7 Ups & 7 Downs From Last Night's WWE Raw (10 Jan)

Oh, we’re getting into that time of the year when things, if they’re going well, start to line up a lot better. The silly stuff gets tamped down, storylines get tighter, action gets a bit more intense, nonsensical angles diminish, and things start building week to week.

It’s Royal Rumble season, which leads directly into WrestleMania season. During these three months, WWE tends to buckle down and actually put thought into their programming. There’s more week-to-week logic and flow. The off-the-wall stuff that drives us crazy the other nine months is minimized as well.

Of course, this doesn’t always work, and we’ve seen some atrocious shows this time of year, but Monday’s episode wasn’t bad at all. We saw a tag team well past its expiration date finally dissolve. We saw another popular tandem lose their titles, which could send them on a spiral. We saw a potential Mania match get a veiled kickstart while setting up another title match. And we saw a dream match take off without the opponents touching.

But Raw also brought us a former champion who continues to lose when he needs to right himself. It brought us a beatdown of former running buddies that felt gratuitous. It brought us a PPV match that still hasn’t been explained. And it brought us the return of a character we were hoping was dead and buried.

Let’s get to it…