WWE Survivor Series 2018: Star Ratings For All 8 Matches

3. Men’s Traditional Elimination Match

This was bags of fun, strange booking aside. It never once dragged, it provided in-the-moment excitement, it furthered several future storylines, and it yielded the winning sight of Braun Strowman plucking and f*cking up Shane McMahon out of thin air.

What’s not to love? Well, a lot of the dumb sh*t.

WWE does dumb sh*t. That’s par for the course. Maybe we should be pedantic. Maybe we should question why Samoa Joe was selected to play corpse for Drew McIntyre (then again, a Jeff Hardy sudden elimination wouldn’t have had the same impact). Maybe Shane McMahon outlasting everybody was an infuriating decision, even if it leads to the fully-fledged heel turns fans are now desperate for.

But the exchanges between Finn Bálor and Rey Mysterio were pulsating, McIntyre was positioned as a star in a company with too few of them, a table was destroyed, and that’s never not fun, and Shane McMahon lost decisively because he is an egomaniac. This was a choice subversion of last year’s bullsh*t, in which Shane lasted because he was just so damn gutsy.

This served to advance wider storylines on both brands, tarnished stars but heightened others—the alternative is 50/50 booking—and wasn’t remotely tedious.

Star Rating: ***1/2