Weekly Wrasslin' Wroundup (Raw)

The man with no face joins the division with almost no heels.

Note to WWE - it's a bad sign when, at the start of your show, you tell me your next PPV is three weeks away, and I'm happy because it's not two. So we get a bit of a break before Hell In A Cell.


We start off the show with Sasha Banks celebrating her title victory last week, and then upping the ante yet again, challenging Charlotte to the first ever women's Hell in a Cell match. This brings out Charlotte, and then Rusev, who gets some more heel heet by shitting on the women's division. Sasha and Charlotte knock him out of the ring, and then Roman Reigns comes out to make an unnecessary save and still gets booed.

Next up is New Day to talk up their match with Cesaro and SHeamus. Cesaro is thick as fuck, but Sheamus is HOT GARBAGE. Cesaro has a singles match with Kofi, which is a fun little matchup, and SHeamus enjoys himself during the match by eating popcorn and livestreaming to Facebook. Kofi gets a rollup win after Cesaro gets distracted by Sheamus.

Bayley vs. Local Talent is slightly awkward, but it's all there to set up Data Brooke attacking Bayley on the ramp post-match, leaving Bayley covered in the corpse of a collapsed tube man.

Cruiserweight tag action as Team Black Tights Beards, Tony Nese and Drew Gulak, face off against Luchadors With Capes, Lince Dorado and Sin Cara. Sin Cara is joining the Cruiserweight division because I guess he thought crowds cared too much about him. They  keep it short, and the crowd stays into it, with Lince Dorado getting the pin off a top rope SSP. Not sure why they're forming tag teams, of course.

Mick Foley is out to announce that yes, Sasha-Charlotte will be inside the Cell, and so will Rollins-Owens. Owens is not happy with this turn of events. He and Jericho complain for a bit, and then they turn the Jericho-Rollins main event into a match they love a lot lately - if Jericho wins, the title match at HiaC becomes a triple-threat.

Bo Dallas and Curtis Axel are teaming again as a more serious version of Social Outcasts, I guess. Their opponents made no sense at first - why pit them against Enzo and Cass if you're trying to extablish them? But it's all a setup so that Gallows and Anderson can jump Enzo and Cass. It's a feud that makes sense, at least.

Axel and Dallas demand an opponent after all that, and out comes Sami Zayn and Neville, so it's "four guys they don't know what to do with" in a tag match and it's still not gonna help Dallas and Axel. Still, nice to see Neville since I was getting ready to put his face on milk cartons. They make short work of Curtis Axel, and Bo just walks off.

Titus O'Neill's stupid new Titus Brand gimmick has him losing to R-Truth this week, which seems odd and pointless.

TJ Perkins is trying to work video game references into his promos and it sort of kind sounds almost natural! Almost. He thinks there is still good in Brian Kendrick, but Kendrick tries to jump him, proving otherwise.

Braun Strohman is now suashing Local Talent in pairs.

Intergender interfeud tag action, as Charlotte and Rusev team against Reigns and Banks. Reigns is still the least popular of the four. The match is mostly plodding Reigns and Rusev bullshit, but when the women get back in, things pick back up. Sasha makes Charlotte tap again to the Bank Statement, and Reigns spearing Rusev to keep him from interfering is the biggest pop Rusev's gotten for a spear in about two years.

Kudos to Jericho for working "stupid idiom" into a backstage interview.

Kudos to the WWE for using a shitty sequel to promote a shitty sequel. To promote WWE 2K17, Paul Heyman proposes Lesnar-Goldberg II. Lesnar-Goldberg I was a steaming pile of shit that got booed out of the arena. So sure, let's do that again with both guys twelve and a half years older and one of them even more retired than he was at Wrestlemania XX. Ugh.

Now we've got TJ Perkins vs. ARYA DAIVARI! Didn't know he'd signed, but that's awesome, even if he's still stuck in Evil Sheik mode. It's a nicely competitive match that of course Perkins wins, but it gives me hope that Arya will be part of the Cruisers going forward. Only pro wrestler I've ever met in person.

Rollins-Jericho caps off the show. The match only goes a couple minutes before Owens shows up. The match is OK TV stuff, but the finish lives in the part of the overrun my DVR doesn't catch, so I don't know how Rollins won, just that he did. Which is fine. I like Jericho way more when he's not wrestling.