How WWE Raw Foreshadowed An Escape From The Empty Arena Era

Are we where we are, anymore?

It was a world of "We Are Where We Are" right around March when the loose global message was, plainly, "get the f*ck inside". As you read this, somebody is almost certainly breaking a rule you're trying hard to stick to and it's eating you up inside. Wrestling's done it since the very beginning, beholden to television networks that should also know better. Indiscipline and capitalism have undermined and underpinned this challenging period, but then we are where we are.

"We are where we are" is that kind of platitude that gets you out of a conversation without really assessing the situation. "We are where we are" temporarily justifies the unjustifiable. "We are where we are" is that sort of awful corporate speak invented to buy or slow down time or processes by the sort of people in your office that are out to fake it until they make it.

You know the sort. You're perhaps not in your workplace at the moment, but when you get back there, they're the ones you want to reconnect with least. The sort that you want pleasantries with the least. The sort whose weekend's you don't care nor ask about. The sort that insisted on the clandestine weekly meeting as a power play for themselves and the toadies they knew had met all their *spits* "action points" from the last clandestine weekly meeting.

We're not where we were the first time WWE opened a show from inside the Performance Center, or even from when AEW moved their big screen and put the wrestlers in the front row. Saturday's Double Or Nothing barely felt like an empty arena event the atmosphere was so boisterous, where as Raw's noise provided an ambience that implied a the company's own gradual steer out of the darkest timeline.

So what next?