicap match, 3-on-2, he and two men against John Cena and Dolph Ziggler. Daniel Bryan looks to be having a genuinely good time. His mood is infectious. But Seth Rollins can’t catch Daniel Bryan fever. He’s still the future of the company, still has the Money in the Bank briefcase. He doubts he’ll be given fair partners. Daniel Bryan decides to give the option to the WWE Universe, via the app that you can download on your phones, if you’re that dedicated. The choices are as follows:

Luke Harper and Mark Henry
Mark Henry and Kane
Jamie Noble and Joey Mercury

Obviously, the fans are going to choose Noble and Mercury. Which, excellent. Neither man has wrestled in forever, but both were good, solid hands deserving of a main event, and they’ve done surprisingly well as an updated take on the Pat Patterson/Gerald Brisco stooge routine from the Attitude Era. Rollins is concerned because they’re not real security. But Daniel Bryan doesn’t care. Life is unfair. Life goes on. There are other people to punish. Next is Kane. Daniel Bryan mentions ancient goddamn history, his old Team Hell No days with Kane, when they entered relationship therapy. It seems Kane has not remembered what he was taught by their therapist, Dr. Shelby. Daniel Bryan asks the fans if Kane should still be director of operations. They say no. Daniel Bryan strips Kane of his title, but understands that the economy is tough, and so gives his former partner a new title: Director of Food and Beverage. Kane has significant experience in this field.

No longer shall Kane be Corporate Kane. He is now Concessions Kane. I hope this is how they refer to him from now until he is inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame. Concessions Kane is given a tray of popcorn and hot dogs. Rusev eyes the tray like he wants some. Kane wanders off to sell his popcorn and hot dogs backstage. Where they already have free food. Now Daniel Bryan addresses Rusev. He thinks he should be more patriotic, since he is the United States champion. THERE IS NO SUPERSTAR MORE PATRIOTIC THAN RUSEV. But patriotism in WWE means America, goddammit, so Daniel Bryan gives Rusev two options:

He can compete in a company-wide battle royal for the title. Every single WWE Superstar will be involved. Hopefully even the women. Hopefully Paige wins the title. This is the option you should choose, Rusev. Take on the world. Lose to Paige. Or…
He can appear in the ring with an American flag in the background, reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.

Never mind that Rusev was pretty much forced onto the team, he must be punished. Go with the battle royal, you glorious power bear. Daniel Bryan’s bearded brother is next. He won the Intercontinental Championship from Dolph Ziggler because Rollins and his security got involved, so Daniel Bryan wants him to defend the title. He will, against Dean Ambrose. Luke Harper doesn’t look too phased. Luke Harper is too strong to care. Last, Daniel Bryan addresses Mark Henry. Mark picks up to leave, but Daniel Bryan keeps him out there. A “big guy” asked him for a favor. He wanted some help avenging a WrestleMania loss two years ago. Two years is two-thousand years in terms of WWE. Daniel Bryan has a PhD in wrestling history, practically. That man was Ryback. Daniel Bryan calls Ryback THE RYBACK, and can have my heart forever. That match is happening next. Mark Henry threatens Daniel Bryan (which, goddamn, I love heel Mark Henry so much. He’s such a nice, genial dude in reality, but he is the absolute best strongman heel in WWE), but Ryback runs out. This opening segment was nearly thirty minutes long. Every minute was a delight. Yes.

Ryback vs. Mark Henry: Before Mark Henry can make it to the ring to take out Daniel Bryan, Ryback’s music hits and he charges down the ramp to avenge his WrestleMania loss. Ryback comes out on fire, ramming Henry into the ring apron, the ring post, and finally the barricade. Mark Henry is obviously dazed by the time the bell rings, but he will try to fight off Ryback. He manages to shove Ryback away and knock him down, but he’s a wounded bull. Ryback hits Mark Henry with a spinebuster, the Meathook Clotheseline, and doesn’t even bother with the Shellshock. Winner: Ryback via pinfall. Grade: C

I’m in the minority, but I remember really liking Ryback and Mark Henry’s match at WrestleMania. So it’s a shame that Ryback’s “revenge” took all of three minutes. But his rebuild as the very popular Aggro Crag of muscles and airbrushed singlets continues unabated, and that’s fine, too. Mark Henry sells the match like he’s concussed, and continues to be amazing. Backstage, Stephanie McMahon apologizes to Vince McMahon, who claims not to be an angry man. He doesn’t want to hear any apologies. He’s disappointed that his family couldn’t beat insurmountable odds. Because he’s beaten those odds a million times. Again, that’s true. It’s amazing how many times Vince McMahon has beaten crazy odds, and amazing how many times he’s failed to beat them. Again, great heels speak their truth, and when Vince McMahon says that he’s never felt sorry a day in his life, he means it. He’s probably okay spending Thanksgiving with Triple H and Stephanie McMahon, though. He’s not that evil.

WWE Intercontinental Championship – Luke Harper (Champion) vs. Dean Ambrose: Luke Harper has such great presence. Maybe better than Bray Wyatt. He doesn’t speak much, but the way he gesticulates is enough. He backs Ambrose into a corner but misses with a haymaker. Ambrose catches him with a flurry, but Harper is so strong that one punch gains him the advantage. Harper claws at Ambrose’s face and knocks him around the ring with a series of strikes until Ambrose catches him off guard with a drop toe hold. After hitting him with a few forearms, Ambrose works Harper’s arm with a series of armbars. Harper escapes by grabbing Ambrose’s nose and twisting, but Ambrose still has the momentum. He hits Harper with a back elbow, and when Harper rolls out of the ring he follows by launching himself over the top rope and into the champion. Back from commercial, Luke Harper has Ambrose in a chinlock. Harper whips Ambrose into the corner and kicks him while he’s down. He does a European uppercut and continues to work Ambrose’s nose. Ambrose fires back with punches and kicks, though, until Harper catches the foot and uses it to swing Ambrose crashing down onto the mat, face first. Ambrose kicks out and gets gator rolled. He throws Ambrose out of the ring and uses his advantage to batter his challanger. He tries to throw Ambrose back into the ring, but just like last night Ambrose refuses to stay down. He rolls back out of the ring and nails Harper with a clothesline of his own. With Harper stunned, Ambrose gets back into the contest. He takes Harper down with a few checks, goes for a bulldog and gets shoved away. Harper tries to nail him but misses, and Ambrose gets a two count with a roll-up. He gets another two count with a clothesline. Harper is reeling, but he catches Ambrose with a headbutt while he’s on the apron and goes for a suplex to the outside. It doesn’t work. Ambrose ties him up in the ropes and hits his dropkick/guillotine leg drop combination, which rules and spikes Harper’s head into the mat. Another two count. Harper is out of it, though, so Ambrose punches and chops him to his heart’s content. When he charges at Harper again, the champion catches him with a black hole slam for a two. He goes for his powerbomb, but Ambrose gets out of it and executes a backslide for another near fall. Harper ends up getting Ambrose on the turnbuckle, stuns him, and follows him up for an attempt at a superplex. He can’t lift Ambrose, though. Ambrose headbutts Harper off the ropes then flies at him with his standing elbow drop for a two. Harper gets up and surprises his challenger with a superkick. Another near fall. Ambrose appears out of it, but he hits his rebound lariat to a good ovation and goes for the cover, but the champion kicks out again! Harper rolls out of the ring and retreives the Intercontinental Championship. He’s had enough. Ambrose catches him with a suicide dive, though, and Harper staggers back into the ring. Harper looks to be caught, as Ambrose has him for his Dirty Deeds double-arm DDT (seriously, not every finisher needs a stupid name), but Harper is resilient and shoves Ambrose off and into the referee. The ref takes umbrage with this, and that’s all she wrote. Winner: Dean Ambrose via disqualification. Grade: B

One of the benefits of not having the WWE Champion on every episode of Raw, SmackDown!, and Main Event is that every other championship seems more important in its absence. There have been some absolute battles over the United States Championship (some on the internet would call them “hoss fights,” but not me), and now the Intercontinental Championship seems to have regained its former stature as being an important title that people have really good matches for. This match teases at what Ambrose and Harper might be able to do later, when Ambrose clears his plate. Until then, it’s yet another Dean Ambrose match with a contrived finish, and that’s going to start leaving people feeling sour sooner or later. Harper boots Ambrose in the face and goes for his dive, but Ambrose cuts him off and goes under the ring for a chair. I don’t demand much in the way of realism from wrestling, but good God, start planting chairs in the crowd or something. Like, a stupid fan wandered off and Ambrose found his chair because he’s a lunatic! Instead, it looks like a multi-million dollar corporation doesn’t know where to put their extra chairs, and also hides garbage cans and kendo sticks under the ring for some reason. It’s 1990s in the worst way. Ambrose spikes Harper on the chair with the double-arm DDT, and this, due to symbolism, is how we’re building to the TLC match between Ambrose and Wyatt. The fans chant for a table, but Dean brings out a ladder. Then he brings out the table. JBL says there’s no need for it, and he’s right. Thankfully, Bray Wyatt is there to stop Dean from giving away spots from their match, and he assaults his opponent with Sister Abigail. He throws Ambrose over the announcer’s desk and buries him under chairs, steel and office alike. It’s a ridiculous visual, but ridiculous visuals are what you sometimes have to deal with when you’re building a feud between lunatics that’s meant to culminate in guaranteed violence on a PG show. It’s nice to see Wyatt doing something more to build his programs than just talking or appearing out of thin air.

A promo for the New Day plays, and, while they couldn’t have planned it this way, oh boy was it terrible timing. I’m not watching Raw live, but Big E., Xavier Woods, and Kofi Kingston continued their push towards redebuting while the grand jury was announcing their decision not to indict Darren Wilson for the killing of Michael Brown in Fergusson, Missouri. Actually, considering that they were in St. Louis the night before, I can blame them a little. Zero people backstage knew what was going on while they pushed play on this weird minstrel show? None? Really? And they’re debuting next week? Oh boy. I really like Big E. and think Kofi Kingston and Xavier Woods are good, talented wrestlers, but this angle, no matter what its perception is right now, is a belated response to an article The Atlantic ran about racism in the WWE. And it debuts next week, seven days after the Ferguson trial, and will be one of three things:

A trio of happy, smiling black dudes who’ve adopted preacher-man gimmicks for no reason beyond the fact that most of the writers the WWE employs are white, and this is their experience of blackness.
A trio of angry, grumpy black dudes who are upset that society and their employer has kept them from moving up the social ladder. All of which is fair enough (especially when it comes to Kofi Kingston’s situation), but how is one supposed to read a group of angry black men (written by white men) on a wrestling show, when the words “angry” and “black” have historically united to mean “bad guy?”
Aborted because somebody watches the news and figures, oh man, there’s no way this can be good. That’ll be the second time this stable is dismantled before it begins, and I’m not sure there’s any coming back from that given the weeks of promotion its been given.

Regardless of any three, WWE has been playing with black stereotypes since the inception of this angle and should have known better. I don’t know why I expect that from professional wrestling, but I do. Everybody should. It’s not hard to avoid making scummy culture.

Speaking of, Larry the Cable Guy comes out with his Jingle All the Way 2 co-star Santino Marella, who says that he misses us. He also hates our guts, since he’s here with Larry the Cable Guy, whose only claim to any kind of lasting fame is that he’s a CHUD who makes his money by selling rednecks a deplorable image of themselves. They plug their terrible movie and take their sweet fucking time to do it. They are interrupted by Stardust and Goldust. Thank you, Dusty Rhodes, for having children who can spare me from this garbage.

WWE Tag Team Championship Match: The Miz and Damien Mizdow (Champions) vs. Goldust and Stardust: Damien Mizdow has fancy toy championship belts. God bless Damien Mizdow. The new WWE Tag Team Champions get a picture-in-picture promo (a great old gimmick that needs to make a regular return), and it’s great because Mizdow is great. The fans boo The Miz and cheer Mizdow, as they did last night. It’s all tremendous. Damien Mizdow gets announced as “Sandow,” which makes the announcers upset for some reason. Stardust and The Miz start the match off, so there’s a “WE WANT MIZDOW” chant immediately. Miz goes for a tag, but Stardust is able to stop it and tag his brother in. Goldust hits The Miz with an inverse atomic drop, and Mizdow comes in to perform the maneuver on himself. This distracts Goldust, who throws Mizdow out of the ring, and The Miz scores with a roll-up but only gets a two count. The Miz continues to press the advantage, but Goldust eventually takes over so Mizdow can continue to flop around. Goldust tags in Stardust and the two beat The Miz up in the corner. Stardust keeps clubbing at The Miz, and Mizdow keeps selling it, though he’s also trying to hang on in the corner so that The Miz can tag him in if needed. It’s the little things. Miz crawls to his corner, but Stardust is able to knock Mizdow off the apron. When we come back rom commercial, The Miz tags his stunt double in and does all of The Miz’s moves. A doctor checks on The Miz while Goldust distracts Mizdow, so the former champions take over on the men who beat them last night. Goldust has Mizdow in a chinlock, and Michael Cole is telling jokes while The Miz is getting checked for a concussion. That’s horrible, real or fake (in this instance fake). Goldust hits Mizdow with a spinebuster and gets a two while The Miz’s medical drama continues. The announcers talk about Triple H and Stephanie McMahon, which, okay, announcers are always talking about other stuff during the match, but again, you’re acting like one of the competitors in the match has a concussion. You pull out “Owen Voice” (the announcers speaking in low, serious tones to indicate that there’s been a “real,” significant injury in the pattern of the fall that killed Owen Hart) for trifling reasons all the time. How about pretending that The Miz matters, even if he doesn’t? Mizdow has nobody to tag out to, so he gets taken out with a gordbuster. The Miz might have a broken nose. Cole CONTINUES TO LAUGH AT THE MIZ’S MISFORTUNE, INSINUATING THAT HE’D RATHER GET SYMPATHY FROM THE DOCTOR THAN DEFEND HIS TITLE. Mizdow locks in the figure four leg lock, and it looks much better than the one Miz employs. Cole even mentions this, saying it’s “more effective.” And Mizdow didn’t even learn it from Ric Flair. Goldust breaks it up (no way he’s letting a Rhodes lose to the figure four), and Stardust continues to beat up on Mizdow. Miz, however, makes a blind tag just before Stardust takes Mizdow out, sneaks up and drills Stardust with the Skull Crushing Finale, and the referee gets to three before Goldust can come to the rescue. Cole is incensed that Miz stole Mizdow’s glory, even though that’s what Mizdow did last night. Winners: The Miz and Damien Mizdow via pinfall. Grade: B-

Concessions Kane works concessions backstage. He keeps a very clean concession stand.

Despite the fact that he is the Director of Food and Beverage, Concessions Kane has a manager. She’s heard that Concessions Kane likes to burn things. She says that he’s not burning things today and is to be kept away from the deep fryer. He’s on chip duty. Can he handle chips? If any chips go missing, Concessions Kane will have to pay for them. It’d be rad if this was some weird commentary on the way the working class is expected to keep the working class in line for crumbs, but really we’re just supposed to be laughing at Concessions Kane, which I am, because his face when he’s expected to deal with normal people is so good. If this were 2003, Concessions Kane would probably burn his manager alive. Since Concessions Kane is now Your Dad, Sad That He Was Laid Off From Work Kane, he just lets the angry teenager dress him down.

In the ring, Rusev stands tall with his United States Championship. He has a decision to make: Take on the world, or say the Pledge. Lana says that this is not fair. I agree. There’s a genial midwestern type in the crowd holding an American flag, blocking the view of the people behind him. Lana asks what kind of country forces its will on people, WHICH IS A GOOD QUESTION TO ASK. Jerry Lawler acts like the answer is “Russia, HAW HAW,” which is also true, but glass houses, cast stones, etc. Rusev takes the microphone and speaks Russian. Nobody understands. Everybody is Steve Austin. So Rusev begins to speak our stupid language. He doesn’t care who is running Raw. He refuses to be brainwashed by dumb Americans. Rusev isn’t just the hero of the Russian Federation, he’s the champion of my universe. Rusev threatens to leave, but Daniel Bryan is watching. He says that if Rusev doesn’t say the pledge, he will send a referee and the entire roster. But he’ll give Rusev a second chance. He sends out Sgt. Slaughter to supervise, which is awesome because Sarge has a cameo suit-jacket and rad cartoon theme music. But Sgt. Slaughter is hardly the most patriotic person in the world: He turned his back on America for a shot at Hulk Hogan, if you recall. But he calls for the flag to be unfurled, and it happens. It looks less fresh than the Russian flag Rusev uses. Slaughter goes through his phlegmy routine and tries to teach Rusev the Pledge. Rusev refuses to do it. The crowd does. Then Lana does in the quietest, most timid voice. Sarge can’t hear her. Lana’s on the verge of tears. She’s tremendous. Rusev refuses to let Lana do it. RUSEV RUSEV RUSEV. He threatens Sarge, who does not back down. Sarge takes off his hat, and this brings out Jack Swagger, Real American. Swagger has a new, hilarious haircut since hte last time I’ve seen him. The flag and Sgt. Slaughter have given Swagger superpowers he didn’t have the last time Rusev crushed him, so he chases Rusev out of the ring. There will be no battle royal, I guess. Rip. Off.

Concessions Kane can’t figure out the cash register (he’s a Libertarian, so the concept of keying in taxes is probably destroying his mind). He starts giving away peanuts and chips and nachos and popcorn (which also goes against his Libertarian ideals). Santino and Larry the Cable Guy are there to ruin this. Concessions Kane manhandles Larry the Cable Guy’s hot dogs and sprays Santino with mustard before declaring himself a big fan of Larry, who wipes the mustard off of Santino and eats it. Concessions Kane, by declaring himself a big fan of Larry the Cable Guy, is automatically the #1 heel in the world.

Justin Gabriel vs. Fandango (w/Rosa Mendes): They’re just running the re-debut from last night’s Survivor Series pre-show, because they assume nobody watches those things. Lillian Garcia calls Fandango “New and Improved,” as if he’s a fucking Shamwow. Rosa Mendes “dances” in the ring to some flamenco music, which is a real shame because Fandango’s old music ruled, and out he comes to do his new dance routine. He’s got new gear, too. Dude is still really intense about his dancing gimmick, which is the best part of the whole thing, but nobody cares because they can’t chant along to his music. Gabriel (who never gets to wrestle on Raw, so congratulations Justin Gabriel) gets in the ring and the two lock up. Gabriel goes off the ropes, but Fandango meets him with an elbow to the face. The fans chant Fandangos old music at him. Fandango assaults Gabriel in the corner and runs him into the turnbuckle. He’s just dominating the poor guy. Gabriel manages to get to the top rope though, which is where he makes his money, and hits Fandango with a flying… punch. Okay. He sprints to the other side of the ring and uses the ropes as a springboard for a clothesline. He kicks Fandango in the gut and runs at him, but Fandango clotheslines him. Gabriel makes the clothesline look particularly devastating. Outside the ring, Rosa Mendes gyrates. I guess violence makes her want to dance. Fair enough. Fandango suplexes Gabriel and turns it into a slam. The crowd starts chanting “CM PUNK.” At least it’s not during an AJ Lee match. Fandango climbs the ropes and leaps off the turnbuckle with his leg drop, which needs a name, and that’s it. Winner: Fandango via pinfall. Grade: C+

JBL asks Jerry Lawler what he thinks of Fandango, and Lawler says “I’m just looking at Rosa” because he is a shambling mound of human waste. They keep calling Fandango “New and Improved,” as if this is how you make somebody a worthwhile commodity. The synthesized trumpets in his new theme song are awful, and everybody except Fandango (who always tries really hard despite the cards he’s been dealt) should feel bad about this mess. They recap Big Show’s betrayal of Team Cena, speculating that he did it because he thought Team Cena was on its last legs. Big Show is backstage in a HUGE SUIT (YES!), bullying production members. I guess, rather than admit he made a mistake, he’s going full heel. Good. Big Show comes out with a shit-eating grin, giving everybody a huge thumbs up, and the children in the audience BOO HIM. THIS IS GREAT.

That’s how you know everything went well in last night’s main event, when the live audience goes along with something that was questioned online. Big Show politely asks for the microphone and continues to mug for the camera. He even lets out a little chuckle before he starts. He wants to make sure that we’re still cool. Big Show knows what we’ve been saying about him on the internet. He thinks we think he’s a bad guy. But he’s not, guys. “I’m a human being,” he says. “A human being who made a mistake.” OH MAN THIS IS THE BEST BIG SHOW PROMO EVER. He’s really sad about what he did, guys. The Authority took his job and his house, and they made him knock Dusty Rhodes and Daniel Bryan out. HE DIDN’T ASK TO BE BORN A GIANT. HE HAS A MEDICAL CONDITION THAT MAKES HIM FREAKISHLY LARGE AND POWERFUL. He has feelings and fears and a family. He’s about to cry. This is the best. Oh man. I want to give this Big Show a hug. Everything was going wrong for Team Cena last night. He knew the score. All of us would do the same. Again, great heels speak their truth. This is the Big Show’s truth, and it is logical and well thought out. It’s not the appropriate time to boo The Big Show, professional good person. But the fans keep booing him regardless. If he could go back to last night, knowing his job would have been safe, he would have stuck with Team Cena, dudes. HE SAYS WE OWE HIM A MULLIGAN. I AM WILLING TO GIVE IT. The arena chooses to chant “YOU SOLD OUT.” And Big Show gets angry. Big Show’s medical condition also makes his voice sound terrifying. I love angry Big Show. He calls the people whispering rumors about him cowards and invites one out. The loquacious Erick Rowan is the man for this task. BIG SHOW CALLS HIM THE UPSIDE DOWN SHEAMUS. Big Show’s mad that John Cena doesn’t feel like addressing him, then makes fun of Rowan for being an adult who plays for toys. Big Show’s ring is made for men. Some of whom have legitimate medical conditions that make them freakishly large and powerful. Big Show threatens to hurt a man who is almost his size, and Rowan says he doesn’t like bullies. He hits Big Show with his rad spin kick, and Big Show wisely chooses to run away. Don’t mess up your suit, bro. Keep it fresh, and fight another day.

Seth Rollins is backstage, probably voting for literally anybody but Noble and Mercury to be his partner. They meet him in the back and say that they’re ready, that teaming with Rollins is going to be like Shield 2.0. Rollins loves his tiny buddies, but they’re tiny. I mean, they’re both former champions in WWE, but they’re not large, and that’s what matters. Dolph Ziggler comes into the room and says that he believes in Noble and Mercury and asked his 1.4 million Twitter followers to vote for them. For once, WWE’s constant social media push seems kinda natural. Noble and Mercury are pumped about this, but then they realize what’s up.

Brie Bella (w/WWE Diva’s Champion Nikki Bella) vs. AJ Lee: For some reason, Brie is super pumped that her sister has the title, which she helped secure by sexually assaulting AJ Lee the night before. It’s her last day as a slave, but I guess she could do this forever. AJ Lee comes out and has a microphone. She congratulates Nikki on turning her life’s work (legitimizing a championship belt that’s shaped like a butterfly and festooned with designs that verge strongly on the vaginal) into an accessory. Lesbian jokes! Skank jokes! This is how we write women! CM Punk chants start up immediately when the bell rings, and AJ and Brie start brawling. AJ misses a baseball slide to the outside and decks Nikki. This lets Brie attack her from behind, nailing her in the back of the head with a forearm. In the ring, this is worth a two count. The camera and transition from a replay obscures something that I think is a DDT, and Brie starts working on AJ’s arm. Brie chokes AJ with the point of her knee against the ropes and continues to work the arm. Nikki cheers her sister on. AJ fights out of it, but Brie gains the advantage by continuing to work the arm. AJ gets a roll-up, but it’s only a one count (because her arm is weak, but who pays attention to these things?). She then catches Brie with a Thesz press and lays into her with a flurry of punches. Brie escapes to the corner, but gets splashed. AJ follows up with the Shining Wizard, but that doesn’t end it. Brie tries to get back into it, but AJ keeps fighting her off. Nikki snaps AJ’s arm over the ropes while the referee’s back is turned, and this allows Brie to roll AJ up for the win. Winner: Brie Bella via pinfall. Grade: C+

They’re not explaining this storyline, which is awful, but the Bellas work better as a heel tandem than they do as rivals, to be honest. AJ’s on the microphone again, upset that it took two Bellas to beat her. Two Bellas aren’t half the woman AJ is, however. While the Bellas respond by flaunting whatever it is that they’ve got, AJ delievers her pipe bomb: “Talent is not sexually transmitted.” Big response from the crowd, who are, of course, aware that Brie is married to Daniel Bryan and Nikki is dating John Cena. I like AJ Lee just fine, but I’m against angles that treat women like accessories to men or insinuate that they’ve only gotten anywhere because they’ve fucked their way to that spot. So, while I’m glad last night wasn’t, as rumored, AJ’s last night, if this is going to be a feud with legs, they’d better start doing something else, and fast.

Adam Rose and The Bunny vs. Tyson Kidd and Natalya: Larry the Cable Guy and Santino are on commentary. Adam Rose and The Bunny are wrestling. I. Want. To. Die. Adam Rose hates that The Bunny is dancing with Larry the Cable Guy, and I’m with Adam Rose. Larry the Cable Guy is concerned that The Bunny wants to fuck him. The Bunny starts the match against Tyson Kidd. I hope Natalya gets in, just so that we can have an intergender wrestling match on WWE television. Instead, we have Tyson Kidd, one of the best wrestlers on the roster, going through this routine where he can’t lock up with The Bunny, who is an amazing natural athlete and master of escapes. All of his dropkick bullshit from yesterday continues to be the gimmick. And then THE BUNNY GETS KICKED IN THE FACE. Thank God. Tyson abuses the stupid Bunny and tags Natalya in. This is what progress looks like in the WWE. Tyson is justifyably upset that his wife shows the Bunny some concern and tags himself in. So The Bunny takes over and tags out to Adam Rose, who takes Kidd to the mat and gets a two. The Bunny tries to heel it up and grab Kidd’s ankle, but he doesn’t realize that Kidd reversed the Irish whip and he accidentally grabs Rose. Kidd rolls up Rose, and this one, mercifully, is over. Winners: Tyson Kidd and Natalya via pinfall. Grade: F

The Bunny figures out that he screwed up and tries to apologize by pantomiming everything that just happened. End. This. Please. Ryback is walking around backstage, and he’s interviewed by Renee Young. She congratulates him on his victory, but he doesn’t care about his WrestleMania revenge because it’s almost Thanksgiving and he’s hungry. He looks for a good concession stand. The final New Day promo plays, bringing together Kofi, Big E., and Xavier Woods. Together they’re going to be stronger, be smarter, and fly higher. Again, there is almost no way this ends well. Sorry guys. Now that they’re all together, the three dance around like James Brown in front of their gospel choir. Big E. does a big cabbage patch. They debut next week. Concessions Kane is still struggling with everything when he hears Ryback say that he’s hungry. Kane approaches the counter. Ryback orders two cans of tuna fish, a protein shake with extra protein, and a big bag of beef jerky. They don’t have any of that, but Concessions Kane tries to make it up to The Big Guy by throwing a hot dog in his face. This doesn’t work. Ryback smashes Concessions Kane with the counter and sprays him with mustard. Kane tries to fight back by throwing a bucket of popcorn at Ryback, but he only responds to meat. He grabs a bag of peanuts and says that Concessions Kane forgot them. They should probably fire every writer.

Renee Young interviews John Cena and Dolph Ziggler. Oh man, John Cena hasn’t been seen all show. It’s a new day, indeed. John Cena goes over the events of Survivor Series. Dolph Ziggler was the only guy left. Ziggler says that everything was on the line, but that he promised to survive. They needed a miracle, and that miracle was Sting. Cena is hyped about Sting, but gives Ziggler all due credit. Cena is all smiles, doing a rhyming nonsense promo. They keep putting over the voting app, but whatever. There’s nothing stopping Noble and Mercury from winning a vote against Kane, Mark Henry, and Luke Harper. John Cena and Dolph Ziggler come out, and we’re going to find out who they’re facing.

Dolph Ziggler and John Cena vs. Seth Rollins, Jamie Noble, and Joey Mercury: Daniel Bryan comes out to announce the results of the vote. He brings Seth Rollins out and brings out the drum roll. By a 93% vote, it’s former WWE Tag Team Champion Joey Mercury and former WWE Cruiserweight Champion Jamie Noble. Seth Rollins is none too pleased.

Over 300,000 people voted for them, which is actually pretty impressive. Mercury and Noble didn’t bring their gear, so they’ll be wrestling in their suits. Jamie Noble, who was once the Ring of Honor World Heavyweight Champion, needs to be told to take his tie off in the ring. Michael Cole points out that Noble was Cruiserweight Champion a decade ago and that time has passed Noble and Mercury by. It never quite arrived. Noble shows no fear against John Cena and puts him in a headlock. Lawler mentions Andy Kaufman, which reminds me that he was once useful. Mercury comes in to attack Cena, but Cena shoots Noble into the ropes. Noble runs them, with Cena and Mercury doing drop downs. Eventually Cena rolls out of the way. Rollins, from the corner, groans about his partners. Mercury stands, colliding with a still-running Noble, and Cena lifts Mercury up for the Attitude Adjustment. Rollins gets in the ring and pulls him down, and the three regroup. I love that Rollins is a master of teamwork, even in new situations. After a commercial, Cena is compromised in Rollins’ corner. Jamie Noble gets back into the match and stomps away at the 15-time champion. Noble charges at Cena, who moves, and Noble crashes into the ring post. JBL claims Triple H paid Seal Team 6 to train Noble and Mercury. Where are those training videos? Mercury encourages his buddy to get to his corner and make the tag. Cena tags in Dolph Ziggler, though, and takes it to Jamie Noble. Clothesline, clothesline, splash, neckbreaker, big elbow drop, DDT—all of Dolph’s moves. Mercury breaks it up and is held up by the referee. This lets Rollins attack Ziggler and get into the match. Ziggler’s the face in peril now as Rollins is the architect of all evil heel garbage. Rollins pulls on Ziggler’s hair and tags Noble back into the match. He body slams Dolph Ziggler and hits him with a leg drop for two. He puts Ziggler in a chinlock. Ziggler comes back with a chinbreaker. Cena calls for the tag, but Ziggler goes for a Stinger splash and misses. Noble steps on Ziggler’s head and gets cocky, which lets Ziggler drill him with a dropkick. Noble taks Joey Mercury in. He goes for a back suplex, but Ziggler flips out of it and tags Cena in. Cena goes shoulderblock, shoulderblock, powerbomb, Five Knuckle Shuffle, but Rollins gets involved and stops the Attitude Adjustment again. He’s stuck between Cena and Ziggler, but Mercury and Noble get involved again and save Rollins. They, however, are not spared a Zig Zag and an Attitude Adjustment. Winners: John Cena and Dolph Ziggler. Grade: B-

Cena and Ziggler invite Rollins back into the ring, but he declines. Daniel Bryan rushes him and hurls him back in against his will, and he is summarily superkicked and Attitude Adjusted. Daniel Bryan celebrates with John Cena and Dolph Ziggler… and then a MacBook’s instant messenger noise goes off, dimming the lights. It’s the Anonymous Raw General Manager. Michael Cole gets super hyped about this and goes to the podium to read it. He’ll be the General Manager next week, for Cyber Monday. That’s when things are cheap on the internet. The computer has a virus, and the fans sigh and groan. They should start a “FUCK OUR LIVES” chant, but they don’t.

Raw started out tremendously, but then became this weird, never-ending placeholder of a show. The main event, which was nice and goofy, should have served to further propel Dolph Ziggler, but it didn’t, and the crowd was so worn out that not even Daniel Bryan could get them going. I can’t blame them. Beyond Big Show’s promo, everything after Ambrose/Harper was dire and miserable. They didn’t quite squander my goodwill from last night, but as the show played off to Michael Cole smiling and a computer going crazy, I have to admit: They came pretty close.

Rating: