8 Ups & 4 Downs From WWE Raw (11 Dec - Results & Review)

2. On The Treadmill

Giving a “down” to Cody Rhodes and Shinsuke Nakamura might seem unfair since they had a pretty decent main event match Monday night, but this is more for the hamster wheel nature of the match and rivalry than anything else.

Rhodes obviously is within striking distance of turning up the volume on his “finish the story” narrative, with the Royal Rumble just over a month away. But for those six-plus weeks, Cody needs to have something to occupy his time.

Enter Shinsuke Nakamura.

The feud might not be the greatest thing, but they managed to find a common thread of Rumble winners denied at WrestleMania and shoehorned a rivalry. It’s been stretched out a bit to get to this point after a “mystery” of who Nakamura was talking about in backstage promos.

And then Monday’s match ended in a DQ when Shinsuke misted Cody, leaving fans with a 15-minute match that ended in disappointment, all to presumably set up a rematch (or maybe two rematches somehow?) in the coming weeks. It’s all to fill space and time during WWE’s holiday season doldrums.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but when it’s so obviously time-filler, and then it’s stretched out even longer due to a DQ finish, that’s just a bit too much. There was nothing terrible about this, but any fans that got invested in the match for that finish had to be disappointed.