5 Ups & 4 Downs from WWE Raw (12 May - Results & Review)
The women crush the main event while babyface trio unify to tangle with Rollins' clan.
At what point does WWE finish setting the table and start serving the banquet?
Four episodes of Raw post-WrestleMania and the company continued Monday night to serve up some appetizers and samplers, but it did not provide any main courses.
(Enough with the analogy, it’s making people hungry!)
It’s completely understandable that WWE needs to reset after Mania and establish new storylines, but they are going to need to offer something more in the coming weeks beyond competent wrestling and slow-but-steady narrative-building.
Seth Rollins’ stable is still getting off the ground. Iyo Sky has had to contend with NXT invaders and formed an uneasy alliance with her potential top challenger. The Judgment Day continues to face internal strife. Becky Lynch is establishing her new heel character. The Raw tag team division apparently only consists of three teams, and they are slowly converging on a triple threat, because that’s all we’ve got.
Most of these developments are actually positive ones, and some are fairly promising. But everything seems to be in the same phase, with little boiling over, and that’s how it has been the past few weeks. The women’s tag main event shined, but the NXT contingent aren’t even officially part of the main roster yet.
This isn’t a serious criticism (yet), but more of an observation. Raw was above decent, featuring one good main event, a solid promo (Lynch) and a laudable angle (CM Punk, Sami Zayn and Jey Uso solidifying their babyface trio). But WWE is pretty far removed from the electricity that pulsed from the Raw after WrestleMania at this point, and they really should be striving to recapture that energy.
Let’s get to it…