Jan 13th RAW "Second Foot Forward?" - REVIEW
This is the episode that I was actually interested in. It's all well and good when the money guns are blazing but the difficult second album question must be answered.
It opened with a recap from last week's Monday Night RAW on Netflix so I can only assume that RAW is going to open with this recap every single week for the rest of time. Drink every time you hear the word 'Netflix'.
An SUV pulled up and it was such a mystery as to who was in the car that the crowd were already chanting CM Punk. As it turns out, it was CM Punk who was in the SUV and we are back to the much-loved one-shot entrance from the back.
Of course, CM Punk is the only person in the world to like hockey so it always has to be the first thing commentary mention.
I'll get straight down to business. I found this entire segment to be utterly interminable. It came off like that none of the people involved particularly had a strong plan of what exactly they were going to say. Punk was doing his generic and tired babyface promo that we are all sick of. He didn't say a lot. He pointed to a WrestleMania sign and said it was there. It wasn't there. The takeaway was that he is entering the Rumble. It felt like an eternity to get there but we got there.
Rollins interrupted and didn't really say anything either but his point was entering the rumble as well and then Drew McIntyre came out and didn't say anything AGAIN but he is entering the rumble. This entire segment was a load of rehashed waffle. RAW did not get off to a good start here. I was bored silly. Everyone was so whiny, you can't buy that any of them will win the rumble and I quite like all three men involved but I came away from the segment hating all of them and I'm only supposed to hate one of them.
What followed was for me, the real hook to watch the show this week.
He was packaged as the real deal and probably rightfully so. More of a real deal than I thought he would be treated as. He had pyro, his own unreadable title card and labelled as the second-best luchador on Earth which is never a death sentence for new Mexican wrestlers in WWE. He even had a live mic promo afterwards which you can't say for many but we'll get there.
They wrestled an Indie main event match and I'm fine with that every once in a while. It had quite an NXT feel with the black ring and a somewhat-blacked out crowd. Penta El Zero M also got rid of his stupidly long moniker. As an aside, I always preferred Pentagon Jr as a name. Penta El Zero M is an Xbox gamertag. It appears that they have went with simply 'Penta' which I am welcoming with open arms.
Its an unusual brand of debut for WWE because it had a sizable length and a stiff back-and-forth. It's normally an uneventful squash match with a jobber or a Royal Rumble surprise whereby they would eliminate one or two people and get booted out off camera. I very much welcome them allowing Penta to get all of his shit in and Gable demonstrated his fantastic selling once again. This type of match as a one-off every now and then makes the show worth watching.
Similar to how everyone was worried about AJ Styles coming to WWE, it turns out that if you treat someone like a big deal, they are received like a big deal. We do have to have the Michael Cole-penned "he/she/they call this the [finishing move]" but what are you gonna do? They love branding.
The promo was something else.
Handing him a live mic after all that shit he tweeted shows unbelievable gall but it paid off in the end. He had the crowd in the palm of his hand the entire time with an unbelievable anger he had been building up for quite some time. He was brave enough to speak Spanish for most of it and they were brave enough to let him. Everyone knew the catchphrase. This was an all-around success in my opinion.
This was when my frustrations with the show started.
So Sheamus comes out for his match with Ludwig Kaiser and as soon as he gets in the ring, he gets cut off by a backstage segment that has nothing to do with the match. It was some story to do with the Pure Fusion Collective that they squeezed in at a really stupid moment and it was so hastily put together that you couldn't really take in any of the information because you were settling in for the Sheamus match.
THEN it cuts back to Sheamus for all of ten seconds and it hard cuts to an advert for WWEShop.
AND THEN it cuts back to Pat McAfee and Michael Cole, doing a Tosh.0 or Alex Zane's RudeTube bit where do the equivalent of when you are out with some friends and they show you what is supposed to be a funny video of something that you have no interest in or no context for. I have no idea what this baffling horseshit was but I could not wait for it to disappear from my screen so I can watch Sheamus WRESTLE on my WRESTLING SHOW.
Instead, we got some American Football shite.
They show Daniel Cormier in the audience for literally no reason.
The match was quite good and there was no chance it wasn't going to be. It's just that the events leading up to the bell just put me in a fowl mood.
I am currently thoroughly enjoying Ludwig Kaiser's single run where he wrestles matches like a cheeky bastard. It's a great foil for Sheamus but the thought has entered by head that they are trying to replicate the Sheamus/Cesaro Best of 7 series.
To compound my annoyance that, as soon as it was getting going, the ad break was placed right as Kaiser was mid-air, mid-move and we perfectly missed his White Noise off the top. I'm sure they'll get the hang of managing their own television adverts (We don't get any in the UK, we just get an untimely awkward black screen). I'm very much looking forward to them charging a premium worldwide for ad-free WWE programming on Netflix.
It was the first match in a while that was, without context, a good match but compromised by sloppy production. McAfee and Cole have gotten off relatively lightly in my reviews thus far but the pair of them together absolutely chew the scenery of the product on a regular basis. The commentary on SmackDown of Wade Barrett and Joe Tessitore is relatively charming by comparison to the incessant pogchamping.
A great little moment.
Late 2000's TNA Impact is back everybody and by back, I mean "TO THE BACK!"
It was a decent backstage segment which I know is mildly contrary to my constant grievances about the Bloodline being involved and interlocked with absolutely everything. It presents an exciting direction for Sami Zayn that will lead us down the garden path to believe that Sami will win the big one.
I don't care for these crowd-side interview segments.
They never seem to really achieve anything meaningful and it comes across as lip-service to fill and/or kill time to get cheap heat or cheap pops in front of a crowd. I never get anything extra from them and this show has already wasted a lot of my time.
MORE BACKSTAGE SEGMENTS.
Zayn and Miz will have a match. The Wyatts have moved to SmackDown. Karrion Kross and The Miz are having half a feud. That's it.
I am generally always happy to see Gunther and it was going well until Jey Uso came out. It was an excellent and mesmerizing promo where he said many things that are all true and my feelings exactly. The focus should be about the prize of the title and it feels like half the roster are squabbling over immaterial, intangible concepts and he holds the grand prize.
Jey Uso came out and his entrance, I swear to God, was longer than both Gunther's entrance and his promo up until Uso's music hit. Jey Uso promises that the Bloodline story is behind him like that will literally ever happen and once again, Gunther was fantastic. My problem was that this was setting up a match on Saturday Night's Main Event - a show that anyone outside of America cannot legally watch. So for all their chat about the world watching on the globally available Netflix, this promo was a big shill for a more advertiser-hungry show.
It's also a feud we have seen before and it is almost, pound-for-pound the exact same build as the one they had before. Jey showed some fine babyface fire but it was for a belt that nobody believes that he can win. It was hardly the Guerrero/Lesnar promo.
This was probably my match of the night.
Even though they teased the prospect of some shenanigans happening at the end of the encounter with a lot Damage CTRL micro-angles happening in the background with Kairi being taken out, Bayley being at ringside and Asuka still injured. I mean, forget the babyface turn of her own creation that Dakota Kai has been on for some time. There is also the shadow of Becky Lynch lingering.
Nothing interesting happened at the end of it. There were no heel turns or face turns or any event at all. Lyra Valkyria won clean and Dakota Kai shook her hand and that was it. I don't know why they interviewed Bayley in the crowd in her hometown and had it be for nothing.
However, none of this stopped the meeting from being an excellent wrestling match.
This moment was legitimately terrifying but I don't think anyone was hurt.
It was actually quite a Japanese women's match. A lot of lock ups and holds and, unlike a lot of the other women in the WWE, the two of them were not afraid to properly hit each other. The crowd really bought Dakota Kai's babyface desperation when she hit her finisher and Valkyria narrowly escaped the ring. Compared to the Penta/Gable match, this was relatively short. Short and sweet. Speaking of Penta, Lyra Valkyria hit what now looks like a very similar finishing move to Penta. If it was McMahon, I would await a tedious shake-up of manoeuvres because only one person is allowed to do one thing. Hopefully, this doesn't become an issue.
Anyway, Lyra Valkyria won and the Sephiroth 3:16 sign will be forever in the background of that image of her lifting the belt. Oh well.
The New Day feuding with Rey Mysterio and Rey Mysterio alone isn't a great outlook for the prospect of this heel run. I like them and I like their new heel look but feuding with Rey Mysterio just does not bode well because Mysterio will always win that feud. They are firmly in the background whilst The War Raiders are feuding with The Judgement Day with the belts in the picture.
The Miz vs. Sami Zayn was forgettable. Bog-standard RAW TV match. Nobody understands this feud with Karrion Kross. He has Stockholm syndrome or maybe he doesn't. He has supposedly been changed by Kross but his gimmick is exactly the same. He turned heel prior to joining the Final Testament but joined them against their will? Has he joined the Final Testament at all? Nothing is particularly clear about this and I don't know really know or care where they are going with this. Pat McAfee called Sami Zayn's finisher "The Blue Thunder Dome"
It did finish with an all-time Helluva Kick but the match was boring and pointless.
There was a cringe fuckboy promo about Logan Paul for two weeks in the row. They're going to regret this when he loses the lawsuit. This was then followed up by my most loathed segment, The Signs of the Night. Get rid of this. Whenever Maffew Gregg puts these in BotchaMania, I fast-forward it.
And if this review couldn't get any fucking longer and even more negative, we had a town hall segment that achieved quite literally, nothing at all.
Rhea ran through her catchphrases. Nia Jax, hot off the heels of losing a No. 1 Contenders Match on Friday, interrupted with basically the exact same promo she cut on that aforementioned Friday night. She did generic carny heel routines about the hometown and about Bayley. Bayley who was in the audience the whole time, came into the segment and before you knew it, the newly crowned world heavyweight champion was pushed to the background. Nia Jax and Bayley did their traditional to-and-fro. They scuffled and Jax was kicked out of the ring.
That was it. That was the segment. It announced nothing. It set up nothing. It achieved nothing. Pointless segment.
I know that it's supposed to be a treat to get a street fight main event on television but from my experience, they are usually a big load of nothing. Yet we fall for it every time. To compound my annoyance more, they did my least favourite category of street fight which is when they go into the crowd to fight for most of the match. It's great for the arena but it never looks that good on television. The footage is always unclear and you can't really see what's happening. Production is often indecisive of what camera to pick.
AND THEN
After quite a good high spot where Cole couldn't decide quite what to call a 'table', the match slowed all the way down whilst they pretended that Finn Balor was genuinely hurt. I said to my friend whilst we were watching this together that "If this is supposed to be real then fair enough; accidents happen. But if this is a worked moment, they are dragging it on a bit too long". Again. Running theme. Wasting my time.
But Finn Balor compounded medical science by somehow tricking who are supposedly trained paramedics into thinking he needed to go on a stretcher and they put the fakest neck brace that I have ever seen in my life on.
This show only ended up being two and a half hours long but it could easily have been only two hours with all the piddling crap they forced onto my television screen. I don't enjoy being negative but this show bored the piss out of me at almost every possible instant. The show is supposed to be three hours long and they don't know how to fill it.
It was better than last week's show definitely but not by a hell of a lot. SmackDown was far more sensibly paced and the time was all the more valuable apparently. I understand and appreciate that this has been the case for a long time but I only live and hope that things will change and improve.
The show definitely had it's moments and it's moments were often between the ropes and bells. Apart from the last match, they didn't put enough weight on the outcome of this match. If it was a replay, I would naturally skip every backstage segment if I had the choice.
Damien Priest won conclusively by the way. Just thought I'd mention that. Dunno where Finn Balor goes after this. I think a lot of people need new enemies.