BRM Reviews the 6/1/2020 Raw (HORRIBLE!)

[Big Red Machine]

SETH ROLLINS’ “RETIREMENT CEREMONY” FOR REY MYSTERIO JR.- This was a HUGE waste of time. Seth explained that he was having this “retirement ceremony” for Rey because he knew Rey would be too prideful to come out and retire for himself. Seth then went on to tell us over and over and over again that Rey was chosen to be a “sacrifice” for him. If this sounds familiar, it’s because he’s said it sixteen times per promo on every show for the past three weeks. Eventually Aleister Black got sick of this sh*t and came out for…

ALEISTER BLACK vs. SETH ROLLINS (w/Buddy Murphy & Austin Theory)- 7.75/10
We got some action for a while. Rollins worked over the arm. He eventually threw Black on the outside and his pals started to menace him so Humberto Carrillo ran out with a chair to keep them away. What a fortunate time to need to take a commercial break.
After the commercial break we got back to the action and it was all GREAT stuff. The guys on the outside stayed out of it until the end, where they got one spot that didn’t actually affect the finish because Black overcame the distraction and won with a roll-up. Murphy and Theory attacked Aleister after the match. Carrillo and Rollins also got involved, and we wound up with Rollins Curb Stomping Carrillo while the other two restrained Black, then forcing Black down for a Curb Stomp as well.
I didn’t like the finish very much, as I don’t see how it’s productive for someone to beat Rollins before Rey (or, as we would learn later, potentially Dominic) does. That’s where the real heat is, and the cathartic release we fans are supposed to feel upon seeing the wronged babyface get his or her revenge on the heel is lessened if we’ve seen that heel get beaten several times in between.
The reasoning behind everything we saw here felt like “well, we don’t want Black to lose, but we also want to do this match, so we’ll have Black win by roll-up and Rollins will get his heat right back. The problem with that line of thinking (other than what I outlined above, I mean) is that it’s essentially trading water. You’re taking heat away from the heel with the intention of giving it right back immediately afterwards. At the end of tonight’s show, this story will not have moved forward for any of the five wrestlers involved in this match and its accompanying pre-match segment… and the show has been on the air for well over half an hour at this point. You’ve expended over one sixth of your runtime accomplishing absolutely nothing.
What they should have done was have a quick line from the announcers at the beginning of the show telling us that Rollins and his pals were barred from the building tonight so that they wouldn’t interrupt Rey’s big announcement. That way you:
1. Can let Rollins and his crew have some rest
2. If you want to give Aleister a win, you can do so without having him get beaten up right afterwards
3. Let Carrillo go a week without getting his ass kicked
4. Save over half an hour of TV time for other things (like not giving us a main event that goes three minutes)
5. Prevent management from looking like either pot-stirring dicks or morons by not allowing the guy who injured Rey to come out and hold something that you are promoting as a “retirement ceremony” for a guy who you don’t even know if he’s retiring!
Or, if you feel the need to at least have Rollins’ guys on TV, you could have just Rollins barred from the building and have Theory get into a confrontation with Vega’s group over having kicked him out, so that when Rollins comes back next week, you can show him telling Theory off for this in the guise of teaching him to be patient or humble or disciplined or whatever. Or you could have Theory get beaten up as a result of this confrontation and want revenge next week but have Rollins tell him no, because Theory deserved what he got for not okaying his actions with Rollins first. You know… something that makes Rollins feel like an actual character who has an actual message that he’s trying to teach his disciples, so that they feel like a teacher and his disciples rather than just a dude and his lackeys who you have decided to refer to as “disciples” to fit the cute nickname you’ve created for Seth?
Or you could have that confrontation cause a schmoz that involves Carrillo and Black and Owens and Crews as well, and use it as a set-up for a four-way tag at the PPV in just thirteen days, where you do a finish that lets you continue the Crews vs. Vega’s Group feud over the US Title and also gives you ready-made challengers for the tag titles so that you don’t have to drag this Street Profits vs. Viking Raiders crap out any longer.
Just spit-balling here. It took me a total of five minutes to come up with all of those scenarios.

CHARLY CARUSO INTERVIEWS ZELINA VEGA & ANGEL GARZA- decent stuff from the heels.
Garza is trying to seduce Charly and she’s clearly into it. He gave her a rose before he left, but after he left Vega took it away, ripped all the petals off, threw them in Charly’s face, and then handed the stem back to her. Look… if you want Garza to be this seductive heartthrob sex symbol, you’ve got to at least imply that his seduction is actually successfully.

SHAWN MICHAELS SAYS HE THINKS EDGE & ORTON CULD ACTUALLY HAVE “THE GREATEST WRESTLING MATCH EVER”- bad
Look… I think at this point pretty much everyone has figured out what the plan is here: At some point Orton is going to cheat to win or blatantly cheat to get DQed, and the idea is that we’re supposed to be angry at him for “ruining what should have been ‘The Greatest Wrestling Match Ever.’” The problem with this is that IT’S F*CKING 2020! We all know that Randy is doing what he’s been booked to do, so no one is going to be angry at Randy for cheating; we’re going to be angry at YOU for wasting so much of our time talking about how this is going to be “the Greatest Wrestling Match Ever,” just so you could give us YET ANOTHER f*ck finish, because the two we’re been getting each week on both Raw and NXT apparently aren’t enough.
And I’m not saying that fans won’t get angry at heels anymore in 2020. Guys like MJF prove that that just isn’t true. What I’m saying is that you have to realize that you implicate yourselves as part of this plan to screw us with the way you’ve gone so ridiculously overboard on this match with your hype machine, and the way you’ll continue to go overboard after the fact when you talk about how terrible it was that Randy ‘ruined “the Greatest Wrestling Match Ever.”
What? You thought we wouldn’t get suspicious when you started to promote something as a “wrestling match” for the first time in (at least) twenty years?! Or that we wouldn’t get suspicious that you started going so insanely overboard with the way you were hyping this match in advance as being so great when not even ROH at the time when it was most dependent on hyping the work-rate of the matches to sell DVDs to survive ever went that far (and doubly so for a match that hadn’t even happened yet)?

MVP & LANA BACKSTAGE- bad
Lana is annoyed at MVP and tells him to leave Lashley alone. MVP tells her that he has no interested in getting involved in an “attention-seeking” argument with Lana because he has “actual work to do.”
Lana alleges that MVP is a “leech,” trying to use Lashley to “revive your washed-up career.” MVP denies this, but says “even if that was true, wouldn’t that make two of us?” Lana got angry and slapped him. Eventually. Then she stormed off
I called this a bad segment, but the fact is that only one of these two was bad, and that was Lana, and she was bad on every axis. First of all, her acting was terrible. Secondly, absolutely nothing MVP said here was false. Not one word of it. Lana doesn’t actually have anything to be doing here because she isn’t booked to wrestle, and rarely ever is, while MVP has been doing a lot of wrestling and managing, and does, in fact, have a match with the WWE Champion tonight.
And because of this, Lana starting an argument with him does come off as attention-seeking. She wants Bobby’s attention. And I would say that that’s fine because she’s his wife, but then shouldn’t she want what’s best for him? We have seen or heard no evidence that MVP is keeping Lashley away from Lana by making him train late into the night or having him live in a training house with Team MVP or whatever, and if that was true, you’d think Lana would bring it up, but she hasn’t. Lana just seems to be jealous that someone else is involved in Lashley’s career, when she should be grateful because- let’s face it- Lana managing Lashley has not worked out well for Lashley at all. It has worked out so poorly that Lashley was telling her not to come to ringside even before MVP got involved.
Furthermore, if we examine Lashley’s career- and especially his recent run in WWE, but we can even extend this to his Impact run, too- Lashley has been at his best when he has had a manager. He might be good on his own, but when he seems to need the help of a manager to at least get over that hump to the top level (Lashley was still able to be a top guy in TNA and win many titles when MVP left, but he needed MVP to get him get that first one and motivate, and he only ever had a title during this WWE run when he had Lio Rush as his manager). And ever since he has aligned himself with MVP, he has clearly been more dominant, and has already been awarded a world title shot.
Hell, even if Lana is just selfish and only cares about herself, she should still be able to recognize that Lashley motivated by MVP has been winning more matches and thus making more money than Lashley alone or Lashley managed by her. And, frankly, I’m shocked that someone as smart as MVP hasn’t pointed that last part out to her yet.


KAYLA BRAXTON ASKS APOLLO CREWS WHO HE WILL BE DEFENDING HIS NEWLY-WON US TITLE AGAINST- meh
We get some good babyface stuff from Crews first, although they’re quickly hitting the point where if he keeps talking about how happy he is to be champion and how hard he has worked and all of his emotions about winning, it’s going to start getting really annoying.
Crews says that he is giving Kevin Owens a title shot because he thinks Owens deserves one. Owens limps out to the ring, and says that he doesn’t want a title shot out pity. Crews assures him that it isn’t pity, so Owens says he’ll wait to seek revenge on Angel Garza, so we get our…

WWE UNITED STATES TITLE MATCH: Apollo Crews(c) vs. Kevin Owens- 5/10
By the time the bell rang for this match it had been ALMOST A HALF HOUR SINCE THE LAST ACCTION WE SAW. They wrestled for ten minutes and it was mostly fine… until Team Vega ran in for the f*cking DQ in this here title match which is one of just four actual wrestling matches they’ve been promoting for tonight.
We went to a commercial, and when we came back, we were predictably in the middle of…
APOLLO CREWS & KEVIN OWENS vs. ANDRADE “CIEN” ALMAS & ANGEL GARZA (w/Zelina Vega)- 4.5/10

Normally my comment about something like this would be to get annoyed at starting a title match just to give us a f*ck finish so you can turn it into a tag match when you could have just promoted the tag match the whole time. What they set up here was actually a situation where I would be fine with the way they did it because it gets over the idea that Crews wants to be a fighting champion, and the fact that Crews was being allowed to pick his first challenger is a reason why a guy like Andrade wouldn’t be getting his rematch right away if losing the belt bothers him so much and he thinks the win was a fluke (which a Tweet that Tom Phillips read to us indicates that he does). Not a particularly good reason, but at least it’s a reason.
But when you do so many f*ck finishes (and especially in matches that you’re actually trying to hype), it makes me angry when you do them in situations where I otherwise would be fine with them.
The match itself was these guys doing the usual stuff for a while. Owens’ knee got worked over yet again. Owens was able to make the hot tag, Crews made his comeback, and won the match for his team, pinning Andrade, which feels like 100% the wrong finish.
I don’t know what they’re planning on doing at the PPV, but the best scenario to me seems like Andrade getting his rematch against Crews for the US Title, and Garza vs. Owens in a grudge match over Garza attacking Owens’ knee last week. You’ve already highlighted Owens’ injured knee in this match, so why the hell wouldn’t you give Andrade the win over Owens via submission, building Andrade up for his title match and making Owens feel like the underdog going into a match against Garza? Throw in a promo by Zelina later on claiming that Crews picked the weakened Owens because he’s a coward and didn’t want to face Andrade because he knows that Andrade is right when he says the title change was a fluke that Andrade proved it tonight by pinning Owens, and you’ve effectively built to your PPV title match, with your go-home show left for your big go-home promos from both sides. Have Owens say something mean about Zelina on social media this week and have Garza cut a promo next week challenging Owens to a match at the PPV to “defend Zelina’s honor,” and you’ve got all of your build in place for that match, too.
(The other theoretical direction they could go at the PPV is Owens vs. Crews for the title to finish up the match that got ruined tonight, in which case you could argue that this finish is okay, but I’d argue that Owens getting the win instead of Crews would have been even better. Also, in the scenario I laid out above, Zelina claiming that Crews only picked Owens to defend the title against because Owens was injured and Crews is a coward is enough of a seed that you should be able to come back to Owens vs. Crews for the July PPV. Or, if you want to extend things even more, you can have Owens lose to Garza at Backlash, have Crews defend against Garza at the July PPV, and then do Owens vs. Crews for the title at SummerSlam.)

KAYLA BRAXTON INTERVIEWS ASUKA- bad
Has someone told Asuka that she’s not supposed to be a human cartoon character?

THE STREET PROFITS AND VIKING RAIDERS GO BOWLING- DUD on principle
I’ve seen these two teams engage non-wrestling competitions for the past three weeks, and one relevant thing has happened. If these guys just hadn’t been on TV for the past three weeks, this story would be in the same place, so why should I waste my time watching them do the same dumb thing again?

We’re at about an hour and forty minutes into the show at this point and have only had three matches, one of which was as a result of a run-in on another, so really just two wrestling things. We got a recap of last week’s angle with the women’s tag titles and The IIconic’s music started to play for our third match… but no. Instead we had to cut back stage to see…

THE IICONICS ARGUE WITH NIKKI CROSS AND ALEXA BLISS! BACKSTAGE- F*CKING HORRENDOUS!
Their match is next, but they’re all in the gym, all shouting incoherently in what feels like a completely staged argument. I’d be shocked if most of the things they were saying were actual words. Billie shoved Nikki, and then we got an absolutely TERRIBLE moment where it was clear that they knew they weren’t supposed to really start fighting because Adam Pearce was going to run in and break it up but Pearce wasn’t there yet so they were trying to make it look like they were about to start fighting without actually touching each other, the result was… well… that it looked like they were trying to make it look like they were about to fight without actually touching each other yet. It was embarrassingly bad.
And making it all worse is the fact that THIS SERVED NO PURPOSE! All it did was fill time so that they could delay the match until after a commercial break. I realize that this is a taped show so can’t tell the matches to go longer, but there are many better alternatives to putting something this f*cking embarrassing on the air. How about a promo of Aleister Black and Humberto Carrillo vowing revenge? Or fallout from Andrade’s loss with Zelina’s crew? Or how about another video package. You’ve already filled the show up with way too many, so it’s not like one more is going hurt!

NIKKI CROSS (w/Alexa Bliss!) vs. BILLIE KAY (w/Peyton Royce)- 4/10
It was almost 1:45:00 into the show before the bell rang for our fourth match. Billie Kay won clean. In other Billie Kay news, she has a move with a name. Her big boot is apparently called “Shades of Kay.” Her finisher, which is apparently “some sort of Uranage” according to Tom Phillips, is still unnamed.

CHARLY CARUSO INTERVIEWS DREW MCINTYRE- fine

REY MYSTERIO JR. PROVIDES A MEDICAL UPDATE- meh
The update is that Rey’s future is in doubt because his eye is infected. He might be back in a few weeks, or he might never be able to wrestle again. The announcers asked him about Rollins’ statements from earlier, so Rey clarified for us that he didn’t sacrifice himself for Seth Rollins. You know… just in case anyone at home was too dumb to figure that out.
Dominick showed up and said that if Rey can’t get revenge on Rollins, someone from the family should. Rey tried to calm Dominick down. After Rey left, Dominick stayed at the camera and said that Rollins was a “man of Scripture” before telling Rollins “an eye for an eye.”
This would have been good except that We’ve had SOOOOO many false starts with Dominick over the past few years that I won’t believe he’s going to actually wrestle a match until I see it.

NIA JAX PROMO- meh
Nia was doing the “heel lying so blatantly that I’m supposed to get really angry about it” promo. It wasn’t terrible (by Nia Jax standards, anyway), but on a night where there has been SOOO MUCH F*CKING TALKING, if you tell me that a match is up next, then instead give me a promo and cut to a commercial, it’s just going to piss me off and make me a lot less predisposed to like anything you’re doing.

And we get back from the commercial and Nia’s music is playing… and Tom Phillips pitches to a f*cking recap of last week’s R-Truth and Gronk promos, followed by R-Truth showing up at Gronk’s house, rolling him up on his lawn, and pinning him to win the 24/7 Title, so now we’ve got that stupid f*cking thing being on TV every week again to look forward to. If you are a wrestler at a WWE taping and you find out you’re being released, please to the business a favor and steal that thing on your way out and chuck if off the nearest bridge.

NIA JAX vs. KAIRI SANE- 0.5/10
They cut backstage multiple times to show us Asuka chanting for Kairi out loud even though she’s the only person around. This went about three minutes and didn’t flow well, but I believe that was because it was heavily edited due to Kairi’s injury.
Nia menaced Kairi after the match but Asuka came out to stare her down until she backed off.

RANDY ORTON PROMO- GREAT (other than the pitiful catchphrase at the end)

CHARLOTTE FLAIR PROMO- fine
She plugged TakeOver, then talked trash about Asuka until Asuka came out to interrupt her so they could have…

CHARLOTTE FLAIR vs. ASUKA- 7/10
These two were having a GREAT match (I’m a HUGE mark for reversing submissions back and forth, and even more so when it’s not just the same two submissions over and over again), although I will admit that the selling could have been better… when Nia Jax came out to Asuka’s music in one of Asuka’s masks, and Asuka got distracted and got counted out.
STOP IT WITH THE G-D DAMN F*CK FINISHES! IF YOU DON’T WANT TO BEAT EITHER WRESTLER CLEANLY, DON’T BOOK THE F*CKING MATCH!
Nia then ran Asuka over with one shoulder tackle, and I guess this was too much for Asuka to get back up.

CHARLY CARUSO INTERVIEWS LANA- bad
Charly asks Lana if she thinks it might have actually been MVP’s idea that Lana not come to ringside during Lashley’s matches and not Lashley’s. Didn’t Lashley ask her to stay in the back before MVP came into the picture?
Anyway, Lana decides that she’s going to go to ringside during MVP’s match tonight. Oh goody. A set-up for YET ANOTHER F*CK FINISH.

DREW MCINTYRE vs. MVP (w/Bobby Lashley)- 2/10
I am, if nothing else, a fair man, so I owe WWE an apology. Even though Lana came out to ringside, we did not get a f*ck finish here. We got a three-minute main event, which really isn’t any more satisfying.

POST-MATCH SEGMENT- fine
Lashley grabs Drew and locks him in the full nelson. They went off the air very quickly after this, which means that they had a choice between giving us the challenger beating down the champion for a longer period of time, or that atrocious backstage bit between the IIconics and Bliss & Cross, and they chose the latter. SMH.


Another TERRIBLE episode of Raw, full of f*ck finishes, water-treading, and other sorts of bad booking. Throw in having ONE match in THREE HOURS that went a satisfactory length of time for it’s spot and also had a satisfactory finish, and SOOOOO much time filled with video packages and pointless talking, and you’ve got yourself a recipe for a big, giant crock of sh*t.