13 Ups And 23 Downs For WWE In 2020

13. Lana’s Heroic Storyline

If you thought Erick Rowan’s spider was bad, then you’ve got to believe that what we just lived through on Raw in recent months was equally bad, if not worse.

Lana has never been a sympathetic character in WWE. She’s almost always been a despised heel – and she’s been pretty decent at it. So when Natalya disbanded their team and Nia Jax subsequently put Lana through a table earlier this fall, you felt like it was putting the Ravishing Russian out of her misery for a while.

But then a funny thing happened: Nia kept putting Lana through the announce table, every week for two months. Lana was shown to be utterly incompetent and inept, but somehow, we were supposed to feel sympathy for her because Jax was bullying her.

It didn’t work and it was idiotic storytelling, but at least it seemed to be consistently building toward an obvious climax: the TLC PPV was coming up, so naturally, the perfect poetic justice would be Lana putting Nia through a table to win a match. When the Women’s Tag Team Championship got caught up in the storyline (with Asuka), it felt like a reasonable conclusion.

Only, none of that happened.

Lana somehow rolled Jax up the week before TLC, and Nia and Shayna Baszler injured Lana, forcing Asuka to recruit Charlotte Flair to be her tag partner, and they captured the tag titles at TLC. Lana was nowhere to be found, and got no revenge on Jax. And this stupid months-long storyline built to absolutely nothing.