5 Ups & 5 Downs For WWE Raw (29 Sept - Results & Review)

Downs…

5. Junior High Drama Club Acting

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Wrestling fans are likely near-universal in their anticipation of the Kabuki Warriors facing Rhea Ripley and Iyo Sky. On paper, it’s a fantastic tag match that could steal the show at Crown Jewel. But the route to get to Perth has been filled with subpar, forced acting that, at times, can threaten to take you out of the moment. It’s a great reversal of the adage that “It’s not the destination; it’s the journey.” In this case, it’s the destination – the tag match – that makes some of the bad drama bearable.

Monday night, Rhea gritted her teeth through her show-opening promo, while Iyo sobbed that Asuka and Kairi Sane are her family. When the Kabuki Warriors attacked Ripley, Sky stood in the aisle doing her best “conflicted” face before charging the ring and doubling down on the confliction before Asuka misted her.

The backstage segments weren’t much better for the low-level acting.

But here’s the secret sauce: because the story itself is solid and the match(es) that come from it have a floor of “very good,” it’s easy to excuse all of this and look forward to Crown Jewel. It also helped that they didn’t string this “Iyo is conflicted about turning on her family” angle for more than an hour of one episode, rather than three weeks of back and forth.

Still, the writers deserve to get dinged for pitching this stuff. You know your performers’ weaknesses, so why expose them like this?

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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.