7 Ups & 3 Downs From WWE Raw (18 April - Review)

4. Trish Is No Sidekick

Trish Stratus
WWE.com

Ever since she returned to WWE, something felt a bit… off about Trish Stratus.

The WWE Hall-of-Famer palling around with Lita and Becky Lynch wasn’t by itself alerting, but the way she felt like an accessory to the WWE Women’s Tag Team Champions definitely rubbed you a certain way. She felt more like Scrappy Doo when she laid down the challenge for a six-woman tag match against Damage CTRL at WrestleMania 39, for example.

When Trish turned on Lynch last week and laid her out, it set the stage for Monday’s in-ring promo. Stratus proceeded to declare that she wasn’t anyone’s sidekick, not a nostalgia act. She put herself over with legitimate facts about her career, grounding her heel turn in reality to justify it, which often helps give it heft.

The promo solidified Trish’s turn and put her back in the conversation as a serious player and not – as she warned – a nostalgia act. How it goes from here remains to be seen, but if she’s got some gas in the tank and actually is back for a bit, this could be a fun little run.

Here’s hoping we get some mileage out of this, because if WWE is going to go through the trouble of turning a Hall-of-Famer heel, it shouldn’t be for just one PLE match.

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Contributor
Contributor

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.