This Monday night was the final episode of RAW before WrestleMania on Sunday night in Dallas. For all intents and purposes, it’s the last show WWE has to give that one final push to make people really want to plunk down their hard-earned money to pay for WWE’s particular brand of wrestling. Smackdown will air this week, but it’s only there to fill the obligation WWE has to air be content on USA Network every Thursday.
In a word, Monday’s RAW was… bad. It wasn’t horrendous. It wasn’t bland (well, it was a bit bland). It wasn’t even just there. The show was uninspired, poorly structured, boring and chaotic in the worst sense of the word.
The opening segment with Shane McMahon and The Undertaker was a heck of a spectacle and the live crowd in Brooklyn absolutely loved it. One would think that if that is how WWE was just starting the show, we were in for one wild ride with only six days left until the event that all wrestlers aspire to make it to.
Boy oh boy were we wrong. That was the start of the night and also its acme. Everything was downhill from there, just a mish-mosh of crap thrown at the TV cameras and a series of awkwardly placed commercial breaks.
Triple H, again, for some dopey reason, wasted his breath trying to make believe that the fans looked at Roman Reigns as a source of hope and salvation. A man of the people and for the people who would try to wrest the WWE World Heavyweight Championship from the powerful arms of The Authority. Brooklyn, just like all of the other cities WWE has been visiting, didn’t buy into it. When Reigns came out to attack the champ he was met by a chorus of boos. Every time he threw a punch the crowd jeered and when Triple H retaliated they cheered.
Then, after a backstage attack, the show closed with them coming back to the ring to essentially do the same thing for the second time of the night. It was smart to keep Reigns from talking, but it’s a band-aid being put on a wound made by an axe through the skull. Ineffective doesn’t even begin to describe it.
Dean Ambrose ignoring Brock Lesnar and gathering his weapons from under the ring was a good little interlude for the night, but it’s the kind of thing he should have done weeks ago as a mind game leading toward a greater goal as WrestleMania drew closer. Instead, it came off flat and stopped cold the momentum the men had been building.
The less said about the six-man tag team match the better. It felt like it was an hour long and the crowd did everything except pay attention. They clearly didn’t care and it just wasn’t working. Instead of calling an audible and ending the match early, they just left those poor guys out there to die. Way to make the big ladder match for the IC Title look important!
There was one more good thing, though: the crowd’s reaction of disbelief when Eva Marie was revealed as the fifth member Total Divas team. It was like they knew what they were seeing but their brains were unable to process that it was real. That was glorious.
