This RAW will be looked back on for its opening segment,
its closing segment, and a meeting about Daniel Bryan that fell towards the
middle. It’s important to emphasise that it was about Bryan and that it didn’t feature him. Bryan was not on the
show. He’s still injured and will presumably be absent from television until
Money in the Bank. There he will either defend the title against Kane in a
stretcher match or be forced to vacate it so a new champion can be crowned in
the MITB ladder battle.
The meeting (not that it was billed as that) was between
Stephanie McMahon and John Cena. Steph had gone to the ring to run down Daniel
Bryan (again) and his recently fired wife-slash-martyr for the Yes Movement
Brie. She did that for a couple of minutes before John Cena joined her to stand
up for Bryan. He did that by reminding the world of the clean victory Bryan had
handed him at SummerSlam and describing him as a great wrestler.
Then Cena revealed his latest problem with The Authority.
He believes that Stephanie and Triple H have allowed their dislike of Daniel
Bryan to influence their decision making. That was hardly a revelation: the
entire point of The Authority, who’ve been around as a heel faction for nine
months now, is that they pursue their own interests and ideals under the guise
of doing “what’s best for business.” They are corrupt bosses. That’s their
gimmick. To have Cena addressing that as some sort of revelation after so long
just made him look thick. It also didn’t do D-Bry any favours: it looked as
though he wasn’t able to show up and defend himself so Cena had to do it for
him. That wasn’t helped by Cena being naturally better at these sorts of
confrontational promos than Bryan.
The exchange between Cena and Steph wasn’t bad. It was,
in fact, rather good in places. But it gave us nothing we hadn’t seen or heard
before. It felt like WWE treading water with a storyline they know will get a
reaction instead of trying something new, which is what the absence of a top
star should prompt.
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| Batista' quit. Deal with it. |
The opening segment was my personal favourite of the
programme. At first it seemed like a standard issue Evolution promo (aside from
Batista randomly taking his jacket off as he walked down the aisle). ‘The Game’
talked about the gang’s feud with The Shield not being over and how he never
loses, even though he’d been pinned the night before and Evolution had been the
losers in both their encounters with ‘The Hounds of Justice’. Basically it was
exactly the approach that would have been taken if a third Shield versus
Evolution bout had been coming.
But that was the point. The writing team played on their predictability.
The swerve came when Batista plucked the microphone from Triple H’s hand,
mid-speech, and said he was tired of tangling with The Shield and wanted the
one-on-one WWE championship match he’d been promised. H3 said there was a plan
in place but Big Dave said he didn’t care. Triple H busted out a pep talk and
said Batista would get everything he’d been promised once The Shield were
beaten and dissolved.
Batista said he understood. The he quit. With a
sarcastic, Royal Family-esque wave that demonstrated why he’s so good at the
role he’s been in.
This was WWE’s way of writing ‘The Animal’ off television
for a while. It gives them the option of bringing him back as a babyface to
face Triple H or Randy Orton but that would be a foolish move. The last six
months should have taught WWE that nobody is interested in cheering for Batista.
The appeal of watching him is booing him and seeing how badly and
unprofessionally he reacts to it. He’ll return at some point, and when he does
it will be as a heel. I still think there’s appeal in a Batista v Bryan title
match, so if Bryan has the title when Big dave returns that’s an encounter I’d
like to see.
Then there was the closing segment. It’s the one that will
be remembered the longest because it featured (or seemed to, see two paragraphs
down) the dissolution of The Shield. Having been such a prominent part of WWE
for the last eighteen months that was always going to be a big deal. Which is a
good thing because taken on its own merits the sequence we saw close RAW was a
tad underwhelming.
 |
| Why, Seth? Why?! |
Triple H stood in the aisle with fellow Evolution members
Randy Orton and The Sledgehammer. He announced that beating The Shield in an elimination
match had been Plan A. Plan B was revealed to be Seth Rollins smashing Roman
Reigns and Dean Ambrose with a chair. Reigns was targeted first, leaving Deano
to do some of his best surprised acting, which was so hammy that I briefly
thought he was going to be switching sides too (and let’s face it, he was the
one most people thought would be going heel when the Shield split came). Rollins
then left the ring and handed the chair to ‘The Viper’ so that he could go in
and take a turn walloping the two good guys.
Perhaps it’s wishful thinking but I’m not convinced
Rollins’s heel turn will be permanent. It was interesting to note that he gave
Ambrose many more chair shots than Roman Reigns. That could have been under
orders to set up an Ambrose v Rollins singles match, leaving Reigns for Orton.
It could have been Rollins being a professional and knowing that Reigns’s back
was covered in bruises from the caning he’d taken the night before and not
wanting to harm him more than necessary. Or it could have been done with the
bruise excuse in mind with a plan to revealing that storyline Seth took it easy
on his buddy at a later date. When he reveals himself as a double agent,
basically.
It could have had no meaning whatsoever too, of course.
I know the double agent idea is unlikely. It’s probably
just wishful thinking on my part but I’d like it to turn out that The Shield
were in on the turn the whole time as part of a “trick” on Triple H. The thing
there is that it wouldn’t actually get them anything.
I wasn’t ready for The Shield to be split yet. They had
things they could still do together and I wanted them to hit their two year
mark as a group, for no other reason than two years is a good amount of time
for a multi-man act to stay together in WWE. The group had a special kind of
energy to it and could have gone further together. In fact I remain convinced
that Reigns could have captured the WWE championship sometime in the next year
without the group being split.
The split feels like a slightly desperate attempt to inject
some freshness into the top of the card. That’s something that’s needed because
top face Daniel Bryan is injured and little thought has been given to helping
other young acts flourish over the last three months. But it’s a short term
solution. No new names have been made with the move, and that’s ultimately what’s
needed. Instead what WWE have done is break up their most popular group in
years and destroy their second most popular act while their most popular is
injured.
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| It was a setup all along! |
It’s too early to say turning Rollins was a wrong
decision. There are things that could be done to make it interesting, such as having
Rollins reveal he’s been a “Triple H guy” for years. There’s a shot of Triple H
raising Rollins’s hand the night he won the NXT championship that could be
thrown up on the Titantron as proof of that. Plus Rollins versus Ambrose,
Rollins versus Reigns, and the tag matches we could get all stand a high chance
of being very good. So I’ll reserve judgement. But it’ll take a lot to make me
wish The Shield weren’t still together.
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