5 Ups & 7 Downs From WWE Raw (Nov 30)
Styles shines, RETRIBUTION sputters, Lana slips on banana peel, more guitar shots.
Watching a three-hour of Raw can be quite maddening over the course of several weeks.
You can see glimmers of quality: talented wrestlers delivering good and even sometimes great matches, booking that actually follows reasonable wrestling logic, and storytelling that actually makes sense.
And then you see horrific matches involving guitars on poles, booking that defies all common sense, and storytelling that looks like it was written by a chimpanzee at a laptop.
And that’s all in one episode. Welcome to WWE Raw in 2020.
Monday’s episode was more of the same, as we got some decent moments: a solid triple threat match naming a smart heel as Drew McIntyre’s next WWE Championship challenger, a decent setup for a United States Championship feud, and a telegraphed double-cross that’s just waiting to happen.
But you also had to endure the maddening booking of RETRIBUTION, an awful promo and opening segment with Randy Orton, more guitar shots, and the confusing storyline involving Lana as a “sympathetic babyface.”
Why should we cheer on Bray Wyatt in his feud with Orton? (Or should we at all?) How are Elias and Jeff Hardy still feuding over something that was investigated by authorities months ago? What is the point of RETRIBUTION’s continued existence on the main roster besides filling space?
It’s all just par for the course at this point. Let’s get to it…