Wrestling’s 4Rs: The Right, Wrong and Ridiculous of WWE Raw

How the 4Rs of wRestling Work!
Here is a quick explanation of the 4R’s. The column will run TWO times a week. We will group our feelings on the shows in various categories: The Right, the wRong and the Ridiculous. The Right is stuff that worked very well: a great promo, a great match and so on. PuRgatoRy is a section between the right and wrong. It shows equal traits from both sides that cannot be ignored and needs discussed. It is not a bad place per say, as things can get remedied or go the wrong way the very next week. The wRong is what it sounds like: bad matches, bad or boring promos and so on. The Ridiculous is stuff that had no right on TV: Stupid angles and so on. And there is always a possibility of a 5th R, which is as bad as they come. This column is supposed to be analytical, and at the right time very critical of the shows, it was the whole reason it was created. This is not a “mark” column, nor a “smark” column, our goal is to analyze the show from many different fronts, reward the good and call out the bad. We will not apologize for our opinions, they are as they are, whether positive or negative.

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By: Jack Stevenson

Raw 4.06.15:
QUICK MATCH RESULTS:
* Randy Orton d. Kane via DQ
* Seth Rollins d. Neville
* John Cena d. Stardust
* Naomi & Paige d. The Bella Twins
* Ryback d. Luke Harper
* The Lucha Dragons d. The New Day
* Roman Reigns d. The Big Show
* Sheamus d. Mark Henry
* The Miz d. Damian Mizdow
* Randy Orton d. Roman Reigns and Ryback in a Triple Threat Match to win a WWE World Championship match at Extreme Rules

THE RIGHT:
Neville vs. Seth Rollins: I really, really liked this match. Rollins dominated the match for a little too long, longer than was interesting, but they got the important bits of this match right; Neville’s brief flurries of offense were bursting with adrenaline and we would have believed he could pull out the victory had we not seen this story so many times before. Rollins in the end won comfortably with the Curb Stomp, but not quite so comfortably that his pre match belittling of Neville seemed entirely justified. As well as the solid storytelling, this match benefited from just how fresh it felt, featuring as it did two relatively young, hungry, high-tech wrestlers who’ve never fought each other on Raw before. Plus, the WWE Champion was fighting on free TV, and that hasn’t happened in so long that it actually felt quite significant and exciting. It was a match so fresh it reminded me we are in the science fiction year of 2015. The future is very much now.

John Cena vs. Stardust: This was a commendable effort. It was especially commendable considering there was close to zero chance of Stardust picking up the victory and so all the false finishes were theoretically futile, but for a split second when the Cross Rhodes was hit I wondered whether maybe, just maybe, we were going to see an unbelievable upset. The pace and structure of this was very similar to the Dean Ambrose match from last week and if we’re going to see weeks and weeks of these kind of matches as the John Cena U.S. Open rolls on, I can imagine it’ll get a bit wearisome. This week, though, I was most grateful that Cena was so willing to defend his belt against all comers, because it turned out to be one of the better segments of the show.

The New Day start to turn things around: This week saw the New Day finally acknowledge in a backstage interview that no one likes them. But guess what? They don’t care! As long as their clapping is loud enough to drown out us killjoy fans, they’re going to remain positive. This was exactly the direction everyone’s known for weeks that the New Day needed to take, and they’ve not left it too late to salvage this stable and the talents within it. A decent tag match with the Lucha Dragons kept up the stable’s fledgling momentum, although Kalisto didn’t get to dazzle as much as he did last week.

puRgatoRy:
Paige & Naomi vs. The Bella Twins: We’re living in a post AJ Lee world, and while she was a hugely capable and entertaining performer, there are better wrestlers than her in the Divas Division and her retirement, coupled with the ‘Give Divas a Chance’ thing, might just open up a decent spot on the card for one or two of WWE’s underutilized females. Naomi is stepping up replace AJ in the short term, teaming with Paige to see off the Bellas and put herself in title contention. I like Naomi, she’s enthusiastic and often looks quite adept at the wrestling, and she put on an acceptable performance in this acceptable tag match. There were some awkward moments- the spot where Brie accidentally kicked Nikki felt contrived, and that weird head scissors thing Naomi used to win the match looked dreadful. Still, they implemented the tag formula effectively and had a better match than all the WWE Championship contenders did on this week’s episode.

Sheamus vs. Mark Henry: This was an OK brawl that reminded us that Sheamus is mean now. He cut a pretty good promo before the match expressing his anger at his undersized foes Daniel Bryan and Dolph Ziggler, and then beat an oversized foe in Mark Henry, which would have been more impressive were Henry not frequently trotted out to give cheap credibility to a variety of different wrestlers.

THE wRong:
The way the Triple Threat number one contenders match was handled: After their victory in six man tag action last week, Roman Reigns, Ryback and Randy Orton were pitted against each other in a three way to determine who’d face Seth Rollins at Extreme Rules. On the face of it, this seemed a sound idea- a logical, fresh match-up in which every potential winner would make for an interesting challenger (although in Ryback’s case it would only be because of the sheer weirdness of him getting the nod over Reigns and Orton). However, it didn’t play out in very satisfying fashion at all- The Authority decided all of Rollins’ prospective opponents would have to compete in singles matches before the main event later in the evening, and all those bouts were vapid wastes of time. Randy Orton and Kane had a passable but dour seven minute skirmish which Orton won through a flat disqualification; Roman Reigns and The Big Show strengthened my theory that they’ve been cursed to fight each other for eternity; Ryback defeated Luke Harper with a memorable Shellshock in an otherwise unmemorable match. By the time the actual main event rumbled around there was precious little time left in the show, so it turned out to be the most perfunctory Triple Threat imaginable. There were a couple of half hearted three man spots, then the Authority interfered and Reigns tried and failed to take them all out single handedly, allowing Orton to pin Ryback and take the title match. The end result is good, Orton-Rollins should be a heck of a title match, but they could have got there in a much more interesting way if they’d scrapped the completely meaningless singles bouts and given more time and thought to creating a dramatic Triple Threat. I like a good storyline that spans an entire show. This was a bad storyline that spanned the entire show.

The Miz vs. Damian Sandow: Originally, fans got behind Sandow because he took his job as a stunt double to ridiculous extremes, and that was goofy and quite funny. The Miz got jealous of Sandow’s popularity and started to bully him, and then at WrestleMania Damian gave him his comeuppance by eliminating him from the Battle Royal in spectacular fashion. Now, we’ve entered a difficult stage of the rivalry where Sandow’s no longer the Miz’s copycat and he’s already got his revenge and neither wrestler is so talented or popular or interesting that you want to see the revenge continue on a weekly basis, so there’s not much reason to care. Damian Sandow is becoming Alex Riley. The crowd didn’t really react to this at all and the Miz’s shady, tights pulling victory was devoid of drama. The ‘Damian Mizdow’ character was enjoyable while it lasted, but it was always inherently limited and we’re beginning to see that now.

THE Ridiculous:
The Prime Time Players aren’t funny: You could say they’re ridiculously unfunny. They made fun of The Ascension and… I can’t remember who the other team were. I remember cringing though.

The 411:
This week’s Raw was packed with wrestling, which looked like it would be a very good thing after the Neville-Rollins and Cena-Stardust matches, which were well above par. That quality wasn’t maintained across the rest of the show though, the remaining bouts ranging from middling to bad. I would rather watch middling to bad wrestling than middling to bad interviews and angles and out of the ring drama though, and the distinct lack of those things was a refreshing change. It wasn’t as compelling as last week’s episode, but it was a decent watch on the whole.

Show Rating: 6.5

As a reminder, I will be going by the 411 scale…

0 – 0.9: Torture
1 – 1.9: Extremely Horrendous
2 – 2.9: Very Bad
3 – 3.9: Bad
4 – 4.9: Poor
5 – 5.9: Not So Good
6 – 6.9: Average
7 – 7.9: Good
8 – 8.9:Very Good
9 – 9.9: Amazing
10: Virtually Perfect

The 979th edition is over…