WARNING!!! If you aren’t up to hearing me complain then leave now while you still have time. This is going to be brutal. Now remember I gave you fair warning. Okay here I go and this is not going to be pretty because as great as Smackdown was on Friday night that’s how crappy Raw was last night. Have I seen worse? Oh hell yeah much worse, but this show rated right up there. I have to put all the blame on Vince and the creative staff because creativity wise this show was AWFUL.
I don’t even know where to begin. I guess for me it’s easier if I list all the garbage with my little side notes and then try to end on segments that I liked. Listen complaining about the shows is not why I write columns, I do this because I loved watching WWE programming, but you know when a show is bad it’s bad and although many might give it high marks I know there are plenty that feel like I do and will understand why I’m so nasty about what we got last night. Here’s the list of horrors.
1. Big Show and Vickie Guerrero’s backstage encounter. There were two bad parts to this. First these two have absolutely no chemistry and never did. So watching them interact was really bad. Second when Vickie made the Big Show vs. John Cena match for Judgment Day not only did the live crowd not react, but I wanted to cry even though I knew it was going to be made. Oh this segment was a major dud.
2. One of the worst segments of the night was Jillian and Festus’s sing off. I would love to know who came up with this idea and who thought it was funny, let alone thought that it should be put on TV? This was beyond crap; the time given to this atrocity could have been given to one of the many short matches of the night.
3. The most painful segment to watch that went on and on and on and well you get what I’m saying was watching the “the severely injured” John Cena being attacked by a slow moving Big Show. If John Cena was feeling the pain physically I was feeling it mentally. This was PATHETIC. I would love to know what John Cena did to deserve this so called feud with Big Show. My God and to think that I will be at Judgment Day and I have to watch these two go at it.
4. And speaking of John Cena, as I said last week, he was thrown in a search light at Backlash and we are supposed to believe that Cena is in really bad shape. Hey Vickie told Big Show about his injuries and that Cena wasn’t cleared to wrestle. And hum, Triple H got punted in the head, painful? Yes, but to me not as major as what Cena got, yet Hunter is still off selling and the very injured Cena has managed to limp his way back to Raw two weeks in a row. Wow creative has really shown their stupidity here. Plus it wasn’t enough that Cena came back and got the Big Show torture, but he first made his way out to I guess come face to face with the Miz who has called Cena out for the last two weeks. I don’t know I would think Cena would be home resting and getting better especially since we are supposed to buy into the fact that he’s in bad shape. Yeah Vince and that marvelous creative team really looked good in this angle.
5. And creative does it again. It’s not like we haven’t seen Shane McMahon vs. every member of the Legacy a lot, and last night we got the same thing that we always get, Shane over powering and dominating every last member of the group. MY GOD enough already. For those who have complained about Triple H doing the very same thing, I say at least he’s a full time wrestler. Shane isn’t and he has been in the ring just a little too much for me as of late and it’s hard for me to watch him not only take out Rhodes and DiBiase, but it angers me to see him look so much stronger out there than Randy Orton. Yeah I hated the main event.
Now my list is not done. The following don’t deserve to be on my list of horrors because the following weren’t that bad, but still I can’t say they deserve to be on the positive list from Raw. So I guess you could say I liked some parts of the segments, but not all.
1. While I wasn’t so into the start of the first match Shane vs. Randy like the Buffalo, NY crowd was, I was totally into MVP running out to help Shane. He was a pleasant surprise and I had high hopes that this was just the start of some great things to happen as the show went on. Ah but I was wrong. I also hated the Win Your In gimmick that was so cheesy.
2. I still get a big kick out of Matt Heel Hardy. I am still really enjoying is whining about his broken metacarpal. Remember it’s broken in three places. And to top it off the bit about filing a protest because he’s being forced to wrestle made me laugh. He’s coming off like a true heel and I love it. Now the match with Matt vs. Kofi Kingston wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t good. Why would it be? You have Hardy in a cast so even though he did a nice job with it on, it still prevented him from putting on a Matt Hardy match. I just thought this one was understandably kind of slow and it lacked a lot of excitement, but considering the handicap I can’t really bash it.
3. The MVP vs. Cody Rhodes match was okay, but it was William Regal on the mic that I liked more. I liked how he was praising MVP and coming off like an MVP fan, only to go after him during his match.
4. Mickie vs. Maryse was okay, I think I just liked the fact that Mickie was out and that she had a new opponent to work with.
5. Batista vs. Ted DiBiase was good, but by the time this came on I was kind of bored with the whole show, so my interest for this one was basically gone.
6. Carlito vs. THE Brian Kendrick I will admit I kind of liked it, but like every other match last night it was given very little time. And honestly I don’t get why Carlito and Kendrick were against each other, but it’s just something else that made no sense last night.
That leaves me with two good segments. One was short and funny and one ROCKED. Finally after a long drought Santino had me laughing. He had some good material for a change, like making swine flu jokes at Vickie’s expense. Now it’s not the swine flu joke that made me laugh it was the fact that he referred to Vickie as a pig and later on squealed like one. Yes a little sophomoric but still funny. But what I really liked was Santino was doing the Vickie material, Chavo stood near Santino and Santino did the “OH Chavo” part to Chavo’s theme. Trust me I was laughing. Yeah Santino made a slight comeback with me last night. But the non-wrestling segment that I loved was the segment with the Miz. And Kevin no I don’t have a crush on the Miz, that’s a little inside joke for one of my friends, but this guy stole the show with his Cena promo. I thought his promo last week was hot, but this one was on fire. He had one-liners that were not only true, but they were funny as well. These were my two favorite lines of the promo, but remember I thought the whole thing was excellent. The first line was when he was wondering where Cena was. He came up with, “maybe Cena’s trying to find his latest movie script. “I mailed it to The Rock. He used it as toilet paper.” And then this one, and this was my favorite: “Cena, you are all hype, churned out by the WWE Machine so the kiddies have someone to scream for and their cougar mothers have someone to fantasize about.” This is one time Creative showed creativity and that’s what made this so good. I can’t believe that I just gave the Miz such a glowing compliment. Now the thing is, can the Miz keep this going? That I don’t know but so far so good.
Well as you can see this was one bad show, but I kept my promise and ended on a positive note. And as I said earlier, complaining isn’t something that I plan on doing or want to do, but there’s no way that I could have made this anything but negative. Now I will not be back over the weekend, but then again for those of you that hate my bitching you can consider this a break, Because it’s mothers day weekend, I will be busy both of those days, but I’ll be back in a week with my thoughts on the last Raw before Judgment Day. And who knows it could be the total opposite of what I wrote today.
Email lindarobin3@yahoo.com