Highlighting the intrinsic hypocrisy of Lucha House Rules on Raw? Pointing out that having Drake Maverick pissing all over the place isn’t funny? Criticising the decision to return the Universal Title to Brock Lesnar?
Has Seth Rollins been listening to WrestleTalk?!
If that is the case, then I only have two questions. One, how do you keep your hair so lusciously greasy? And two, what’s it like being the voice of the people?
Because that’s exactly what we witnessed last night. Seth acting as our conduit, reciting the grievances of every wrestling fan who’s had to sit through the atrocity of Raw in recent weeks.
He effectively echoed everything we’ve been complaining about in recent times. The booking is incoherent, the humour is juvenile and the wrestling is flat; all of which has contributed to pushing fan support and TV ratings to an all-time low. Those words were actually delivered by Rollins, as he placed complete blame for the languishing product at the feet of Raw ‘General Manager Elect’, Baron Corbin.
Of course, Raw is a scripted show, which means that in truth Seth wasn’t voicing his own feelings, nor channeling the fans’ discontent. These criticisms came directly off the written page, crafted by the brand’s writing staff and (presumably) signed off by WWE‘s agitator-in-chief, Vince McMahon. This was, in effect, WWE criticizing itself in the most stark, uncompromising of ways.
It was an unexpected, even shocking, approach to say the least. One that, naturally, not everyone agreed with:
This opening segment was right out of WCW when they were swirling down. Amazing.
— Dave Meltzer (@davemeltzerWON) December 11, 2018
Vince is actually scripting a segment blaming himself on how bad ratings have gotten and using Corbin as his surrogate. It's fascinating.
— Dave Meltzer (@davemeltzerWON) December 11, 2018
Strange scripting decision aside though, the words coming out of Rollins’ mouth weren’t untrue. The Revival have been unfairly buried. We are tired of the whole Drake Maverick mess. And, interestingly, Lesnar really hasn’t turned up for a televised match on the red brand in over 16 years. Aside from a single dark match and a handful of house show appearances, Lesnar last competed on the July 22nd 2002 episode of Raw. His opponent on that occasion? It would shock me if anyone guessed this… but it was Tommy Dreamer. In a ‘Singapore Cane’ match (whatever the hell that is). Feel free to go forth and impress your friends with that little nugget of useless information.
Getting back on track though, this was certainly an interesting start to last night’s Raw. A surreal segment that ended with Seth challenging Corbin to a TLC match. With the Raw GM reluctant to agree to the contest, the ‘Architect’ resorted to the Daniel Bryan school of goading your opponent into a match – repeatedly calling Baron a coward until he relented. Because apparently Corbin doesn’t mind being called lazy, incompetent or biased, but he draws the line at cowardly dammit!
They say that the first step in remedying a problem is recognising that you have one. And that recognition seemingly arrived during last night’s broadcast. But did it lead to a better Monday Night Raw? Or was it simply a hollow gesture on yet another awful show? As usual, we’ve gathered our cast of WrestleTalk writers to discuss that very question and evaluate the show overall.
As an aside – and this was too important to just let slide – but Corey claiming that Rocky 4 was his favourite in the series is one of the biggest heel moves of the year. It was a thinly-veiled patriotic fluff piece entirely lacking the spirit of the original, Graves! Damn heels.
With that out the way, let’s kick things off with the good.
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