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| I don't need or want to see this again Photo Credit: WWE.com |
Vince McMahon and WWE deciding to go with its fourth- or fifth-most important pay-per-view head-to-head with the aforementioned series finale to the most recent instance of monoculture in the modern popular vernacular seemed like a mistake even as Thrones started to veer wildly towards hasty demise after the landmark third episode this season "The Long Night." Last night's finale was met with mixed reactions from fans and critics alike, even if most of those reactions were negative. It's not the first time a monocultural event met with disappointment. How I Met Your Mother, The Sopranos, The Dark Knight Rises, and LOST, for example, all went out to questionable endings, even though all of them will have some vociferous defenders (for example, I swear by the final season and finale of LOST even if it gets me into more fights with mutual acquaintances on social media than any other stance I have). Thrones fits here because after that landmark battle at Winterfell episode, the writers seemed to cram more material and plot advancement in three episodes than belonged there. HBO apparently offered showrunners David Benioff and DB Weiss ten episodes, which they refused, but honestly, what they tried to fit in the back half of this season really needed about two more seasons of fleshing out.
Wrestling fans are used to this kind of big show disappointment, especially people who have stayed with the medium after the purchase of World Championship Wrestling. WWE has at times been uninspired at best with its PPV offerings, and even if the shows themselves have had good-to-outstanding wrestling, the booking decisions have set off fervor. So basically, wrestling fans know the drill that a lot of prestige television fans go through maybe once every couple of years at the most frequent. However, I'm not sure anyone expected WWE to tell Weiss and Benioff to hold its beer with the finish of the men's briefcase match, but in retrospect, I'm not sure McMahon likes being upstaged, even if it's by a show with which it only shares staged violence in common. So he called out Brock Lesnar.
Yes, Lesnar's artificially-extended forever reign with the Universal Championship ended at WrestleMania, a grateful public reveling in Rollins presumably sending his ass back to Ultimate Fighting Championship. So you'll have excuse my and everyone else's exhaustion that he'd show up again to spring another presumed forever-reign on the company. If Lesnar is the panacea for sliding ratings that are rumored to have Smackdown canceled before it even begins on Fox, then I would suggest he refer to the famous quote from Narcotics Anonymous pamphlets in the late 19th Century, "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results." None of the evidence shows he moves the needle anyway. Basically, Lesnar and Ronda Rousey only really fill the "big name" quotient because people know who they are independently, or more accurately, because of exploits in UFC. It might help if WWE knew individuality and cult of personality sold tickets over homogeneity, but I already wrote that piece recently.
In reality, Lesnar having the briefcase severely limits its implementation. He doesn't wrestle on any TV dates, so any cash-in on RAW or Smackdown is out the window. He only shows up to selected pay-per-views. If he cashes in early, then he either undoes WrestleMania with Rollins or it's terrible optics with Kingston. WWE already has Lars Sullivan running amok on television, and despite lightly punishing him for being an intractable racist goon, they seem to still want to have him attacking anyone with skin darker than a light sunburn from the Jersey Shore. I mean, the company letting him murk all three Lucha House Party members last night shows how dedicated they are to assuaging concerns that it's not fascist-adjacent in any way possible. So having the arch-Aryan dude whose bigotry is also on record would just dogpile onto those bad optics at the very least. If they wait to have him cash in, well, maybe that might be the best option depending on whom he cashes in, but the resulting title reign, unless he hilariously fails in his cash-in, would be a return to narrative problems that have plagued the company in recent memory.
Lesnar's surprise appearance (by some accounts a surprise to the workers themselves, but I'm wary of those backstage "leaks" at convenient times) was perhaps the one thing that could have made the Thrones finale seem satisfactory to people who didn't enjoy it. I shouldn't be surprised; WWE has made it a mission statement to perfect the art of a disappointing big event finish. Yet folks like myself still tune in every time a PPV airs, because maybe we're the enablers and have the big problem. Then again, no matter who buys the show or not, it should be the responsibility of the wrestling company to do something that resonates satisfactorily with its audience, especially if you consider pro wrestling, or at least just WWE, not to be art but a capitalistic venture of supply and demand. If it was art, I might be able to defend the vision, but McMahon has never been in the business of making art. He's in the business of making money, which is probably problem number one.
