5 Ups & 6 Downs From WWE Monday Night Raw (24 November - Results & Review)
3. Is Vince Booking Again?
When Vince McMahon’s stranglehold on WWE finally ended, several of the dated, out-of-touch practices and booking tropes the company relied on finally disappeared from sight.
Monday night, one of those tropes returned… in a feud that certainly didn’t need any gimmick or shortcut to maintain its heat.
Dominik Mysterio came out to rail against John Cena and pledge to recapture his Intercontinental Championship at Survivor Series this weekend. The crowd mercilessly booed him – the near-universal love of Cena proving to finally be enough to push Dirty Dom back firmly into the heel camp.
Suddenly, Cena’s theme played, and Joe Tessitore stupidly lost his mind, despite Big Match John having already made his stated final Raw appearance last week. To make a surprise appearance on Monday would have made the babyface a liar on his way out the door.
Instead, Mini-Cena emerged, a little person decked out in Cena gear, complete with a mini-Stu serving as his personal cameraman. Mini-Cena cut a promo on Dominik, calling him the worst Mysterio of all time, which led Dom-Dom to tell the pseudo-doppelganger to “stick to the plan” before booting him down and flattening him with a 619 and frogsplash.
It was the very worst of Vince, who loved to trot out miniature versions of wrestlers as part of heat angles like it was 1983. Only, it’s 2025, and Vince is (allegedly) long gone from the company he built. Maybe Bruce Prichard was feeling nostalgic for the “good old days.”
Either way, this was dumb and pointless. It wasn’t clever or entertaining. They could have played the entrance music and had Dominik mock the fans for being gullible to really set them off before Rey Mysterio ran down to chase him off.