"Nothing happened": Monday Night RAW (10/12/15)

This pretty much summed up the overall reaction to watching RAW last night. What should've been another week to set up storylines leading up to HIAC turned into a rehash of last week. No major story development or story progression. I tuned out for the last hour and just watched the clips online.

There was no "12 Rounds 3: Lockdown" poster sighting this week :/

Ambrose opened up RAW, which got a nice pop from the Chicago (one of the smarkiest cities in the world) and it was so good to hear him on the mic. Then Orton showed up and in one lengthy exposition, told Dean he has a match in HIAC against Luke Harper and Braun Strowman and that his partner is none other than himself. It's sort of weird to hear Orton talk this long and even weirder that he had to acknowledge that he and Ambrose don't get along with others. We already know that. The New Day came in and interrupted them, pointing out how dominant they were last week and that The Shield never did this (which got a great angry reaction from Ambrose) and neither did Evolution, The Authority, or Legacy did this (which actually got a laugh from Orton when they mentioned Legacy). Corporate Kane showed up via Titantron and decided to put the superstars into a match. Throughout the match, the duo are seen clearly trying to one-up each other until a miscommunication caused Orton to accidentally bump Ambrose out of the ring, giving Kingston an opening to pin Orton.

There's one segment I wanted to point out and that was Roman Reigns being sent out to do a very lengthy recap of how his feud with Bray Wyatt began, which was hard to watch. Reigns is great when he talks in short sentences or when he's bouncing off of Ambrose. Having to literally recap everything that has happened since Money in The Bank was too drawn out and boring, and the Chicago crowd was not having it. Sure, it drew "BORING" chants from them and he was quick to shut them down, but when Reigns went back on script, he had already lost his confidence.

I'm one of those people that's still bitter with Reigns being obviously pushed to be the top babyface. I just don't like how WWE puts other people with Reigns to get him over. He's been inseparable from Ambrose for a majority of the year because they know he won't get as much heat when he's paired up with him. I get that Reigns has great chemistry Ambrose, it's something the Shield will always have. WWE just has to stop protecting him so much. Rollins and Ambrose are clearly not protected and their fans are still loyal to them, even with all the loses and bad booking, because they can bounce back from it.

I won't talk about any other matches or segments. AV Club and RollingStone summed up the show and agreed that last night's RAW was just unbearably bad. This is baffling considering that the flagship show has been drawing historically low TV ratings weekly and they're still not doing any major changes. The go home show is next week. About half of the matches on the HIAC PPV card are Night of Champions rematches. That's nothing to get excited about, not even for this:

A fucking kickoff match. That's a spot reserved for tag teams and superstars that they don't have a story for RAW or Smack Down. I guess we'll actually have to watch it. And speaking of Smack Down:

Ambrose is in the main event match in his hometown of Cincinatti, OH! I don't know what to make of this. If he and the Dudleyz win, that would be mighty nice of WWE to let Ambrose win in his hometown. If he loses, then it's no big deal. If it happened on Smack Down, then it didn't happen at all.