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

4. Nia Slips On Banana Peel

Nia Jax Lana
WWE.com

If you ever find yourself thinking WWE isn’t that bad at telling stories, re-watch all the segments involving Nia Jax and Lana and then get back to us.

Monday’s installment of the godawful storyline saw Lana overmatched but managing to counter a press slam into a hurricanrana, and then evading a super Samoan Drop and stomping Nia to the mat before folding Jax up for the upset win.

This comes after months of Lana being portrayed as incompetent, cowardly and incapable of doing even basic wrestling correctly. This wasn’t an underdog winning a major upset; it was a 5-year-old beating Conor McGregor in two minutes in the octagon.

What makes all of this worse is that WWE seemingly was on-course for a somewhat logical conclusion to this storyline: Nia had put Lana through a table for nine consecutive weeks, with the TLC PPV looming. Just have Jax continue to do so, leading to Lana getting payback by putting Nia through a table in a WWE Women’s Tag Team Championship tables match to win the titles.

But instead, nope. We get this drivel. Lana is still portrayed as incompetent, not overmatched. Weak, not valiant, and this storyline is stupid, not inspiring. Worse yet, they seemingly pulled the plug on Lana, removing her from the title match via injury angle. What the actual hell?

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Contributor
Contributor

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.