3 Ups & 8 Downs From WWE Raw (27 Jul - Results & Review)

1. Smacks Of Desperation

In practice, the weigh-in between Oba Femi and Brock Lesnar was a completely inessential, pointless exercise. There are no weight classes in WWE, so the only purpose it really served was as an excuse to put the two wrestlers in the ring together for one final confrontation.

And then they didn’t even deliver that.

Raw opened with GM Adam Pearce and Paul Levesque in the ring, which set off klaxons because Triple H only seems to show up when he can position himself in the middle of a major confrontation or big announcement. Then they lowered Hell in a Cell to add another artificial layer of “intrigue” to the situation.

But rather than something interesting happening, Brock Lesnar locked everyone else inside the cell, and he and Paul Heyman paraded around the ring, cutting a bog-standard promo while Oba followed him around the cell and everyone else stood there impotently.

If you thought this was all leading to Femi tearing the door off the hinges to get his hands on Lesnar, you’d be a better booker than Triple H – and very wrong. They just stared at each other, yelled a bit, and flipped each other off through the cage.

Oba then directed his pent-up anger toward the cops in the cell and flattened them – again, rather than doing something impressive or relevant, like tearing the door off the hinges and stalking Brock.

What was the point of all of this? Triple H and the cell were completely superfluous. The weigh-in was utterly pointless (other than for the gimmick of Heyman announcing that Brock had gotten on a scale backstage and weighed one pound more than Oba). The promos just repeated everything that has already been said during the past four months of this rivalry.

The only thing new here was Heyman’s microphone repeatedly shorting out, which might be a metaphor for how this feud is fizzling out at the finish line. Chances are the match will be good on the night, but this was not the go-home segment this rivalry needed.