Tuesday, June 27, 2017

Monday Night Raw (6/26)

Not quite the Festival of Friendship, but not bad.
 In the absence of much good wrestling or significant developments, Raw was really the tale of two segments.



Oh, sure, Sasha Banks won a gauntlet match to face Alexa Bliss at Great Balls of Fire, and most of the gauntlet match was good. And yeah, they're really pushing the Strowman ambulance thing hard, although you'd think by now the WWE would know how long it takes vehicles to back into and drive out of arenas and figure out how to pace around that.

But the two big things this week were a MizTV segment featuring some basketball players named Ball who are famous or something. This segment went off the rails completely and utterly, pretty much from the moment the Balls walked down the ramp. It ended so abruptly that I can only assume the Ball antics hit them up against a hard time limit or something.

Later in the show, we had an in-ring confrontation between the broken up Enzo and Cass. Now, I know, last week, I just focused on the wisdom of the idea, but tha''s mainly because the entirety of the execution occurred beyond the limits of my DVR's ability to record Raw. So I didn't see it. And whether or not it's a good idea, the execution has been great from a motivation standpoint.

This week, Enzo did the "plead with Cass that they're family" thing, and then they played out the "fake reconciliation leading to beatdown" thing, but the way they did it, extending the reconciliation until the absolute last possible moment, teasing the turn on at least three separate occasions without it happening, had me actually wondering if they'd abandoned the breakup lans. Only the lingering camera shots on things cameras don't normally linger on told me that the brutal beatdown was still en route, and when it happened, it was super effective.

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