4 Ups And 9 Downs From WWE Legends Raw (Jan 4)

1. Written On A Beer-Soaked Napkin

If there’s one theme running through all these “downs,” it’s that this might be one of the most poorly written episodes of Raw in recent memory.

It’s not that the action or the wrestlers or even the legends were bad. In fact, what makes this episode so bad is that we had a couple good matches and good energy from the superstars. However, they couldn’t overcome some godawful writing that managed to pluck defeat from the jaws of victory multiple times over three hours.

Goldberg’s contrived excuse for challenging McIntyre was overthought and overwritten, when the simplest, most direct and “Goldberg-like” line would have sufficed. Riddle set himself up for a United States Championship shot by tapping out cleanly and then rolling up a distracted champion after the referee didn’t see the tap, when a DQ finish or even a count-out would have worked much better.

Your Raw tag champs lost because they’re now inexplicably not on the same page literally two weeks after winning the titles. Randy Orton tormented legends all night, which seemed to lead to a legend – maybe someone like Edge – getting revenge, but instead it was just the writers reminding us that the person who lit a man on fire is a really bad guy.

And after closing Raw on a ridiculous cliffhanger of Orton possibly burning Alexa Bliss to death, we had to wait a half-hour before we learned her fate.

These are not examples of poor execution or a boring episode, but a show that was so poorly written, you have to hope the writers were drunk at the time. Otherwise, you have to wonder why so many other talented personnel were laid off last year and these clowns are still employed.