5 Ups 8 Downs From WWE Raw (Oct 19)
RETRIBUTION gets punked, Orton cures insomnia, Lee falls to low blow. Terrible.
After watching Raw on Monday night, it’s becoming more difficult to say with any confidence that WWE knows how to plug and promote a PPV, or rather that they just don’t care.
The go-home show for Hell in a Cell, a PPV with exactly three matches confirmed – one of which was from Raw – concluded with only one more match added to the card, and the promotion job for the other match was a snoozefest from Randy Orton and an emasculating promo masquerading as quiet rage from Drew McIntyre.
The wrestling on Raw was average at best, so it’s not like you could forgive the poor promotion by saying it was an entertaining three hours of action. And the show served to diminish its invading heel force multiple times in the first half-hour, only to try to rebuild them through a retconning promo later on. Talk about closing the barn door after the horses have bolted.
Oh, and Raw took one of its newer stars – one who has “legit main event star” written all over him – and jobbed him out to a low blow from an ice cold superstar who needs to be written off the show for a while.
So all in all, it was a Raw on par with other episodes this year. You finish the show and wonder how the same people writing SmackDown are churning out this stuff, and then you wonder how they’re still turning a profit.
With that said, let’s get to it…