If I were the kind of person who lived by the mantra ‘If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all’ I would summarise this week’s Raw thusly: for a special edition of Raw it was mercifully short, some benevolent soul deciding that three hours of this drivel would be too much. Yes indeed folks, this week Raw was celebrating its 900th episode. While the commentators never explain why 900 as a number is so special, they sure take every opportunity to remind of just how great they are to have reached such a milestone. King and Cole especially enjoyed lording it over other famous, long-running shows like Friends and Seinfeld and took unnerving pleasure in having 600 or so more episodes than Monday Night Football. This got to me on a number of levels. First of all, the number of broadcast episodes is hardly an index of quality; nor is it really fair to compare something that goes out weekly to something that broadcasts 17 times a year like Monday Night football. Going by WWE’s logic, BBC News broadcasts should have us as a nation huddled round our TV sets foaming at the mouth in anticipation for TV gold. But hey, if it’s been on the air for that long it must be doing something right…right?
Staying on the subject of the commentary, Cole’s heel leanings make for such a refreshing break from the dreary, banal sycophancy usually emitting from the announce table. It really is entertaining to listen to Cole each week as he becomes more and more enraged not just by Daniel Bryan but also by other face routines, having recently singled out R-Truth’s ‘What’s up?’ catchphrase as a new target for vitriol. This transition is slow, as it should be, but Cole sorely needs a passionate face announcer to work off of and counter his arguments. At best King will wearily dismiss what Cole’s saying or, more often than not, simply ignore him or change the subject like a parent trying to deal with a spoilt child’s incessant line of questioning about how long a journey will take or how babies are made.
If you think I’m neglecting to mention the wrestling then that’s probably because the Raw booking team forgot to book any. Sure, there were some matches, but not much wrestling. The booking on this show was horrible. Whoever it is booking Bret Hart in matches isn’t fooling anyone. You don’t particularly need the observational skills of Sherlock Holmes to notice that since coming back in January Bret Hart hasn’t taken a single bump or blow to the head. Booking him in a singles match isn’t fooling anyone. Instead of seeing the guy who’s recently come back from a vegetative state versus the Undertaker, we were treated to some Scooby Doo style hijincks as Wade Barrett and the gang tried to take out the scary deadman while someone, or something keeps turning out the lights. Jinkies!
Only the main event went beyond the three minute mark and, in a match involving ten people, only really managed to make one person look even slightly better than before. What puzzled me about this five on five elimination match of Raw’s top main eventers versus the Nexus is that three weeks ago Jericho and Edge were forced to put their differences aside to take on the Nexus because they posed such a huge threat to their careers, way of life and very existence! Three weeks later and Nexus no longer evoke anything like the melodrama they did just a few weeks before when they were hyped up as being more deadly than the Bubonic plague. Nexus have fallen so far that Jericho and Edge nonchalantly get themselves disqualified and simply walk out, probably wondering what all the fuss over Nexus was about to begin with. I was really getting into the Nexus story but losing the match at Summerslam utterly killed their momentum and now they’re being booked to look like absolute jokes. Nexus barely managed to win a 5 on 3 match, with Barrett pinning Orton, in a victory as convincing and impressive as predicting lottery numbers after they have already been drawn.
But don’t forget to tune in for the 901st thrilling instalment of the longest running weekly episodic television show in history!
