4 Ups & 8 Downs From Last Night's WWE Raw (Dec 14)

by Scott Carlson

1. Stupid Ceremony, Hard Sell

AJ Styles Drew McIntyre
WWE.com

The idea of an “ascension ceremony” is just dumb, sorry. Raising the title up is just a silly trope that doesn’t make any sense, unless you believe the title is going to stay suspended above the ring for the next six days.

However, the main event segment with AJ Styles and Drew McIntyre did provide a strong closing argument for their WWE Championship TLC match on Sunday. Styles noted that it might not be a true one-on-one match, triggering a melee with Miz and John Morrison and then Omos getting involved, leading to AJ battering McIntyre with a chair and ladder before putting the champ through a table.

It might have been a bit cliché, and we could see what was coming once the attack was on – that Styles would end up at the top of the ladder pulling the WWE title down – but it did the trick, so let’s give it some serious credit.

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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.