4 Ups & 5 Downs From WWE Monday Night Raw (17 November - Results & Review)

1. Chasing The Dragon

WWE Raw Brock Lesnar Roman Reigns
WWE

Let’s call the men’s WarGames match what it really is: Paul Levesque chasing the dragon, searching for the high of a crowd pop without actually doing real booking.

The closing angle to Raw was an abysmal display of nothingness. The Vision and Drew McIntyre came out to talk for 30 seconds before CM Punk, the Usos, and Cody Rhodes ventured out one at a time to surround the ring, triggering a four-on-four brawl that the crowd cared about so much they chanted “Cody, Cody Rhodes!” in the middle of it.

The empty calories brawl quickly spilled outside, leaving Punk alone when Brock Lesnar (URGH) returned to wipe him and Cody out in quick succession. Then Roman Reigns made his return for the big confrontation with Lesnar, rekindling a rivalry that is wildly overblown. Brock quickly bailed, leaving Bronson Reed to take the Superman Punch and spear through the barricade.

What a horrible, “throw crap at the wall and hope something sticks” main event segment this was. Sure, you can connect the dots between the players, but there’s no compelling emotional story here. It’s a series of pops layered on top of pops to manufacture a high heading into a match that is more slapdash than epic.

Maybe if you still had Seth Rollins leading The Vision and driving the story, it would work better, but we’re way past that point, and WWE hasn’t filled that hole.

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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.