WWE went all in on shilling Twitter in the last month or so. It's gotten so bad that I'm contemplating shutting mine down because it now annoys me. Nah, not really, but still, the height of that Tweet-spam has to be The Rock predictively making things trend, only not seeing them trend at all in some cases. That was about the worst thing about the solo portion of his show-closing promo. I was afraid we'd get weaksauce from Rocky, but he proves again that he's one of the best live promos. He was looser, more energetic and brought better material. I may be in the minority among my commenters and readers and fellow peers, but I enjoyed the set-up to the "Finally..." bit. It was a fresh take on his older material. It's what we've been clamoring for, right? Plus, the little one liners when he went into a much more subdued tone were really cool.
Of course, he only had the second best promo of the night. John Cena, Sr., wow, that was pretty epic. He had such a great sense of irony tonight, and his delivery as the distressed parent wanting to fight his son's battles was refreshing. Hell, the whole "This Is Your Life" segment, though making me preemptively cringe, was a pleasant surprise. Cena Jr. felt a bit cardboard, but I loved seeing Foley again, and all three who came out to ironically roast Cena were really lively and amusing. I especially enjoyed Bull Buchanan as the personification of a country music song.
But it's tonight that punctuated how badly they've botched the build to this Survivor Series main event. This is what they should have been doing the week after Cena announced he'd picked Rocky, not six days before the show. It's like the writers show flashes of competence and the rest of the time, they just try to veil dick jokes behind PG doublespeak and it makes for some bad shows. It's frustrating, and before anyone says "lolz change the channel", they do stuff each week that's really good.
For example, any time Dolph Ziggler comes out and wrestles or talks or even just flicks his hair, it's a win. He came out tonight interrupting Vickie Guerrero, and holy shit, he was just money, self-aware money as he referenced how good he is on a regular basis. He even almost made a Mason Ryan match look good. Almost. There's also any time Mark Henry or CM Punk or Alberto del Rio wrestle, and they were all in the same match with a criminally underrated Big Show. Henry's also gotten himself a t-shirt finally. It's about fucking time, man. Santino recounting his Royal Rumble near-win, Zack Ryder getting people to sign his petition, Jack Swagger and Sheamus getting some decent time to wrestle... those things all made RAW worth watching tonight.
Those things being good counteracted the suck that was their blatant disregard for women's wrestling, their continual humiliation of Jim Ross and the insistence that Michael Cole always talking about himself is a good thing. The last two things I won't go any further on because people including myself have gone on ad nauseam, but again, the women's wrestling stuff is appalling, especially coming out of a weekend where Sara del Rey, Portia Perez, Rachel Summerlyn and Mia Yim all proved that there's no such thing as a gender barrier when it comes to good wrestling. But no, let's keep booking these shitty models-turned-"wrestlers" to get fluke-ass wins over Beth Phoenix and Nattie Neidhart. It's comedic at this point.
So yeah, RAW was definitely uneven tonight, but hey, the good moments were really good. I just wish they would have pulled this out of their collective ass, especially concerning the main event match, a few weeks prior to Survivor Series.
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