4 Ups & 6 Downs From WWE Raw (3 July - Review)
Brock returns, great women's title match, bad nearly everything else.
Woof. Really, woof.
On the heels of an enjoyable Money in the Bank PLE, WWE seemed poised to deliver a solid episode of Raw, picking up the threads from Saturday and setting the table for SummerSlam, which is five weeks away.
And right out of the gate, it felt like we might be on that path, with Brock Lesnar returning to confront (and be thwarted by) Cody Rhodes. But then, things fell off the tracks in a hurry.
If you turn off logic and consistency in your brain and ignore context, then you probably enjoyed this show, and that’s fine. But if you’re trying to follow along and make sense of the many angles, then you probably were becoming increasingly frustrated at the disjointed nature of this episode.
The wrestling wasn’t all that great, save for a surprisingly entertaining WWE Women’s World Championship match. A tag team turmoil match to determine #1 contenders for the women’s tag titles was actively bad, both in booking and execution. Shayna Baszler’s reasoning for turning on Ronda Rousey was solid – if you ignored the context and story being told up to that point. Even a video package for Bronson Reed was painful.
Let’s give this episode a mulligan, but it needs to do much better than this, especially after a good PLE.
Let’s get to it…