3 Ups And 8 Downs From WWE Raw (Dec 21)

This probably gets said every year around this time, but if WWE were ever to have an “offseason” of sorts, right now, from about mid-December until early January, would be the time to do it. The product consistently suffers during this time, with a lot of wheel-spinning, strange booking and silliness surrounding the holidays.

But discounting that, coming out of an uneven TLC PPV in which Raw’s contributions were *ahem* less than stellar, the red brand needed to turn the page somewhat Monday night. Instead, we got a bad episode. Not horrifically unwatchable, but if you can point to something that was really good, you’re probably a liar.

Rather than let things with the burning of The Fiend just fester for a while, we endured a lengthy, bad promo from Randy Orton, with a promise that Fiend would be back, thus negating a human torch segment at TLC. We got a scenario that quite possibly could end with the WWE Champion looking like a gullible loser instead of just someone duped by a good friend. We saw The Miz admit he’s a goof who isn’t respected, because that’s what passes for character development today.

Oh, and we got more of RETRIBUTION versus Ricochet, because that’s still a thing. At least the women’s tag division got some love Monday night… although one of the teams immediately was revealed to still be mired in “wacky tag partners who don’t like each other” territory.

Let’s get to it…