Waiting for changes to happen on Monday Night RAW.
Realizing it's the same old shit.
This is the go-home show? This is supposed to be the show to give the PPV a final push and make people tune in for Sunday? What seemed promising at the beginning, in the form of an unprecedented 16-Man Fatal Four Way match for the first hour, devolved into a mess for the second and third hour. There was no serious story progress and character development and motivation was all over the place. Oh, and Reigns made WWE WHC Sheamus look like a chump again, guaranteeing that Reigns will not walk out with the title this Sunday due to shenanigans.
On a plus side, they did acknowledge that it was Dean Ambrose's birthday! Also, Popcorn Ambrose made his return and... he came off as a bigger bully than Kevin Owens. At least he got to be in the same ring with Tommy Dreamer! Dreamer threw Moxley into someone's chair 5 years ago at Dragongate.
There were meaningless matches throughout the night and it looks like everything was being rushed to create more time for the final segment of the night with Reigns and Sheamus. From the look of things, there is going to be a lot of anger and frustration from wrestling articles and podcasts for this week's RAW.
From F4W:
This was a show booked in reverse. We got a solid first hour and it just lost steam from there. Reigns and Sheamus feels like a cold program, which anyone who watched Sheamus win the title would have predicted. I might regret writing this, but Reigns doesn't have that special quality as a main eventer. He can't carry a 10-minute talking segment and the fans don't see him as a top of the card talent.
From RollingStone:
They threw everything at the wall last night, from unisex unicorns and 16-man tags to some meta-insight on Lana and Neville getting a backstage pep talk from Donny Deutsch. Very little of it stuck.
From AV Club:
As we head into Sunday’s PPV, I feel nothing but apathy, and occasionally downright hatred. Raw is in a dire state right now, and tonight’s episode is a pretty good representation of everything that’s currently wrong with the product.
From Prowrestling:
WWE is in a bad place right now. It's not going to change overnight because they are relying mostly on wrestlers who were damaged because of their own parity booking. I would be understanding if the creative was good and it was just taking time for them to establish or reestablish some of these wrestlers, but that's just not the case. There's no light at the end of this tunnel.
From PWTorch:
Overall, an excruciatingly long promo exchange exposing Reigns’s weaknesses and masking his strengths to get to physicality, which seemed to cross over from a “sample of the TLC action” to basically a free meal.
The common theme with all of these reviews was not just RAW being disappointing, messy, and predictable but how the final segment with Reigns and Sheamus, the headline event for TLC, was the major low point of the show. Reigns' weakness is doing long promos and they did it to him again by making recap his rise from The Shield to getting the WWE WHC title, all while climbing up on a ladder to literally illustrate his point. And then he and Sheamus just talked and talked before getting into a brawl that went outside the ring. This was slow and boring to watch - it was noted that empty seats can be seen towards the third hour - which doesn't say much on what to expect for Sunday.
Ambrose and Owens have a contract signing for Thursday Night Smack Down. Hopefully, they'll get to do more here besides having another concession fight. Owens being out last week shouldn't be a reason for a such poor build up for their match, and I hope Ambrose isn't going to side with Reigns in another multi-man match for the final go-home show.
TEAM BAD DAY
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