WWE Raw – February 4, 2019 (Review)

I vividly remember a school dance held during my final year of high school, to celebrate the end of exams. Towards the end of the night, a few of us decided it was a good idea to go for a midnight swim in the school swimming pool. With no access though, and most of the school being locked, we were forced to climb over the fence to get there.

Without delving into the details, the night ended with one of my friends accidentally impaling his thigh on a steal spike on top of the barricade. A couple of hours and several stitches later, he was in the clear. It was nevertheless a traumatic and unpleasant night.

Now, I have no way of knowing this for sure, but I imagine that experience was still more enjoyable than hearing Stephanie McMahon’s shrill voice open last night’s Raw. She truly is the Moment of Bliss of people.

Mercifully, we were only subjected to a few seconds of the ‘Billion Dollar Princess’ before ‘The Man’ came around. Because when Becky gets invited to appear on a show, she doesn’t wait to be introduced. Heck, for that matter, she doesn’t even really wait to be invited.

https://twitter.com/BeckyLynchWWE/status/1091827837521268736

This led to a strangely tense confrontation between the women. No, I’m not talking about Becky being suspended for refusing to allow a doctor to evaluate her knee injury (although that was weird in itself). I’m referring instead to Becky’s response to this unwelcome news.

She slapped the head off the boss’ daughter. This was a genuine surprise, given how rarely the youngest McMahon allows herself to be on the receiving end of any form of punishment.

Of course, Stephanie’s pride almost – almost – prevented this from being a truly excellent opening segment. We’ve heard many comparisons between Lynch and ‘Stone Cold’ Steve Austin recently. But whereas Vince gleefully positioned himself as the perfect foil to Austin’s style of anti-authoritarianism, Stephanie too often struggles to let herself veer completely into heel territory. She chooses instead to remain in this frustrating character limbo. Becoming neither face, nor heel. Neither straight-laced authority figure, nor scheming villain.

For all of her father’s faults, at least he knew when to be irredeemably vile, and when it was time to get his comeuppance in order to put someone over. While Stephanie so far seems reluctant to embrace the former, based off of last night’s showing, perhaps she’s finally learnt the latter.

So is Becky the modern day Steve Austin? Not quite. She hasn’t yet found that career defining antagonist who elevates her into becoming a generational hero. But is she the best thing in WWE – perhaps all of wrestling – at the moment? You bet.

And so it was this opening 15 minutes that set the tone for another inconsistent instalment of Monday Night Raw. Sure it wasn’t perfect. Much like a bag of liquorice allsorts, there was some good (the delicious multi-coloured squares) and a fair share of bad (those disgusting circular black tubes). But when you mix them all together together, you’re in for a surprising treat.

Man, I hope that reference makes sense to a non-European audience.

Guess who's not happy to see @BeckyLynchWWE…

The #RAW #WomensChampion @RondaRousey. pic.twitter.com/g3fM99FvRT

— WWE Universe (@WWEUniverse) February 5, 2019

But regardless, there certainly was a lot to talk about here. We saw the first match (but still no first words) for one EC3, Mojo Rawley’s continued descent into madness (step away from the crazy mirror, Mojo!) and Ronda Rousey’s attempt at an open mic poetry slam:

“You need to stop showing up to hear the cheers for your weekly violin recital and instead stay home and rest up until WrestleMania. So then you can finally receive the beating even your moping, woe-is-me ass won’t find some new reason to lament about.“

Hey Ronda, B-Rabbit called. He wants to know if you’ll star in the white girl remake of 8 Mile.

But we’ll get to all that in due course. Let’s start with the best parts of last night’s Raw.

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