Steph comes out and wishes us a happy of whatever our holiday of choice may be. Well all I wanted for Hanukkah this year was for Raw to not start off with a long talking segment for once, so thank for rubbing it in that you’re ruining my holiday, Steph.
Okay… they had to have that line prepared in advance, knowing that there would inevitably be a “CM PUNK!” chant. Now if only they would put that sort of effort into thinking how the audience will react to the stuff they have most of their babyfaces do (looking at you New Day, Enzo, and Roman) and then curtail possible negative reactions by NOT BOOKING THEIR BABYFACES TO BE CHEATERS AND DOUCHEBAGS.
Steph tells us that she gave Foley the week off. Good. At least no one will be crying on tonight’s show.
Rollins comes out and interrupts Steph. How much to you think their PR department is unnecessarily panicking right now because Rollins said “merry Christmas” and not “happy holidays?”
Rollins comes out and tries to be funny. He makes jokes that Steph has Hunter’s balls in her purse, except that doesn’t make any sense because 1) as the COO of the whole company, he outranks Steph, so he is the one who is stopping himself from showing up to fight Rollins, not Steph, and 2), didn’t they make it pretty obvious that Hunter and Steph are in cahoots? This isn’t her stopping him from doing something he wants to do; this is them following their evil plan.
I laughed my ass of at Steph managing to get that Michelle Obama lined booed in Chicago. That was great. The writing team has clearly been saving all of their good stuff for Steph.
Rollins went on and on and was really annoying. He then changes tracks and says that he wants a match against Braun Strowman. Ooooh. Let me guess: Roman will come out now and say that he wants Strowman and Steph will book them against each other with the winner facing Strowman next week (in what is certain to be a f*ck finish)
Byron Saxton said that last week Braun Strowman was on a “rage parade.” You know what Vince should do? He should have Byron’s chair set up like a non-lethal version of the chairs the members of SPECTRE had to sit in so that Blofeld could electrocute them at will. This way, through simple negative reinforcement, Byron would learn to not say stupid sh*t.
Rather than one-on-one, Roman suggests that they team up and fight Braun two-on-one like a bunch of heels. Rollins agrees to this. Now it’s Steph’s turn to be humiliated by getting overly excited and pretending she would be part of the group, because apparently WWE thinks that is a good way to portray their authority figures. Then Steph points out that Smackdown is running this same building tomorrow night, so “a certain ‘Lunatic Fringe’ might be in the area.” Two things here:
1. I cannot fathom how it is possible that WWE manages to come up with phrases like that and write them down and say them out loud without realizing how COMPLETELY F*CKING RIDICULOUS they sound.
2. I happen to be in the New York City market, so I know that while Smackdown Live might be emanating from Chicago tomorrow night, tonight they’re running a house show in Madison Square Garden, so Dean had better not be here instead of there, and if he is, Shane and Bryan should suspend his ass. (Also, Steph should not be casually insinuating that guys on the other show will just show up on Raw as if this was all perfectly normal).
They spend all of this time setting the crowd up to make them happy about a Shield reunion just for the purpose of telling them it won’t happen… and for what purpose? To get Steph one round of boos that no one will remember by Thursday? I don’t see the purpose in antagonizing a crowd (especially a notably rowdy crowd like Chicago) for absolutely no reason (and even more so when you’re running the city for live TV two nights in a row).
Wow. I was wrong. Steph just books Rollins vs. Strowman tonight and says that Roman will face an opponent of her choosing. Also, New Day are getting their return match right now. Because that’s not the sort of thing you would want to advertise and build up and make a main event or anything, right?
WWE RAW TAG TEAM TITLE MATCH: Cesaro & Sheamus(c) vs. The New Day (w/Big E. Langston)- 7/10
It’s always nice when the heels’ cheating is foiled. Great match, too.
BRAUN, OWENS, & JERICHO BACKSTAGE- long, annoying, boring, and pointless. And speaking of those things…
GOLDEN TRUTH & BAYLEY BACKSTAGE- she gave Goldust a Dusty Rhodes Bayley Bear. I guess I was supposed to care about this, but you can’t have Dustin be a comedy loser for years and then expect me to care when someone mentions how nice his father was. Then Gallows & Anderson came and ripped up the bear (this is the second time they’ve done that angle in the month since the bears have been a thing). Goldust was sad. If you want to book Gallows & Anderson vs. Golden Truth, how about you just book the match instead of wasting time with a dumb backstage segment?
NIA JAX vs. HOLY F*CK IS THAT A BLONDE SCARLET BORDEAUX?
Scarlet says that she was inspired to become a wrestler by Sasha Banks. OH COME ON. This so pointlessly heavy-handed. Also… what was the point of showing us that Tweet by Sasha if she wasn’t going to run in here? If you tell us she is planning on getting her revenge on Nia tonight and then she doesn’t show up at such an obvious opportunity, it makes her look bad.
STEPH WITH HEELS BACKSTAGE- This started out with Charlotte thanking Steph for something and them shaking hands and then Charlotte walking away. I really didn’t like this. We always see the heels making their evil plans backstage. That’s the whole reason why WWE uses their “just pretend the cameras don’t exist” style of backstage segments. So to have us all of a sudden not see it this one time but having them still be clue us in that something is happening hurts my suspension of disbelief because it goes out of its way to call attention to the fact that this is an editorial choice that they are making for a specific reason rather than asking me to just accept that “this is the way things (uniformly) are here.
Then Owens and Jericho showed up and it was annoying. Only Owens calling out Jericho’s stupidity made this even tolerable. Owens is facing Roman tonight for the US Title. I do like the idea that Owens’ win over US Champion Roman is resulting in him getting a shot at Roman’s title (even though the win was bullsh*t).
WOMEN’S SEGMENT- bad
Bayley comes out to cut a promo but she is quickly interrupted by Charlotte, who has videotape pointing out that she got her shoulder up before the three and the referee didn’t notice, so Bayley’s victory has been expunged from the record books. Okay. Fine. But that shouldn’t negate the other two times that Bayley pinned Charlotte while Charlotte was the champion.
Charlotte tries to turn this into a class issue for some reason.
Well… now that those few out-of-place sentences are over, we can get back to the angle, which is that Charlotte doesn’t think Bayley is good enough to beat her. Also, apparently, in the “settlement” Charlotte’s lawyer reached with Steph concerning their match last week, Charlotte was guaranteed the right to pick her own referee for the rematch, so she chose Dana Brooke. Either that or the contract stipulated that Dana would be the referee for the rematch. Either way, Dana Brooke is back and I am the only one who popped for her, and even that was half-hearted because I hate biased referee angles.
SINGLES MATCH WITH DANA BROOKE AS THE SPECIAL GUEST REFEREE, AND IF BAYLEY WINS SHE WILL BECOME THE #1 CONTENDER: Bayley vs. Charlotte- no rating, meh segment.
A few things here:
1. As I said above, even if last week’s match is expunged, Bayley has already pinned Charlotte twice when Charlotte was champion, so why does she now have to win this match in order to earn a title shot. The only possibly reason seems to be Steph and Charlotte conspiring against her, but if that’s the case then…
2. If they’re going to stack the deck against Bayley in such an obvious fashion then why not just make this a title match (which would also theoretically negate Bayley’s claims of being owed a title shot due to her previous victories over Charlotte)?
As for the match itself, we got two quick instances of bias by Dana, after which Bayley took Dana out with the Belly-to-Bayley, who was then kept down the by Kryptonite often found in referee’s shirts. We then got a regular match for a few minutes and another referee came out. Bayley was about to win but Dana took out the other ref then fast-counted when Charlotte rolled Bayley up (and Charlotte pointlessly had her feet on the ropes, too). So basically, they didn’t really accomplish anything and we’re back to square one. If that’s the end result you want (and I’m not necessarily saying that was wrong here) I would have avoided the fast count and instead done a Dusty Finish with Bayley getting a clean pin on Charlotte to keep that aspect of the angle going, but then have Dana come over and tell JoJo that was the official who was assigned to this match her word takes precedence and she is disqualifying Bayley for attacking her.
STEPH & BRAUN BACKSTAGE- meh.
Braun was trying to suffocate Jamie Noble backstage because he wouldn’t tell him where Sami Zayn is. Braun wanted a match with Sami but Steph said she couldn’t give it to him because she didn’t know where Sami was. What? Didn’t he show up to work? And if not, shouldn’t Steph suspend him? Aside from little plot hole, this was decent. I actually laughed at Braun’s “I’m multi-tasking” line.
We’re getting Braun vs. Zayn in a Last Man Standing match next week. Unfortunately, I’m predicting one of those bullsh*t finishes where Braun will either get buried under heavy stuff so he can’t get up (like Kane vs. Jericho) or some sort of duct-tape BS finish so that Sami can “win” the feud without hurting Braun, except that Sami’s win will be bullsh*t and everyone will know it, but they’ll never call it out.
TJ PERKINS vs. NEVILLE- 5.25/10
The match was great for the time it got but I hated the illegal leverage with the tights here simply because with the pin they did it actually looked like Neville pulling on TJ’s tights was pulling TJ up instead of keeping him down.
Corey Graves: Santa gave my son a video game system for Christmas but I took it away from him because I was worried he would turn out like TJ Perkins.
Austin Aries: That’s a good call, Corey.
NEVILLE CUTS A SCATHING PROMO ON
ENZO & CASS PROMO- they show me Enzo’s injuries like I’m supposed to have sympathy for him or something, when I think most fans are in agreement that Enzo damn well deserved that beating he got.
They repeated jokes from last week. Nobody laughed. Funny how that works.
The guy who got Enzo’s hair was the highlight of this segment.
Rusev and Jinder came out to answer Cass’ call to fight… but turns out that Enzo didn’t need that wheel chair after all. He was only using it to lure his enemies into a false sense of security so he could sneak up behind them and them attack them from behind. You know… like a heel.
Enzo & Cass beat up Rusev and Jinder. Snore.
THE SHINING STARS vs. BO DALLAS & DARREN YOUNG (w/Bob Backlund)- Yes. This match is actually happening.
And here comes Braun Strowman to make the save! And he’s lugging around a Christmas tree from last week and beating the f*ck out of people with it.
WAIT! THAT’S IT!
Braun’s gimmick should be that he brings a big f*cking tree down to the ring with him every week to use as a weapon.
There were “THANK YOU STROWMAN!” chants.
BRAUN STROWMAN vs. SETH ROLLINS- 5.75/10
Very good for the time it got because they stuck to their simple, effective story of big bad Braun being too big and strong for Rollins. Then we got the f*ck finish I figured we would get when Sami Zayn’s music played so Braun when to face him when he came down the ramp, except that Sami came out from the crowd and attacked Braun from behind. You know… like a heel. Also, how did the sound guy know to play Sami’s music?
So after Sami and Braun did their thing and wound up backstage, Jericho showed up to give Rollins and a Codebreaker.
CHARLY CARUSO INTERVIEWS KEVIN OWENS- good stuff from Owens.
EMMALINA STILL ISN’T HERE YET- We don’t need Emmalina now that Dana Brooke is back!
THE GOLDEN TRUTH vs. LUKE GALLOWS & KARL ANDERSON- 3/10
Comedy jobbers Golden Truth are going punch for punch with Gallows & Anderson, to the point where Anderson had to pin Goldust with a ROLL-UP.
RICH SWANN vs. ARIYA DAIVARI- 3.5/10
Great for the short amount of time it got.
RICH SWANN PROMO- good. Then Neville jumped him from behind, which was also good. They’re facing off tomorrow on 205 Live. I don’t know if the title is on the line, which they really should clarify.
ARIYA DAIVARI & JACK GALLAGHER SEGMENT- now that they’re trying to get “scoundrel” over, I don’t like it. Gallagher challenged Daivari to a duel and hit him with a dueling glove and they talked about Burr and Hamilton so… are they to shoot each other?
(But, like, seriously: why did they not just go ahead and say that this would be a wrestling match? And if it’s anything other than a wrestling match, why is it even happening?)
WWE UNITED STATES TITLE MATCH: Roman Reigns(c) vs. Kevin Owens- 7.25/10
Roman gets the win, which was fine, but I’m so sick and tired of bad finishes on Raw and Raw PPVs that I would have much rather had Roman just win clean here.
Raw ends the year with a dull show.