3 Ups & 11 Downs From WWE Raw (Jan 18)

3. The Phantom Of The Ring

Randy Orton
WWE

One very important question about Randy Orton: Who talks like that?

This column has very clearly been down on the entire Orton/Fiend fire storyline, but what makes it impossible to even give a mulligan or a clean slate for a week are Randy’s horrific promos. Orton delivered a monologue in a darkened backstage area while wearing a mask after being burned by an Alexa Bliss fireball.

The promo was the usual “voices in my head are louder than ever before” stuff we’ve heard recently, with Orton talking about “fire melting flesh,” how he enjoys the pain, how they could chop off his limbs, but he’ll still win the Royal Rumble… and so on, and on, and on.

They could have done something different considering Orton was apparently so badly burned that he’s forced to wear a generic lucha mask, but instead, he just cut the same old “methodical” Randy Orton promo using words and phrases no one else ever would use. It’s just bad TV.

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Scott is a former journalist and longtime wrestling fan who was smart enough to abandon WCW during the Monday Night Wars the same time as the Radicalz. He fondly remembers watching WrestleMania III, IV, V and VI and Saturday Night's Main Event, came back to wrestling during the Attitude Era, and has been a consumer of sports entertainment since then. He's written for WhatCulture for more than a decade, establishing the Ups and Downs articles for WWE Raw and WWE PPVs/PLEs and composing pieces on a variety of topics.