Last week, WWE put on a quality Raw with good matches, surprises and a hot crowd. Naturally, that effort was rewarded with one of Raws lowest ratings in years. So with ratings in a freefall, WWE on Monday night turned to the one trick the company pony knows authority figures. But does Triple H equal ratings? Well have to wait to find out. In the meantime, Raw was in go-home mode (already) for WWEs next PPV, Payback. We learned the fate of one champion, saw the heart of another, witnessed a burial, watched wrestlers previously buried try to brush off the dirt and saw people still stumped by an old tag team rule. It certainly was an eventful Raw, but nowhere near the level of last weeks performance. (That probably means ratings will go up.) As with many episodes of Raw, there were two hours of good material in here, but unfortunately, Raw is three hours long. That gives us some brutal segments with confusing booking and bad writing. Sadly for the fans who made it through the entire episode of Raw, the ending looked a lot like last week, so unless youre from Cincinnati, you easily could have skipped it. So what rose up and what fell apart? Lets find out how the go-home Raw for Payback broke down.
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.
