4 Ups & 8 Downs From WWE Raw (Aug 24)
Keith Lee debuts, RETRIBUTION strikes, wacky tag partners, McIntyre cracks skull.
It’s really difficult to sit here and tell you that Raw on Monday night was watchable when we have such a grossly unbalanced rundown of ups and downs this week. Just looking at the numbers, it seems like this would be one of the worst Raws ever.
However, we should not that not all ups and not all downs are created equal.
In this case, the downs this week weren’t the kind of horrible things where you turn the TV off in disgust. But WWE peppered enough negative moments throughout three hours to fill up the “downs” column, while not doing enough on the positive front to balance it out. So while Raw was watchable, it just wasn’t that good.
The high point had to be Keith Lee making his debut, and although his debut match ended in a DQ (a theme for this week’s episode), it felt like a big deal, which is more than you could have hoped for here.
On the negative side, we got some really poor writing for Nia Jax and Shayna Baszler, as they traded schoolgirl insults, then found themselves agreeing to team up for the women’s tag titles. Because reasons. Oh, and RETRIBUTION made its mark felt on Raw once again, but we once again learned nothing about them. Time to start moving the story forward…
With that said, let’s get to it…