For everyone who whined about RAW having less than a half-hour of ring action last week, are you happy now? Okay, that was a bit unnecessarily snarky, but it's not surprising given how polarizing RAW 1000 was last week. This week, I thought we had a nice counterbalance, a look into what the average three-hour RAW should look like. There were two good pay-per-view type matches on the undercard, a passable main event (even with a predictably meh finish) and a great start to the AJ Lee era as GM. Oh hey, look at that, AJ finally got her last name!
The Miz/Dolph Ziggler vs. Chris Jericho/Christian match was everything I want from a "let's put four guys in a tag match and see what happens" and more. Jericho was a delicious throwback from his initial run, Christian did the face in peril thing really well and Miz and Ziggler did great as a devious bad guy team. The real star of the show was the Daniel Bryan/Sheamus street fight. Holy shit, did these guys bump their way around the arena and throw some serious haymaking shots at each other. That might have been the best RAW match of the year, but it's got a lot of company.
Hell, let's just say the star of the show completely was Bryan himself. Not only did he wrestle the match of the night, he was doing it in his character work as well. The pensive pacing outside AJ's office to begin with, his excellent interplay with the doctor later in the show and then especially his segment with R-Truth and Kofi Kingston were all fantastic. Just think, a year ago, his talking point was that he had no charisma. How things change. This year, he's gripping the audience by kicking an imaginary child. It's just awesome.
Into the main event stuff, CM Punk followed up his attack on The Rock last week with some character work that eerily cut out the entire run of his career inclusive of getting cashed-in upon by Alberto del Rio until RAW 999. He pretty much resumed his pipe bomb persona, and it gave me a tingly feeling in my spine like I was at a Chikara show or something like that. This is the CM Punk the WWE fell in love with, not the one who wore Triple H's jacket.
(Speaking of Trips... how many fucking times did we have to see that self-aggrandizing recap from last week? Ugh.)
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