Last night's Monday Night RAW showed a lot of promise in the first hour. It kicked off with Stephanie cutting a promo about HHH not being present tonight before being interrupted by Roman Reigns, who of course got tremendous boos from the Philly crowd. Reigns actually came off a little better here, shushing Stephanie to make his short promo and even stopping her from slapping him in the face again. Kevin Owens vs AJ Styles was the first match of the night, which was a ridiculously amazing and hard hitting spot fest, only for it to be ruined when Jericho interrupted the match. Owens would then cut a promo about KO-Mania before being interrupted by Dolph Ziggler, The Miz, and Sami Zayn, causing Owens to go to the Authority to arrange a triple-threat match so that the winner would be the #1 contender for his IC title. Later on in the show, Owens would accidentally piss off Stephanie, causing her to book Owens into a 7-man ladder match for the IC title at Wrestlemania, which includes Stardust, Sin Cara, and Zack freakin Ryder.
And that's where RAW, as many describes it best, falls off the cliff. The results can be found here.
Save for a wonderful taped segment with Dean Ambrose and another hardcore legend Terry Funk in a Philly bar, where Funk just flat out gives Ambrose a chainsaw, the rest of RAW was once again filled with random matches and an unusual amount of video packages. This was flat out a mostly terrible show. There are just 2 weeks left before WrestleMania and 5 of the main event performers didn't make an appearance (Shane, Taker, and Lesnar) or wrestled in the ring (HHH and Reigns). Ambrose was the only main eventer who wrestled last night and his opponent was Braun Strowman. BRAUN STROWMAN WAS THE MAIN EVENT OF RAW.
There was also one weird segment that involved Stephanie. She was suddenly apprehensive of Reigns and called Hunter to pick her up. This was HHH's only appearance by the way. They went into the car and waited for the garage door to open up, only to reveal Reigns wearing a hoodie, blocking their way. He approached the car, pulled out HHH, and started beating him up - with Stephanie screaming bloody murder in the background. HHH managed to get one hit on Reigns before getting back into car and driving off. The crowd was dead silent during the segment and when the camera panned to Reigns, they all booed him. Reigns is finally acting like the silent bad-ass but it came WAY too late. These out-of-the-ring and backstage brawls are ok but it's not doing much for Reigns. He's back to tag-teaming with Ambrose for the house shows but he hasn't done a solo match since his return.
The wrestling quality was great (even though most of the matches ended poorly) but the the horrible booking and creative decisions, not to mention the endless commercial breaks and video packages, really brought down the show. Even the normally smarky Philly crowd was dead at the third hour, chanting "THIS IS BORING!" and "WE WANT LESNAR!" The cheered for Ambrose when he abruptly ended the match by hitting Braun with a chair. Neither Ambrose or an unannounced Paul Heyman (who was seen at commentary) got any mic time, which was one of the dumbest things to do for 2 great talkers.
And to make things worse, tonight saw yet another possible and major injury. The dark match was The Wyatt Family vs Reigns, Ambrose, Zayn, and Ziggler. For some unexplained reason, Harper appeared to have sustained an ankle injury as soon as he got into the ring. The babyfaces couldn't really celebrate (not to mention some of the crowd was already leaving and Reigns got the win, of course) and they all looked pretty concern with Harper.
Thank god this was not the go-home show. Now I'm looking forward to Smack Down to see what Lesnar and Ambrose will be doing, and hopefully, it'll be a lot better than what was showcased last night.
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