BRM Reviews the 5/29/2017 Raw (AWESOME!)
Posted: May 29th, '17, 22:36
MEMORIAL DAY STUFF- fine
MIZ TV WITH SPECIAL GUESTS CESARO & SHEAMUS- Miz talked up his match with Ambrose at the PPV, then brought out Cesaro and Sheamus, so we’re probably getting a six-man tag later tonight. Mouths are run and PPV title matches are plugged until Ambrose shows up and calls the heels “buttheads.” Dean wants to fight. Miz points out that it would be three-on-one so the Hardys come out. Booker declared this to be “a moment,” which I guess is technically true. The heels were quickly run off and we shockingly went to commercial before Kurt Angle came out book a six-man tag.
THE HARDY BOYZ & DEAN AMBROSE vs. SHEAMUS, CESARO & THE MIZ (w/Maryse)- 7.25/10
Yup. Kurt came out and made the match during the break. This was a solid sixteen minutes or so of good tag team wrestling. Dean was the babyface in peril. Eventually Jeff pinned Sheamus, keeping the Hardys undefeated streak alive.
“Sheamus and Cesaro and The Miz: they’ve got a plan guys, and I think that plan is about Sunday night and how they can win.” Thank you for expert analysis, Booker.
Cole accidentally said “WWE fans” instead of WWE Universe, so he’ll probably spend the next commercial break in the Agony Booth.
COLE PLUGS THE PPV WHILE COREY GRAVES CHECKS HIS PHONE- Cole once again explained the stips for the PPV matches in the two feuds we just saw while the whole time Graves was intensely and staring at his phone. Cole pitched it over to him but Corey said “sorry” got up and left. Intrigue. For a nice touch, Cole stumbled a bit into his next plug… which happened to be for Alexa Bliss! presents “Bayley, This Is Your Life.” THIS IS GOING TO BE EPIC.
KURT ANGLE & COREY GRAVES BACKSTAGE- Kurt reads his phone with the same intensity as Gravs before. Graves shows up and Kurt starts to read out loud: “A disgrace and embarrassment to the WWE. Besmirch my status as an Olympic gold medalist,” then turns to Graves and says “what is this? Some kind of joke?” to which Graves solemnly responds “I wish it was.”
Graves says he is on Kurt’s side and thinks Kurt is doing an excellent job as GM and would hate for anything to screw it up. Kurt then asks Graves “how’d you get this?” and Graves just claims that “people tell me things.” He says he just wants to give Kurt a heads up and offers to help Kurt in any way he can. Kurt says that “if this is true, it could ruin me.” So is Steph trying to blackmail Kurt to get her job back or something?
“THE DRIFTER” ELIAS SAMPSON ANNOYS US WITH HIS GUITAR- In case you ever wondered how The Drifter could be any more annoying, the answer is to have WWE Creative write his songs.
“THE DRIFTER” ELIAS SAMPSON vs. ZACK EVANS- squash
Yeah, I did a double-take when I heard that name. If you’re going to do that you might as well go the whole way and announce him as hailing from “Zarkland, Washington.”
“LET’S GO JOBBER!” chants. See. Everyone hates that f*cking Drifter. Even his squash wins are boring.
Graves is back.
SAMOA JOE PROMO- F*CKING AWESOME (and he managed to plug the Finn Balor WWE Network special in a way that made perfect sense!) Joe was then magically interrupted for more of Bray Wyatt’s verbal diarrhea. Come to think of it, that’s quite the perfect metaphor for Bray’s promos because the promos themselves are all sh*t and the words he says are worth just about as much.
FINN BALOR vs. SAMOA JOE vs. BRAY WYATT- 7.75/10
Michael described this as “one of our main events tonight.” Really? Third on the card and you’re going to call it a “main event?” Is the Kiss Demon going do to a run-in? (Finn Balor, Kiss Demon, & The Demon Kane for King of the Trios. Book it, Quack!)
The match was GREAT! The story was your standard three-way where it’s basically guys taking turns having singles segments with each other, but in this case it was Balor who was in the segment 90% of the time so he was worn down and had to fight back against the two bigger men. He eventually hit Bray with the Coup De Grace but Joe stole the pin.
The announcers spent the whole match putting Balor over really hard. That resulted in the following gem from Booker T: “To stop him you’re gonna have to separate him from himself, and I wonder ‘is there actually a place.”
Fifty-Million BRM-Land Fun-Bucks to the first person who can translate this sentence into real English.
SETH ROLLINS PROMO- good
Apparently we’re getting Dar & Fox vs. Sasha Banks & Rich Swann in a Mixed Tag Team match at Extreme Rules. When did Rich Swann get involved with this?
NOAM DAR (w/Alicia Fox) vs. RICH SWANN (w/Sasha Banks)- 3.5/10
This was good for the time it got. Dar worked over Swann’s arm, Swann made his comeback, Fox tried to interfere but Sasha stopped her so Swann could hit his finisher. Swann and Sasha danced after the match and came off looking like the coolest cats in the world. Great stuff.
CHARLY CARUSO INTERVIEWS THE RETURNING REVIVAL! Dash will be back soon. Charly asks them about Enzo but Dawson said they had nothing to do with it. They showed The Revival in the background of Sasha’s interview. Dawson was excellent here. This whole bit was excellent, and now The Revival have been set up as the prime suspects in the attack on Enzo.
Michael Cole then gave us a recap of the Kendrick vs. Tozawa blow-off from last week’s 205Live… and when we got back from the video package, Big Cass was already standing by the broadcast position and yelling a Graves- without a mic, but loudly enough to be heard- that he had better not have been implying that Cass would have had something to do with the heinous assault on a man he considers a brother. THIS is how you do this sort of thing while making it all feel as organic as possible. Did WWE hire someone new in Creative? Because this have been feeling a lot more organic tonight.
Corey stuttered and stammered in the face of big scary Cass and said that he meant that he knew that Cass would be doing his own investigation that would be very thorough… and Cass stick his hand out for a handshake and Graves tentatively took it, but you could tell by Cass’ face was that what he meant by this handshake was “I’m letting you off this time, but you’d better watch your mouth from now on.”
KALISTO vs. TITUS O’NEIL (w/Apollo Crews)- no rating, good segment.
We got a segment from earlier tonight where Titus told Apollo to watch and learn from what he does tonight. The finish came pretty quickly in. Kalisto tried for a wacky Lucha roll-up but Titus used his strength to block and pinned Kalisto while pulling the tights. Apollo was disapproving of Titus’ pulling the tights but was trying not to be too confrontational about it. Titus kept telling Apollo that that was what was needed to get the job done.
ALEXA BLISS! PRESENTS “BAYLEY, THIS IS YOUR LIFE”- pretty good
Alexa explains that whoever gets the Kendo stick first is allowed to “legally use it to inflict pain on her opponent,” which would mean that if the other woman uses the Kendo stick at all then it’s a DQ. Don’t get me wrong: if you’re going to do a gimmick match like this, that’s the way that makes the most sense. I’m just laying out what she said here so that I can hold them to it on Sunday.
A little over the top but mostly fine, aside from that part where they specifically had her ex-best friend bury Bayley as uncool because Bayley wanted to watch wrestling. They also went back to the “couldn’t stand to be away from her father” joke twice, which is actually kind of pathetic when they only had three points. I did actually laugh at the ex-boyfriend saying he only dated Bayley to get close to the ex-best friend and her saying that she thought he was out of her league and them making out and stuff. This true love would not have been possible without Alexa Bliss! being mean to Bayley. The universe works in funny ways sometimes.
Anyway, Bayley finally shows up without in any way attempting to refute all of these things that were said that made her look completely pathetic. She wants to fight with Alexa but Alexa immediately takes her down. Bayley makes a comeback and starts to knock some of the cutesy kiddie stuff of the table but then she decides to go get the Kendo stick down off the pole in the corner. Alexa cut her off before she could get to it, and then revealed that she had deviously hidden a Kendo stick under the table for just such an occasion and she hit Bayley with it once and Bayley went out to the floor and sold it a lot while Alexa celebrated. This was good, but it didn’t really feel like any sort of escalation because we’ve seen this same ending at least once before. Also, I think that at this point Bayley pretty much HAS to win at the PPV or else she will look completely pathetic.
If I were booking this, instead of going for the Kendo stick I would have had Bayley knock all of the kiddie stuff off of the table and put Alexa through it (I like the symbolism of that). Then Bayley would go up and get the Kendo stick but by the time she got back down Alexa would have escaped into the crowd (maybe you could buy some more time by having Alexa first roll under the ring to hide and recover and once Bayley figures out where she is and comes after her Alexa could poke out the other side and escape through the crowd). This would show that Bayley can “get extreme” as they would say and show us that she is fully capable of winning, so if you don’t want to take the belt off of Alexa yet (and why would you ever?) you can have Alexa beat Bayley without Bayley coming off as completely pathetic and out of her league when things have to go to that next level.
ENZO HAS BEEN LAID OUT FROM BEHIND AGAIN- good
If you’re going to do this I would rather have just kept him out. Cass and Kurt both showed up. Cass is insistent that The Revival did it but Kurt says he saw them leave. Cass points out that they could have just come back in, but Kurt says that he doesn’t want to make any accusations without all of the facts. He tells Cass to go calm down but Cass says that he won’t leave Enzo’s side again.
AUSTIN ARIES & JACK GALLAGHER vs. TJ PERKINS & NEVILLE- 5.5/10
I’m dead sure we saw this same match on Raw recently. Anyway, Aries made Neville tap which is 100% the right finish because, as Cole and Graves explained, it shows us that Aries’ can make Neville tap going into their Submission Match for the title while Neville gets to claim that he was just preserving his body for Sunday’s title match.
ROMAN REIGNS PROMO- GREAT! THIS is the sort of promo Roman should be cutting.
CHARLY CARUSO TRIES TO INTERVIEW NEVILLE- he angrily walks off without saying anything. Cole says that this shows that he has been thrown completely off of his game by this submissions loss to Aries.
GOLDUST VIDEO- The show has been quite good so far this week so I won’t skip this video this week. And it’s a good thing I did because this was actually pretty good.
AND NOW THERE’S AN R-TRUTH VIDEO, TOO- great! This whole thing is very 1996, but it definitely works.
They keep telling me that the main event at Extreme Rules “could change the course of history” but they never tell me why that is different from any other match. I think this might actually be worse than TNA’s “10/10/10: a date that comes once a century” hype phrase for Bound For Glory 2010.
SETH ROLLINS vs. ROMAN REIGNS- 7.75/10
Booker T noted that Roman’s injuries from the Strowman match at the last PPV have finally healed. These guys had a great match, with the story being Roman working over Seth’s midsection.
Holy sh*t what happened between last week and this week? This show ROCKED! They did all of the little things right, there were lots of great matches and promos, every match had the right finish, and absolutely no f*ck finishes! I want THIS Raw every week!
MIZ TV WITH SPECIAL GUESTS CESARO & SHEAMUS- Miz talked up his match with Ambrose at the PPV, then brought out Cesaro and Sheamus, so we’re probably getting a six-man tag later tonight. Mouths are run and PPV title matches are plugged until Ambrose shows up and calls the heels “buttheads.” Dean wants to fight. Miz points out that it would be three-on-one so the Hardys come out. Booker declared this to be “a moment,” which I guess is technically true. The heels were quickly run off and we shockingly went to commercial before Kurt Angle came out book a six-man tag.
THE HARDY BOYZ & DEAN AMBROSE vs. SHEAMUS, CESARO & THE MIZ (w/Maryse)- 7.25/10
Yup. Kurt came out and made the match during the break. This was a solid sixteen minutes or so of good tag team wrestling. Dean was the babyface in peril. Eventually Jeff pinned Sheamus, keeping the Hardys undefeated streak alive.
“Sheamus and Cesaro and The Miz: they’ve got a plan guys, and I think that plan is about Sunday night and how they can win.” Thank you for expert analysis, Booker.
Cole accidentally said “WWE fans” instead of WWE Universe, so he’ll probably spend the next commercial break in the Agony Booth.
COLE PLUGS THE PPV WHILE COREY GRAVES CHECKS HIS PHONE- Cole once again explained the stips for the PPV matches in the two feuds we just saw while the whole time Graves was intensely and staring at his phone. Cole pitched it over to him but Corey said “sorry” got up and left. Intrigue. For a nice touch, Cole stumbled a bit into his next plug… which happened to be for Alexa Bliss! presents “Bayley, This Is Your Life.” THIS IS GOING TO BE EPIC.
KURT ANGLE & COREY GRAVES BACKSTAGE- Kurt reads his phone with the same intensity as Gravs before. Graves shows up and Kurt starts to read out loud: “A disgrace and embarrassment to the WWE. Besmirch my status as an Olympic gold medalist,” then turns to Graves and says “what is this? Some kind of joke?” to which Graves solemnly responds “I wish it was.”
Graves says he is on Kurt’s side and thinks Kurt is doing an excellent job as GM and would hate for anything to screw it up. Kurt then asks Graves “how’d you get this?” and Graves just claims that “people tell me things.” He says he just wants to give Kurt a heads up and offers to help Kurt in any way he can. Kurt says that “if this is true, it could ruin me.” So is Steph trying to blackmail Kurt to get her job back or something?
“THE DRIFTER” ELIAS SAMPSON ANNOYS US WITH HIS GUITAR- In case you ever wondered how The Drifter could be any more annoying, the answer is to have WWE Creative write his songs.
“THE DRIFTER” ELIAS SAMPSON vs. ZACK EVANS- squash
Yeah, I did a double-take when I heard that name. If you’re going to do that you might as well go the whole way and announce him as hailing from “Zarkland, Washington.”
“LET’S GO JOBBER!” chants. See. Everyone hates that f*cking Drifter. Even his squash wins are boring.
Graves is back.
SAMOA JOE PROMO- F*CKING AWESOME (and he managed to plug the Finn Balor WWE Network special in a way that made perfect sense!) Joe was then magically interrupted for more of Bray Wyatt’s verbal diarrhea. Come to think of it, that’s quite the perfect metaphor for Bray’s promos because the promos themselves are all sh*t and the words he says are worth just about as much.
FINN BALOR vs. SAMOA JOE vs. BRAY WYATT- 7.75/10
Michael described this as “one of our main events tonight.” Really? Third on the card and you’re going to call it a “main event?” Is the Kiss Demon going do to a run-in? (Finn Balor, Kiss Demon, & The Demon Kane for King of the Trios. Book it, Quack!)
The match was GREAT! The story was your standard three-way where it’s basically guys taking turns having singles segments with each other, but in this case it was Balor who was in the segment 90% of the time so he was worn down and had to fight back against the two bigger men. He eventually hit Bray with the Coup De Grace but Joe stole the pin.
The announcers spent the whole match putting Balor over really hard. That resulted in the following gem from Booker T: “To stop him you’re gonna have to separate him from himself, and I wonder ‘is there actually a place.”
Fifty-Million BRM-Land Fun-Bucks to the first person who can translate this sentence into real English.
SETH ROLLINS PROMO- good
Apparently we’re getting Dar & Fox vs. Sasha Banks & Rich Swann in a Mixed Tag Team match at Extreme Rules. When did Rich Swann get involved with this?
NOAM DAR (w/Alicia Fox) vs. RICH SWANN (w/Sasha Banks)- 3.5/10
This was good for the time it got. Dar worked over Swann’s arm, Swann made his comeback, Fox tried to interfere but Sasha stopped her so Swann could hit his finisher. Swann and Sasha danced after the match and came off looking like the coolest cats in the world. Great stuff.
CHARLY CARUSO INTERVIEWS THE RETURNING REVIVAL! Dash will be back soon. Charly asks them about Enzo but Dawson said they had nothing to do with it. They showed The Revival in the background of Sasha’s interview. Dawson was excellent here. This whole bit was excellent, and now The Revival have been set up as the prime suspects in the attack on Enzo.
Michael Cole then gave us a recap of the Kendrick vs. Tozawa blow-off from last week’s 205Live… and when we got back from the video package, Big Cass was already standing by the broadcast position and yelling a Graves- without a mic, but loudly enough to be heard- that he had better not have been implying that Cass would have had something to do with the heinous assault on a man he considers a brother. THIS is how you do this sort of thing while making it all feel as organic as possible. Did WWE hire someone new in Creative? Because this have been feeling a lot more organic tonight.
Corey stuttered and stammered in the face of big scary Cass and said that he meant that he knew that Cass would be doing his own investigation that would be very thorough… and Cass stick his hand out for a handshake and Graves tentatively took it, but you could tell by Cass’ face was that what he meant by this handshake was “I’m letting you off this time, but you’d better watch your mouth from now on.”
KALISTO vs. TITUS O’NEIL (w/Apollo Crews)- no rating, good segment.
We got a segment from earlier tonight where Titus told Apollo to watch and learn from what he does tonight. The finish came pretty quickly in. Kalisto tried for a wacky Lucha roll-up but Titus used his strength to block and pinned Kalisto while pulling the tights. Apollo was disapproving of Titus’ pulling the tights but was trying not to be too confrontational about it. Titus kept telling Apollo that that was what was needed to get the job done.
ALEXA BLISS! PRESENTS “BAYLEY, THIS IS YOUR LIFE”- pretty good
Alexa explains that whoever gets the Kendo stick first is allowed to “legally use it to inflict pain on her opponent,” which would mean that if the other woman uses the Kendo stick at all then it’s a DQ. Don’t get me wrong: if you’re going to do a gimmick match like this, that’s the way that makes the most sense. I’m just laying out what she said here so that I can hold them to it on Sunday.
A little over the top but mostly fine, aside from that part where they specifically had her ex-best friend bury Bayley as uncool because Bayley wanted to watch wrestling. They also went back to the “couldn’t stand to be away from her father” joke twice, which is actually kind of pathetic when they only had three points. I did actually laugh at the ex-boyfriend saying he only dated Bayley to get close to the ex-best friend and her saying that she thought he was out of her league and them making out and stuff. This true love would not have been possible without Alexa Bliss! being mean to Bayley. The universe works in funny ways sometimes.
Anyway, Bayley finally shows up without in any way attempting to refute all of these things that were said that made her look completely pathetic. She wants to fight with Alexa but Alexa immediately takes her down. Bayley makes a comeback and starts to knock some of the cutesy kiddie stuff of the table but then she decides to go get the Kendo stick down off the pole in the corner. Alexa cut her off before she could get to it, and then revealed that she had deviously hidden a Kendo stick under the table for just such an occasion and she hit Bayley with it once and Bayley went out to the floor and sold it a lot while Alexa celebrated. This was good, but it didn’t really feel like any sort of escalation because we’ve seen this same ending at least once before. Also, I think that at this point Bayley pretty much HAS to win at the PPV or else she will look completely pathetic.
If I were booking this, instead of going for the Kendo stick I would have had Bayley knock all of the kiddie stuff off of the table and put Alexa through it (I like the symbolism of that). Then Bayley would go up and get the Kendo stick but by the time she got back down Alexa would have escaped into the crowd (maybe you could buy some more time by having Alexa first roll under the ring to hide and recover and once Bayley figures out where she is and comes after her Alexa could poke out the other side and escape through the crowd). This would show that Bayley can “get extreme” as they would say and show us that she is fully capable of winning, so if you don’t want to take the belt off of Alexa yet (and why would you ever?) you can have Alexa beat Bayley without Bayley coming off as completely pathetic and out of her league when things have to go to that next level.
ENZO HAS BEEN LAID OUT FROM BEHIND AGAIN- good
If you’re going to do this I would rather have just kept him out. Cass and Kurt both showed up. Cass is insistent that The Revival did it but Kurt says he saw them leave. Cass points out that they could have just come back in, but Kurt says that he doesn’t want to make any accusations without all of the facts. He tells Cass to go calm down but Cass says that he won’t leave Enzo’s side again.
AUSTIN ARIES & JACK GALLAGHER vs. TJ PERKINS & NEVILLE- 5.5/10
I’m dead sure we saw this same match on Raw recently. Anyway, Aries made Neville tap which is 100% the right finish because, as Cole and Graves explained, it shows us that Aries’ can make Neville tap going into their Submission Match for the title while Neville gets to claim that he was just preserving his body for Sunday’s title match.
ROMAN REIGNS PROMO- GREAT! THIS is the sort of promo Roman should be cutting.
CHARLY CARUSO TRIES TO INTERVIEW NEVILLE- he angrily walks off without saying anything. Cole says that this shows that he has been thrown completely off of his game by this submissions loss to Aries.
GOLDUST VIDEO- The show has been quite good so far this week so I won’t skip this video this week. And it’s a good thing I did because this was actually pretty good.
AND NOW THERE’S AN R-TRUTH VIDEO, TOO- great! This whole thing is very 1996, but it definitely works.
They keep telling me that the main event at Extreme Rules “could change the course of history” but they never tell me why that is different from any other match. I think this might actually be worse than TNA’s “10/10/10: a date that comes once a century” hype phrase for Bound For Glory 2010.
SETH ROLLINS vs. ROMAN REIGNS- 7.75/10
Booker T noted that Roman’s injuries from the Strowman match at the last PPV have finally healed. These guys had a great match, with the story being Roman working over Seth’s midsection.
Holy sh*t what happened between last week and this week? This show ROCKED! They did all of the little things right, there were lots of great matches and promos, every match had the right finish, and absolutely no f*ck finishes! I want THIS Raw every week!