10 WWE Survivor Series 2018 Impulse Reactions
Raw beats SmackDown Live in brand battle, but Lesnar and Rousey are left with the scars of war...
The build for this year's Survivor Series was thankfully dominated by the company's lack of opportunity to assemble one.
Thanks to the controversial and at-times catastrophic Crown Jewel taking place at the start of November, the company were left with a fortnight to build a show that has, in previous years been given the video game treatment. In 2016, WWE spoke of fantasy warfare coming to life when cyborgs Brock Lesnar and Bill Goldberg went to war, while Triple H booked his own career mode last year after inserting himself into a winning position in the main event as if he had exclusive access to a pre-release cheat code.
Raw Vs SmackDown Live is an inherently stupid concept for just how little it matters the other 11 months of the year, but wrestlers are so often portrayed with inherent stupidity that it's finally starting to marry up with the performers themselves.
As fans, we are told to invest in the battle for brand supremacy, but the message too easily gets lost in translation along the way. For this year's show, WWE didn't have the time to bother their a*ses too much with the usual song-and-dance, and were given a panicked last-minute change in the time they did have.
In all-too-brief planning, it was suddenly a supershow with several mega matches. And in execution...
10. A Nonentity
...it wasn't allowed to count until the show started proper.
SmackDown Live's doubles division were successful against Raw's largely laughable conglomerate in a match that did well to somehow be unpredictable in the final third.
Stubbornly showcasing themselves in a way the main roster never has, The Revival were Raw's last men standing against a blue brand side anchored by The New Day and The Usos. Xavier Woods even gamely took the Shatter Machine from a coast-to-coast leap before a Roman Reigns tribute splash finished the former NXT champions off.
This match was a rather tragic tribute to the league in 2018 - hardly anybody mattered, even the few that did barely got a chance to prove it, and the result was quite literally meaningless. It spoke too to the downward trajectory a life holding the tag rope can bring - almost everybody in this match was in a worse state than they had been the prior year, with Bobby Roode's main event thumping by NXT gaffer Triple H kickstarting a plummet he's yet to recovered from.