00:00Monday Night Raw, the two-hour variety, went down in St. Louis, Missouri.
00:11The show starts with CM Punk, and immediately I was like, man, okay, because you guys know,
00:18if you were listening, I was saying last, um, yesterday, I don't want CM Punk coming
00:23out and being fine, and I don't want Drew McIntyre, like, these guys need to sell the
00:28damages from this.
00:30And now, to that degree, CM Punk did a great job.
00:33He looked genuinely hurt, and looked very uncomfortable.
00:36I thought it was a good promo to just like, okay, this is putting a real bow on this,
00:42and we're moving on now, and it's off, it's in the past, and I'm moving forward, looking
00:47for a championship, and looking for a couple other things as well.
00:52Um, so that, I thought it did a good job of selling the injuries, it did a good job of
00:57just like, let's get this guy on TV, really show how much damage has been done, and now
01:02get him moving forward.
01:03And then, you plant the seeds when Seth Rollins come out.
01:07So that is, I think a, I thought it was a good use of time.
01:10And this was something they did throughout the show.
01:13And I think it was a way to kind of still get some of the storytelling done that you
01:18wanted to in three hours, and do it in two.
01:20Where you had a crossover of Punk leaving, and oh, in comes Seth Rollins, and then they
01:26did it again with Jey Uso.
01:29And like, you just had a lot of crossover with those guys at different times, and that
01:33helped to kind of string together a few different things, and also kind of visually pair up,
01:39alright, that guy with this guy, this guy with that guy, that guy over here, this and
01:42that.
01:43Like, you did a good job of, I think, kind of mixing and matching all of those things
01:46together.
01:47So, I thought that was, um, I thought that was a part of this show that they did really
01:51well.
01:52Seth Rollins comes out, he cuts a promo.
01:54It's a Seth Rollins promo.
01:56It's better than most promos you will see, but it doesn't get to the upper echelons of
02:01the epic promo doers of this generation.
02:05Like it's, it was a Seth Rollins promo, and he challenged Bronson Reed to a match, and
02:10thusly they will have a match at some point soon, I am sure.
02:13The Intercontinental title match was good.
02:15It wasn't a blowaway match, but I don't think it should have been.
02:18When you have Jey, who is still, like, solidifying himself as the Intercontinental champion,
02:24as an upper mid-card type of a performer, you don't need to have super competitive
02:28matches every night.
02:30And with the story that they are telling with Xavier Woods right now, I don't think this
02:33needed to be a five-star, drag-em-out classic.
02:37You give Xavier Woods a little bit of shine, and then Jey gets the win.
02:41And then after, Braun comes out, turns back into a monster.
02:44I thought that was really well done.
02:45And so there, again, in something that probably would have been two separate segments on a
02:50three-hour show, they got over the Kofi and Xavier feud, still, in this match.
02:55They got Braun back to being a monster.
02:58With this match, you got Jey a win.
03:00So you just, you did a whole lot in just one segment.
03:03So I thought they did a really, a really good job.
03:06We covered, like, four different things in the first, like, 30 minutes of the show.
03:09So I thought they did a good job with that.
03:12One of the things I didn't love was R-Truth coming in and saying, like, look, you forgot!
03:17I'm not in the Judgment Day anymore.
03:19And making it a bit of a jokey thing out of that.
03:21And I get we're, hopefully, fucking building to this thing, of this being serious.
03:28But I thought it kind of took away from the turn last week, that everyone saw it coming.
03:33And, you know, it was what it was.
03:35But I thought it took away from it a little bit, that Truth is like, oh man, you thought
03:38I was with the Judgment Day.
03:39And then Miz kind of gets it back on track, and that, you know, that was fine.
03:47Now they're setting up a match.
03:48And the, like, our kids play together line, I thought was an interesting one.
03:52And so I do wonder if we're going to start to see a little bit more seriousness out of
03:56this, potentially.
03:57But it doesn't really have me.
03:59I thought we had a good pre-match promo with Sheamus and Pete Dunn setting up their match.
04:03I thought they did a really, really school job.
04:06This one was a little old school, in a lame way.
04:08Like, not old school in a, oh wow, this is Terry Funk and it's bleeding and all these
04:12different things.
04:13This was old school in a, remember that time there was, like, dog food and pumpkins, and
04:18this guy wore a jack-o'-lantern, and it was that sort of, like, a Smackdown 2015 on a
04:23pre-taped Thanksgiving episode, or something like that.
04:27They did end up having a good match out of it.
04:30It was a bit more serious than what they used to do with those sorts of things.
04:33Like, the finish would have been, like, Pete Dunn drowning in booze, or something like
04:36that.
04:37So, this one, they at least treated it with a little bit more seriousness.
04:41This was one of the ones where Joe Tessitore, I thought, went a little bit over the top
04:45on it.
04:46And I think his energy for big moments is really good.
04:49And I like him in boxing a lot.
04:51And maybe he was a little bit too 100% all the time for Monday Night Football.
04:56But I do think for the wild world of college football, he's pretty good at it as well.
05:01And for WWE, I think the emotion and the energy that he brings to big moments is actually
05:05really, really good.
05:08But when it's not actually a big moment, and he's still going at it, it just, it's
05:11a little, eh.
05:12Like, he called Sheamus's win over Pete Dunn in the Donnybrook Brawl a historic win
05:17for Sheamus.
05:18It's like, yeah, he got his hands zip-tied, but this is a guy who's won multiple championships.
05:23And was pursuing the Intercontinental title because he would have been a Grand Slam champion.
05:30So, in terms of the historic nature of Sheamus's career, winning the Donnybrook Brawl on a
05:36Monday in October against Pete Dunn, ah, it's probably not going to crack the top
05:4050.
05:41So, I thought that was where Joe Tessitore was maybe being just a little bit over the
05:45top.
05:46Uh, we had our, and what is probably going to be a more constant thing, um, Get Everybody
05:51On TV match.
05:52A 10-woman tag.
05:54It didn't advance anything.
05:57And this is, I think, going to be, honestly, like, these, these were the performers that
06:03I was wondering about when Raw got cut from two hours to three.
06:06All 10 women.
06:08In this match.
06:09You just worry about, where are they going to fit?
06:11And we have seen, just throwing different iterations of them out in matches every single
06:16week, isn't going to build the storyline enough to get people to give a shit about
06:19any of this.
06:20So there needs to be a little bit more character development, or any type of investment that
06:25is something other than, oh, they had a six minute match, check.
06:28There needs to be a little bit something built into that, I believe.
06:32And then we get to the main event.
06:33It's Gunther taking on Sami Zayn.
06:34I thought this was a really, really good match.
06:36They are hindered by the fact that no one was taking it seriously.
06:39That Sami Zayn was going to beat Gunther.
06:41They're already promoting Gunther against Cody Rhodes for, um, Crown Jewel, as the,
06:46the Crown Jewel tournament, to win the 8 billion pound belt, and I, and so you just, you couldn't
06:53take it seriously.
06:54Both put on a really, really good show, and obviously, like, you, you get past this hurdle
06:59for Gunther now.
07:00Um, you, you give Zayn a bit of plausible deniability that he never gave up, he just
07:04got choked out, and so maybe we get another Rocky montage, or something, um, with him.
07:11I do hope that there is, I hope that Sami doesn't just fall down the card now.
07:17We have done, um, the booking to WrestleMania a couple of times on this show, and each time
07:24I have put Sami Zayn in the main event against Gunther again.
07:28I think that, like, obviously not THE main event, they're Rock and Roman Reigns and Cody
07:32and Punk and all them, but, um, in terms of being in the World Heavyweight Championship
07:36match, I think Sami Zayn has the claim to that right now, and I think you can build
07:40him kind of back up, in kind of the way I wanted them to build up here, where he's
07:44actually winning matches, and doing those things.
07:46I think you can build him back up into that challenger, so I'm very fascinated to see
07:50what they do next with him.
07:51But overall, like, Raw being two hours, blew by, man, I, like, you can zoom right through
07:56that thing.
07:57I thought it was a good show, I still think they hit a lot of the main beats, but the
08:01concerns about the kind of secondary and tertiary storylines, I think are warranted, and I think
08:07definitely there could be an improvement on that going forward.
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