10 Things We Learned From WWE Raw (May 29)
This is your death.
Extreme Rules will be a better pay-per-view than Payback.
There are few certainties in life, and even fewer in professional wrestling, but Sunday's supercard will easily surpass the prior Raw-only event if only for the fact that it hasn't been hijacked by mistimed booking devices such as the Superstar Shake-up and the creative black hole that was Bray Wyatt's House of Horrors.
The show has enough about it to be passable, and with low expectations, may actually over-deliver on the night itself. Matches up and down the card have stipulations, stakes and sticks, and over half of the current line-up is made up of genuinely unpredictable title matches.
As the final broadcast of the flagship show before the Baltimore event this Sunday, this week's edition of Monday Night Raw would traditionally place the final layer of icing on a well-baked cake, though the creative team still appeared to be pre-heating the oven on much bigger summer creations (if this analogy is still holding together...)
Only six matches have thus far been announced, with two major angles occurring on Monday that sat independent from anything else even built around an Extreme Rules clash. Even Sunday's main event is designed to pick an opponent for Brock Lesnar at the next pay-per-view.
Thankfully for the Greenville, South Carolina Monday Night Raw crowd, the roster weren't overlooking Sunday's show quite as much as the company.
10. TV Time
Heels be heelin'. Monday Night Raw kicked off with a segment that took three charismatic villains and apparently sought to deconstruct just everything about them in a vacuum between the opening to Miz TV and The Hardy Boyz and Dean Ambrose picking up a win in the impromptu match that followed.
Everybody knows the script by now. Miz brought out Sheamus and Cesaro as his guests, and since all heels and faces are always friends regardless of how recently they've turned, the trio got on famously (and unconvincingly), sharing an embittered hatred of the respective champions they're set to do battle with this Sunday.
To be fair to 'The Celtic Warrior', he's been in tremendous form as an "I told you so" heel since the duo snapped on Matt and Jeff after yet another defeat, but it's the backwards thinking mentality that engulfs the present day product that has triggered this recent restart.
Only by losing every single time, have the heels somehow been allowed to gain any momentum, as Michael Cole would like to say. As characters, their work has been stellar, but the Hardy Boyz win every time. Along with Ambrose, they were victorious yet again here!
Sheamus, Cesaro and The Miz all spout off like winners, but the constant losses simply undercut the verbiage, rather than make it comically delusional