So we're now a week after the Superstar Shake-Up that saw stars moving between shows to give us some new blood and hopefully some new life into titleholders and their rivalries. Of course, things kept shaking after the shows were over last week and we'll get into a bit of that later on, but we're going to stick with the format that I decided I'm going to continue trying out until I don't like it or I think of something better, which means we're going to start off with this week's episode of Raw and what didn't work.
We're going to start with both women's matches on Raw. The first women's match of the night was between Billie Kay and Naomi. Now I love The IIconics' promos. They're silly and stupid but have just the right amount of charm and self-awareness to them, and I credit Billie and Peyton for that. But when the promo they cut on their way to the ring ended up being longer than the match, that's a problem. I don't know what it is about Vince and The IIconics, but these past few weeks since Mania have not seen anything go their way when they only people they've beaten were the "Brooklyn Belles" at the post-Mania Raw. But they're not only getting beaten; they're practically getting squashed, and that's not a great look for the Women's Tag champs.
Then there was Becky Lynch vs Alicia Fox. According to the dirt sheets, the reason Arn Anderson was fired from WWE was because he let Foxy wrestle while intoxicated. If Arn did that and got fired, who's getting fired this week? Because I don't know what to make of her incredibly botchy performance in this match. I know that she's not on TV a lot anymore, and I've never been particularly impressed by any of her ring ability with the exception of her pin bridging ability and the one time that Nia Jax ragdolled her into the barricade like she was made of plastic, but this was just bad. I think that this was Becky giving Alicia some TV time, but Becky ended up having to carry the entire match, and despite the amount of time this match got, neither The Man nor Alicia came out of this one looking good.
I'm beyond disgusted at what they've done to Ricochet's entrance music. First they added the stupid cartoon bullet-ricocheting sound to the beginning, and now they've added a thunderclap. Ricochet's entrance music is, aside from Finn Balor's, my favorite entrance music. It's anthemic in the way that a superhero's theme music should be, and now it's almost totally ruined.
Now let's dig into that swirl and discuss the things that had a bit of both bad and good.
I'm glad that Seth got to open up the show with Triple H in Des Moines. It's the closest thing to a hometown crowd for Seth and they popped like mad. And I didn't mind that they were doing two triple threats that were going to culminate into a main event between the two winners in order to give Seth a contender at Money in the Bank. And it might be weird of me to get bored by this cliche, but when they put these matches together, you know exactly what you're going to get, and that's each superstar is going to come out and cut a promo about how they're the one that's going to win, and then the champ finishes it by telling them he's going to stay champ. It's 50/50 as to whether or not it ends in a brawl, but that's usually saved for when the matches aren't set, and since they were, no brawl ensued. It's just that this is such an overused trope that it just feels tired. There's got to be a fresher way to do this, and I wish I knew what it was, but I guess that's why it's a wrestling trope.
Sami Zayn came out again and showed the crowd his Instagram feed from when he was away from WWE and continued to berate us all about how we're all so toxic and we push our own negativity onto people like him. I'm not going to say that this did or didn't work, but for me, when it was over, I just felt... confused. I don't know if Sami is taking the Elias spot on Raw where he comes out just to get heat from the crowd, but if it is, I don't think Sami's the right guy for that. But the thing that is most upsetting about this is that it's clear that Vince and everyone else in Creative don't have any plan or direction right now for Sami. It feels like Sami came to Vince and told him what he wanted to do after coming back, Vince gave it the green light, but forgot to give him any rivalry. When Cedric Alexander came out when Sami was leaving, I thought, "Well, this might work," but then Cedric went off to have a match against Cesaro but Sami had no real interaction with him. I just love Sami too much to let them continue to shit on him forever. I think that Sami and Ricochet would be a solid money rivalry. Both of them are dynamic as hell, and both of them can sell like nobody's business. So let's just put that out into the universe and hopefully it will happen.
Speaking of Cedric, his match with Cesaro really shocked me. This is usually the spot where you have the incoming star go over the established veteran, and Cedric looked really solid out there, and that spot with the incoming springboard attack into a devastating European uppercut was just fucking brutal. I thought that was a super weird way to pick up the win, and I certainly would never have booked it that way, but at least we had that spot.
Now, let's move on to the things that worked.
Becky's promo prior to her match was awesome. Her subtext for Lacey "currying favor" wasn't even subtext; it was just text, and I think it illuminated a lot of the problems I have with Lacey's character. When Lacey came out to retort, and said that Becky couldn't keep her emotions in check, she said, "Maybe it's because you're Irish" and I went red-faced with fury. You keep your fucking mouth shut about my people, Lacey. But it was made better because Becky called her an "absolute plank" and I laughed my bollocks off.
The Viking Experience is now The Viking Raiders. That's a little bit better, and I found it funny that it was clear that when Cole pointed out that they caused "a lot of activity on social media" last week that he wasn't talking about anything positive, hence the name change. They were supposed to have a match against the Lucha House Party, but they just wrecked them before the bell ever sounded and that was the way to book this, because this isn't a match that needed to happen. But they're keeping "The Viking Experience" as part of their characters because that's now the name of their finisher, which is dumb as hell, but whatever. So it was better than last week, even though I still have to call Rowe and Hansen Erik and Ivar now. And the backstage segment with Hawkins and Ryder had a gem where Zack called them "smelly, horny woolly mammoths". Thanks for that, Zack.
I loved The Usos' promo with The Revival, and when I think about it now, I never thought in a million years that the whole Uso Penitentiary thing would work, but I mark out for it now like a maniac.
And now we have Robert Roode, newly-anointed pornstached heel. Their match was decent, but where it worked for me was with the booking. Since Roode is going back to where he belonged this whole time and heeling it up, it felt right that his heel coming-out party was a shortcut victory over one of the main roster's shiniest new stars.
While the culmination of these matches wasn't really anything to write home about, I really really enjoyed the two triple threat matches to determine who was going to fight it out for the #1 Contender spot. The first match between A.J. Styles, Rey Mysterio and Samoa Joe (who was sick last week and that's why he made his Raw debut this week) was really terrific. It was interesting that they had the two babyfaces duking it out one-on-one for a good portion of the match, but that made Joe's intervention back even better. The triple superplex spot was one of the better ones I've seen them do lately, and Lil' Rey hitting Joe with a Crucifix Bomb was really something! But if there was a spot of the night, it was A.J. hitting the Styles Clash on Rey into a prone Joe for the win. That was awesome. I was a little bummed they couldn't fit one of the regular Raw guys in this match but I guess sometimes WWE doesn't fuck with a good thing considering how well these three know each other.
The other triple threat with Miz, Baron Corbin and Drew McIntyre was also really good if a little tentative sometimes. They are really all in on selling us Miz as a babyface, which was evidenced by his opening promo, and they really are looking to save Drew for another time as far as taking on Seth. Miz had to fight from underneath the whole time, so I was super into it when he started getting the upper hand, no matter how brief it might have been. And Drew hitting Miz with the Claymore and then getting pushed out of the ring by Corbin to steal the win was exactly how I would have booked that. Why push Corbin as a pseudo-monster heel when he's obviously so much better as a chickenshit heel? And that was as chickenshit heel as you can get. Again, I wasn't really a big fan of the actual main event, but A.J. vs Seth at MITB is going to be pretty fucking awesome.
Now that all of that is out of the way, let's talk about Bray Wyatt.
Bray has been on the shelf for a really long time, and when we saw these weird vignettes with creepy buzzard puppets and ANNABELLE-like dolls with Bray's signature laughter haunting us from the darkness, we knew there was something coming, but I think it's fair to say that the "Firefly Fun House" was not the way anyone expected it. To say that this felt like a bit from these lunatics would be underselling how fucking insane this was. I'll be interested to see how this plays in a live show environment, but we also saw how their failed attempts to work in weird shit to Bray's matches have already played out, and on the Grandest Stage of Them All, no less. But I'll be looking forward to his return, no matter what kind of weirdness ensues.
So let's kick it over to Smackdown and start out by looking at where they broke bad.
As much as I don't want to dislike it, the same thing that happened on Raw happened on Smackdown and that's a super-short Divas-era match between Peyton Royce and Kairi Sane. Again, I'm loving what The IIconics are doing in their to-the-ring promos, but the matches are so frustratingly short, and it's just not what I'd like to see from these two.
That's really it for the bad. Let's head over to the swirl!
It's becoming clear that there's no clear plan yet for Lars Sullivan. There was supposed to be a match between Jinder Mahal and Chad Gable, and the only good part about Sullivan's interference was that no one wanted to see that match. R-Truth would also try for his pound of flesh after Lars absolutely destroyed Gable, and then hit the Singhs with Freak Accident and then that running powerbomb, but Truth got the same fate he got last week. I know that I'm impatient in regards to plans for these people getting this kind of showcase, but when Lars attacks both babyfaces and heels, it starts to feel like they're trying to give Lars the Strowman treatment, and I don't know if that's going to work for Lars.
Aleister Black is now over on Smackdown because Zelina Vega was moved over to Smackdown because she's married to Aleister and therefore Andrade got moved over to Smackdown because he's apparently pretty seriously involved with Charlotte Flair and Vega works best as Andrade's manager. I mention all these things because they were all in this episode, and Black had a pre-taped promo that said that he was a very complicated person and they might see him as being "condemned". This is the kind of thing that fills me with apprehension because I just don't trust Vince to get Aleister right. But by the same token, it's very possible that he's being set up as a new Undertaker-like character that has a very dark elemental side and doesn't care who he fights as long as he gets a good fight. Black as a tweener could work very well rather than being a Chaotic Good babyface. I guess we'll just have to wait.
I liked Shane and Roman and Elias opening the show, but is it really that believable that Roman would be bested by Shane's rabbit punches and Elias's knee strikes? And is having Roman's first big rivalry against Elias a good idea? That sounds like a recipe for a quick burial. It's a good story that's being told, but Elias is not top-tier talent and Roman is.
Let's move on to the stuff that worked and the stuff that really worked.
We were treated another really fun match between Finn and Andrade. They have really solid in-ring chemistry and I enjoyed the promo that Andrade cut about wanting the IC title as well as wanting to "destroy the myth" of Finn. The only issue that I had with the match is that we've seen that ending before when we had Aleister vs Andrade at TakeOver New Orleans when Zelina jumped at Black and ended up in Andrade's arms only to provide the distraction that allowed the opponent the win, but it's such a fun ending that I don't mind seeing it twice and this is the first time we've seen it on the main roster, so I'll give it a pass.
Charlotte and Becky had a terrific confrontation that shows how much one can put the other over just in promos. Charlotte makes the point that she should be Smackdown Women's champ because she wasn't the one that was pinned at Mania, and Becky retorts that it was a Winner Take All match and she was too busy beating the person that hasn't been beaten, and she's beaten Charlotte enough times to prove that she doesn't have to do it again. She also suggested that other people like Bayley or Mickie James should have the next opportunity and that brought in Bayley, who seems to be a little edgier and that could really work to her advantage, and Bayley got right in Charlotte's face and said that she came over to Smackdown for new opportunities but all she's seeing is a rerun of a match we've seen a number of times already. And she ain't wrong. This led to a match between Bayley and Charlotte for a #1 Contender spot for MITB to face Becky and this was another terrific outing for Charlotte and Bayley and it's nice to see The Hugger in singles competition again. This ended with Charlotte going over in a hard-fought match, and while my knee-jerk reaction was that I didn't want to see this match again so soon, but I came around to thinking that this was actually the best outcome because it gets the Charlotte vs Becky rivalry come to an end for now. Once their MITB match is over, that'll open the door for new contenders we haven't seen before. The only negative is that I can see them putting the Smackdown title on Charlotte to save Becky up for Raw, and Charlotte doesn't need the title again so soon.
Then we had the main event which was Shinsuke Nakamura with Rusev and Lana vs Kofi Kingston with Xavier Woods and the injured Big E's replacement, Kevin Owens aka Big O. Seeing Kevin interact with New Day has been really fun and Xavier and KO's separate commentary table was great. And as far as the match itself was concerned, there was one spot that was insane which was a kind of sliding suplex on Kofi and it was just brutal. But when it looked like Kofi was going to pick up the win, Rusev (in a suit for some reason), interfered causing a DQ win for Kofi and when it looked like both Xavier and KO had Kofi's back, Owens did what he does best, and hit Kofi with a superkick. KO is back, baby! And he didn't stop there. He also hit Woods with an apron powerbomb that looked like it could put Xavier on the (kayfabe) shelf, and I'm really hoping that's going to be the case. Kofi with no support would make a huge babyface win for him at what I'm sure will happen at MITB, but it would certainly solidify Owens as one of the best heels in the biz if he were to go over. It's really a testament to KO's talent to think that he could come back babyface and actually pull it off for a while until we all remember who he is; he betrays everyone eventually. This trigger was just pulled faster than what happened between him and Jericho, but certainly not as quickly as his first night on NXT with Sami. I can't wait to see what's next for the two of these competitors.
Well, that's it for this week of Raw and Smackdown Live! Don't forget to come back later in the week for my wrap-up of NXT as well as this week's Worlds Collide episode, and of course, next week's usual recap of Raw and Smackdown!
Until next time, kids...
We're going to start with both women's matches on Raw. The first women's match of the night was between Billie Kay and Naomi. Now I love The IIconics' promos. They're silly and stupid but have just the right amount of charm and self-awareness to them, and I credit Billie and Peyton for that. But when the promo they cut on their way to the ring ended up being longer than the match, that's a problem. I don't know what it is about Vince and The IIconics, but these past few weeks since Mania have not seen anything go their way when they only people they've beaten were the "Brooklyn Belles" at the post-Mania Raw. But they're not only getting beaten; they're practically getting squashed, and that's not a great look for the Women's Tag champs.
Then there was Becky Lynch vs Alicia Fox. According to the dirt sheets, the reason Arn Anderson was fired from WWE was because he let Foxy wrestle while intoxicated. If Arn did that and got fired, who's getting fired this week? Because I don't know what to make of her incredibly botchy performance in this match. I know that she's not on TV a lot anymore, and I've never been particularly impressed by any of her ring ability with the exception of her pin bridging ability and the one time that Nia Jax ragdolled her into the barricade like she was made of plastic, but this was just bad. I think that this was Becky giving Alicia some TV time, but Becky ended up having to carry the entire match, and despite the amount of time this match got, neither The Man nor Alicia came out of this one looking good.
I'm beyond disgusted at what they've done to Ricochet's entrance music. First they added the stupid cartoon bullet-ricocheting sound to the beginning, and now they've added a thunderclap. Ricochet's entrance music is, aside from Finn Balor's, my favorite entrance music. It's anthemic in the way that a superhero's theme music should be, and now it's almost totally ruined.
Now let's dig into that swirl and discuss the things that had a bit of both bad and good.
I'm glad that Seth got to open up the show with Triple H in Des Moines. It's the closest thing to a hometown crowd for Seth and they popped like mad. And I didn't mind that they were doing two triple threats that were going to culminate into a main event between the two winners in order to give Seth a contender at Money in the Bank. And it might be weird of me to get bored by this cliche, but when they put these matches together, you know exactly what you're going to get, and that's each superstar is going to come out and cut a promo about how they're the one that's going to win, and then the champ finishes it by telling them he's going to stay champ. It's 50/50 as to whether or not it ends in a brawl, but that's usually saved for when the matches aren't set, and since they were, no brawl ensued. It's just that this is such an overused trope that it just feels tired. There's got to be a fresher way to do this, and I wish I knew what it was, but I guess that's why it's a wrestling trope.
Sami Zayn came out again and showed the crowd his Instagram feed from when he was away from WWE and continued to berate us all about how we're all so toxic and we push our own negativity onto people like him. I'm not going to say that this did or didn't work, but for me, when it was over, I just felt... confused. I don't know if Sami is taking the Elias spot on Raw where he comes out just to get heat from the crowd, but if it is, I don't think Sami's the right guy for that. But the thing that is most upsetting about this is that it's clear that Vince and everyone else in Creative don't have any plan or direction right now for Sami. It feels like Sami came to Vince and told him what he wanted to do after coming back, Vince gave it the green light, but forgot to give him any rivalry. When Cedric Alexander came out when Sami was leaving, I thought, "Well, this might work," but then Cedric went off to have a match against Cesaro but Sami had no real interaction with him. I just love Sami too much to let them continue to shit on him forever. I think that Sami and Ricochet would be a solid money rivalry. Both of them are dynamic as hell, and both of them can sell like nobody's business. So let's just put that out into the universe and hopefully it will happen.
Speaking of Cedric, his match with Cesaro really shocked me. This is usually the spot where you have the incoming star go over the established veteran, and Cedric looked really solid out there, and that spot with the incoming springboard attack into a devastating European uppercut was just fucking brutal. I thought that was a super weird way to pick up the win, and I certainly would never have booked it that way, but at least we had that spot.
Now, let's move on to the things that worked.
Becky's promo prior to her match was awesome. Her subtext for Lacey "currying favor" wasn't even subtext; it was just text, and I think it illuminated a lot of the problems I have with Lacey's character. When Lacey came out to retort, and said that Becky couldn't keep her emotions in check, she said, "Maybe it's because you're Irish" and I went red-faced with fury. You keep your fucking mouth shut about my people, Lacey. But it was made better because Becky called her an "absolute plank" and I laughed my bollocks off.
The Viking Experience is now The Viking Raiders. That's a little bit better, and I found it funny that it was clear that when Cole pointed out that they caused "a lot of activity on social media" last week that he wasn't talking about anything positive, hence the name change. They were supposed to have a match against the Lucha House Party, but they just wrecked them before the bell ever sounded and that was the way to book this, because this isn't a match that needed to happen. But they're keeping "The Viking Experience" as part of their characters because that's now the name of their finisher, which is dumb as hell, but whatever. So it was better than last week, even though I still have to call Rowe and Hansen Erik and Ivar now. And the backstage segment with Hawkins and Ryder had a gem where Zack called them "smelly, horny woolly mammoths". Thanks for that, Zack.
I loved The Usos' promo with The Revival, and when I think about it now, I never thought in a million years that the whole Uso Penitentiary thing would work, but I mark out for it now like a maniac.
And now we have Robert Roode, newly-anointed pornstached heel. Their match was decent, but where it worked for me was with the booking. Since Roode is going back to where he belonged this whole time and heeling it up, it felt right that his heel coming-out party was a shortcut victory over one of the main roster's shiniest new stars.
While the culmination of these matches wasn't really anything to write home about, I really really enjoyed the two triple threat matches to determine who was going to fight it out for the #1 Contender spot. The first match between A.J. Styles, Rey Mysterio and Samoa Joe (who was sick last week and that's why he made his Raw debut this week) was really terrific. It was interesting that they had the two babyfaces duking it out one-on-one for a good portion of the match, but that made Joe's intervention back even better. The triple superplex spot was one of the better ones I've seen them do lately, and Lil' Rey hitting Joe with a Crucifix Bomb was really something! But if there was a spot of the night, it was A.J. hitting the Styles Clash on Rey into a prone Joe for the win. That was awesome. I was a little bummed they couldn't fit one of the regular Raw guys in this match but I guess sometimes WWE doesn't fuck with a good thing considering how well these three know each other.
The other triple threat with Miz, Baron Corbin and Drew McIntyre was also really good if a little tentative sometimes. They are really all in on selling us Miz as a babyface, which was evidenced by his opening promo, and they really are looking to save Drew for another time as far as taking on Seth. Miz had to fight from underneath the whole time, so I was super into it when he started getting the upper hand, no matter how brief it might have been. And Drew hitting Miz with the Claymore and then getting pushed out of the ring by Corbin to steal the win was exactly how I would have booked that. Why push Corbin as a pseudo-monster heel when he's obviously so much better as a chickenshit heel? And that was as chickenshit heel as you can get. Again, I wasn't really a big fan of the actual main event, but A.J. vs Seth at MITB is going to be pretty fucking awesome.
Now that all of that is out of the way, let's talk about Bray Wyatt.
Bray has been on the shelf for a really long time, and when we saw these weird vignettes with creepy buzzard puppets and ANNABELLE-like dolls with Bray's signature laughter haunting us from the darkness, we knew there was something coming, but I think it's fair to say that the "Firefly Fun House" was not the way anyone expected it. To say that this felt like a bit from these lunatics would be underselling how fucking insane this was. I'll be interested to see how this plays in a live show environment, but we also saw how their failed attempts to work in weird shit to Bray's matches have already played out, and on the Grandest Stage of Them All, no less. But I'll be looking forward to his return, no matter what kind of weirdness ensues.
So let's kick it over to Smackdown and start out by looking at where they broke bad.
As much as I don't want to dislike it, the same thing that happened on Raw happened on Smackdown and that's a super-short Divas-era match between Peyton Royce and Kairi Sane. Again, I'm loving what The IIconics are doing in their to-the-ring promos, but the matches are so frustratingly short, and it's just not what I'd like to see from these two.
That's really it for the bad. Let's head over to the swirl!
It's becoming clear that there's no clear plan yet for Lars Sullivan. There was supposed to be a match between Jinder Mahal and Chad Gable, and the only good part about Sullivan's interference was that no one wanted to see that match. R-Truth would also try for his pound of flesh after Lars absolutely destroyed Gable, and then hit the Singhs with Freak Accident and then that running powerbomb, but Truth got the same fate he got last week. I know that I'm impatient in regards to plans for these people getting this kind of showcase, but when Lars attacks both babyfaces and heels, it starts to feel like they're trying to give Lars the Strowman treatment, and I don't know if that's going to work for Lars.
Aleister Black is now over on Smackdown because Zelina Vega was moved over to Smackdown because she's married to Aleister and therefore Andrade got moved over to Smackdown because he's apparently pretty seriously involved with Charlotte Flair and Vega works best as Andrade's manager. I mention all these things because they were all in this episode, and Black had a pre-taped promo that said that he was a very complicated person and they might see him as being "condemned". This is the kind of thing that fills me with apprehension because I just don't trust Vince to get Aleister right. But by the same token, it's very possible that he's being set up as a new Undertaker-like character that has a very dark elemental side and doesn't care who he fights as long as he gets a good fight. Black as a tweener could work very well rather than being a Chaotic Good babyface. I guess we'll just have to wait.
I liked Shane and Roman and Elias opening the show, but is it really that believable that Roman would be bested by Shane's rabbit punches and Elias's knee strikes? And is having Roman's first big rivalry against Elias a good idea? That sounds like a recipe for a quick burial. It's a good story that's being told, but Elias is not top-tier talent and Roman is.
Let's move on to the stuff that worked and the stuff that really worked.
We were treated another really fun match between Finn and Andrade. They have really solid in-ring chemistry and I enjoyed the promo that Andrade cut about wanting the IC title as well as wanting to "destroy the myth" of Finn. The only issue that I had with the match is that we've seen that ending before when we had Aleister vs Andrade at TakeOver New Orleans when Zelina jumped at Black and ended up in Andrade's arms only to provide the distraction that allowed the opponent the win, but it's such a fun ending that I don't mind seeing it twice and this is the first time we've seen it on the main roster, so I'll give it a pass.
Charlotte and Becky had a terrific confrontation that shows how much one can put the other over just in promos. Charlotte makes the point that she should be Smackdown Women's champ because she wasn't the one that was pinned at Mania, and Becky retorts that it was a Winner Take All match and she was too busy beating the person that hasn't been beaten, and she's beaten Charlotte enough times to prove that she doesn't have to do it again. She also suggested that other people like Bayley or Mickie James should have the next opportunity and that brought in Bayley, who seems to be a little edgier and that could really work to her advantage, and Bayley got right in Charlotte's face and said that she came over to Smackdown for new opportunities but all she's seeing is a rerun of a match we've seen a number of times already. And she ain't wrong. This led to a match between Bayley and Charlotte for a #1 Contender spot for MITB to face Becky and this was another terrific outing for Charlotte and Bayley and it's nice to see The Hugger in singles competition again. This ended with Charlotte going over in a hard-fought match, and while my knee-jerk reaction was that I didn't want to see this match again so soon, but I came around to thinking that this was actually the best outcome because it gets the Charlotte vs Becky rivalry come to an end for now. Once their MITB match is over, that'll open the door for new contenders we haven't seen before. The only negative is that I can see them putting the Smackdown title on Charlotte to save Becky up for Raw, and Charlotte doesn't need the title again so soon.
Then we had the main event which was Shinsuke Nakamura with Rusev and Lana vs Kofi Kingston with Xavier Woods and the injured Big E's replacement, Kevin Owens aka Big O. Seeing Kevin interact with New Day has been really fun and Xavier and KO's separate commentary table was great. And as far as the match itself was concerned, there was one spot that was insane which was a kind of sliding suplex on Kofi and it was just brutal. But when it looked like Kofi was going to pick up the win, Rusev (in a suit for some reason), interfered causing a DQ win for Kofi and when it looked like both Xavier and KO had Kofi's back, Owens did what he does best, and hit Kofi with a superkick. KO is back, baby! And he didn't stop there. He also hit Woods with an apron powerbomb that looked like it could put Xavier on the (kayfabe) shelf, and I'm really hoping that's going to be the case. Kofi with no support would make a huge babyface win for him at what I'm sure will happen at MITB, but it would certainly solidify Owens as one of the best heels in the biz if he were to go over. It's really a testament to KO's talent to think that he could come back babyface and actually pull it off for a while until we all remember who he is; he betrays everyone eventually. This trigger was just pulled faster than what happened between him and Jericho, but certainly not as quickly as his first night on NXT with Sami. I can't wait to see what's next for the two of these competitors.
Well, that's it for this week of Raw and Smackdown Live! Don't forget to come back later in the week for my wrap-up of NXT as well as this week's Worlds Collide episode, and of course, next week's usual recap of Raw and Smackdown!
Until next time, kids...
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