About Last Night is a quick reflection on the matches and segments, or random observations, from a wrestling show that sticks out to us the morning after we watch them. If you would like to get your comments featured, chime in below in our comments section or tweet us. You can also help support us on Patreon.

Also, hey everyone, it’s been a while. Did you miss me? I know I haven’t written this column in a bit but in my defense, Raw was really bad and I didn’t want to watch it, let alone form opinions on it. But I have done both this week. Hooray for you!

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About Baby Braun…

Our main story this week involves everyone’s favorite Scary Monster Guy, Big Bad Bing Bong Braun Strowman, hot on the heels of playing Just Cause 3 in real life by using a grappling hook to drop some lighting rigs on Kane and Brock Lesnar. But since it’s apparently only okay for variouspeople to try and murder Braun Strowman but not the other way around, Kurt Angle responds by firing Braun in the opening of the show. Naturally, this leads to Braun spending the next hour on the warpath, ruining everything in sight because why wouldn’t he? This is something that should be impossible to get wrong, especially after a year of escalating structures that Braun has destroyed or have been used in a failed attempt to destroy Braun. And yet, I wasn’t into it.

For a series of segment that should have revolved around Braun, unshackled by the fear of needing to keep his job, proceeding to ruin Raw for everyone else¹, most of Braun’s stunts felt tame in comparison. We’re talking about a man who several months ago flipped an ambulance with an injured Roman Reigns inside just because he could, and what do we get from the man now that he has an actual vendetta against the entire show? He destroys Kurt Angle’s set that’s made to look like an office, ruins the catering table and beats up Curt Hawkins, something that at least one Superstar does almost every week. At this point it’s starting to feel like more of a temper tantrum than a warpath. This builds to Braun invading one of the production trucks and attempting to take the show off the air by force, and finally it starts to feel like there’s actual stakes at play and a chance that Braun could cause some real lasting damage, but instead Braun detaches the back of the truck from the semi and proceeds to flip the semi over. What did that accomplish? Good job Braun, you managed to slightly inconvenience WWE by making them have to rent a new semi on short notice; meanwhile the show you claim to want to ruin remains on the air. This all culminates in Braun getting his job and title shot back by order of Stephanie McMahon, and Braun thanking them by throwing Michael Cole into a gang of security guards with such force that Cole is unable to commentate the rest of the show, and I cannot decide what stands out to me more: That Cole is seemingly the world’s weakest man if that was enough to break him, or that it’s 2018 and WWE still thinks that someone murdering Michael Cole will ever be seen as anything but a babyface move.

Maybe that’s the point – if Braun is supposed to be a heel in this feud, maybe we’re supposed to be disappointed in his rampage not being cooler in order for us to hate him more. (Come to think of it, who’s the face in this feud? Kane majorly sucks, and Brock Lesnar should be a forever-heel for what he did to Undertaker four years ago… is this a heel vs. heel vs. heel match?) But fuck that. I want to watch the cool murderous guy do cool murderous stuff, and anything less will always be disappointing.

About Jason Jordan, Total Goober…

Jason Jordan sucks. He’s a complete and utter dork and I hate him. I think I also love him. It’s complicated, y’all.

Jason Jordan is essentially playing the world’s most annoying little kid brother. Think about it – he acts like an entitled little kid who knows how to play his dad for whatever he wants (in Jordan’s case, the GM is his “legitimate” father Kurt Angle) and desperately wants to be seen as cool by his older brother (tag team partner Seth Rollins) and his brother’s friends (Roman Reigns). And despite his mix of naïveté and playing dumb, Jordan is an instigator that seems to know exactly what he’s doing. He shows up during The Bar’s match early in the night to distract them and cost them the victory, but when they show up later in the night seeking retribution he’s somehow able to avoid fighting them by sending them directly into The Club, who are all too eager to fight. You can’t tell me that was unintentional. Or what about that weird, shit-eating grin he has on his face when he goes to talk to his dad and affirms that he was keeping watch behind Angle somewhere off-camera the whole time, making sure Braun didn’t try to hurt him from afar? No one is this manipulative by accident.

I have no idea where any of this is going, and honestly I’m not sure that WWE knows either. But it definitely feels like they’re figuring out how to give Jason Jordan something more than expecting us to like him because he’s Kurt Angle’s son. It’s been a long time coming.

About the Problem with Not Knowing…

Hey everyone, bored of the various permutations on Mickie James, Bayley and Sasha Banks versus Absolution they’ve been doing over the past several weeks? Well too bad because this week we got a slightly longer version of a Raw Classic–a short and meaningless match that ends before it has time to build to any remotely interesting storytelling or action–featuring Sonya Deville and Sasha Banks. It wasn’t terrible and I appreciate that Deville got a strong victory, but it ended before things could really get off the ground. But what interested me most was the presence of Absolution leader Paige. Or, to be more specific, I was mostly interested in what wasn’t said.

For those who haven’t heard, there’s some really bad rumors going around about the future of Paige’s career, with suggestions this weekend that a recent injury scare coupled with Paige’s history of neck issues may be forcing the third-generation Superstar into early retirement. This week’s Raw clarified none of that, beyond off-handedly acknowledging that Paige will not be competing in the Women’s Royal Rumble later this month. I don’t fault anyone involved for being cagey about the future, as it seems like everyone’s still trying to figure out what this means for Paige, her two proteges in Absolution and the Women’s division in general going forward, but the lack of answers is a bummer. Our hearts go out to Paige and we hope that everything works out for the best with her no matter the outcome, but it would be nice to know that WWE has considered a reality in which Paige can no longer compete.

About Botched and Badass Endings…

The main event of this week’s episode featured Seth Rollins and Finn Bálor in their first singles match since competing to become the first Universal Championship at SummerSlam 2016. Considering that I really liked their last match even in spite of Bálor only having one working shoulder, it should come as no surprise that I was really into this match. Say what you will about both Superstars’ booking last year (and boy was Finn involved in some hot garbage), Rollins and Bálor are lithe, obscenely talented performers capable of unbelievable stunts when faced with opponents that push them, and they took it to the limit in this match. They were fast and forceful, leading to the kinds of fast-paced counters and high impact strikes you don’t normally see in a WWE ring. This match was firing on all cylinders… that is, until it wasn’t.

As you can see starting around 3:53 in the above video, Rollins goes for a Frog Splash but Bálor counters with knees to the gut and rolls him up for a pin. Rollins doesn’t kick out until well after three, but the ref calls for the match to keep going anyway. It doesn’t make sense to start applying blame since we don’t know why things got screwed up–although if I had to speculate, the fact that The Bar showed up almost immediately after the match kept going makes me think that their entrance was supposed to distract everyone and interrupt the pin but someone missed their cue–but it was incredibly sloppy in one of those “exposing the business” ways and deflated my excitement for the end of the match, even as things went off the rails with The Club and The Bar duking it out, Jason Jordan being an instigating little shit and Bálor doing his best Michael Cole impression by taking out everyone with a tope. That’s a level of sloppiness that is really hard to recover from.

But honestly, they were sort of able to recover. This was in no small part thanks to Rollins, seemingly as an apology for what happened, won the match by bringing the Curb Stomp out of retirement after almost three years and stamping Finn’s head through the fucking mat. Don’t get me wrong, it was a fantastic finish that made up for all the earlier nonsense, but seeing it again for the first time in a while reminded me of every time we see Randy Orton do his head punt nowadays – it looks awesome, has a huge impact and makes you think that maybe there’s a reason they stopped doing it in the first place, because it looks goddamn brutal. As in, “I’m kind of amazed Finn isn’t dead or suffering from a concussion” brutal.

The Raw Rapid Fire Round-Up:

And now, the section in which we discuss the segments of Raw that don’t warrant a more extensive write-up.

In case you don’t live in America or are somehow oblivious to the country’s important holidays, yesterday was Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, which meant another year of WWE’s typical paeans to the Reverend’s life that don’t threaten the sensibilities of the kinds of shitty white people that love to tell you what causes Dr. King would support were he alive today. I’ve said my piece on this garbage several times now so I’ll spare you all of it this year, but I do want to quickly address the way in which WWE took two steps forward in their approach of the subject material before immediately taking another two steps back. During the night, Raw aired a segment about a group of Superstars visiting the Dr. King museum and the site of his assassination and discussing their experiences. It was a wonderful gesture with a surprisingly diverse number of voices to speak to their experiences in a way that had to potential to be a teachable moment for the less racially aware segments of the WWE Universe². But then that trash bag Roman Reigns “all lives mattered” Dr. King’s goddamn legacy, proving once again that he’s legitimately the most insufferable fucking person on the planet.

But enough about WWE’s concept of racial justice as determined by a seventy-plus-year-old manthat grew up in a North Carolina trailer park and his Confederate flag-loving buddy. Let’s discuss something undeniably good, like Asuka versus Nia Jax. Raw’s been trying to push Jax as the division’s unstoppable monster again in spite of her middling win-loss record, and this match did a great job of pushing that narrative by having her toss Asuka around the ring with aplomb. For her part, the Empress of Tomorrow looked outmatched but never outgunned, taking Jax’s punishment and pushing through with cunning skill and quick wits. The finish, in which Asuka preserves her undefeated streak by “injuring” Jax’s knee in the steel steps and rendering her unable to continue, was perfectly done. It kept Nia looking like a credible threat only done in by a fluke injury, while also presenting Asuka as the enticing character that defined her NXT run, a brilliant tactician who steals victory from the jaws of defeat through a combination of quick thinking, ring awareness and unparalleled skill. This is the best Asuka has looked since coming to the main roster, and I’m happy that the quality of the match means I don’t have to qualify that statement.

Speaking of things that were good, Raw had some Top Guys this week and it was the best.That’s right, The Revival–PW.C’s 2016 Tag Team of the Year–returned to action in this week’s Raw, making short work of some jobber nobodies in a match that admittedly was basically nothing. But it was all worth it for their post-match interview with Charly Caruso, in which they buried all the legends slated to appear on next week’s 25th Anniversary episode of Raw for being “sports entertainers,” and declared themselves professional by god wrestlers who won’t be shoved into management’s box of being some goofy crotch-chopping chuckleheads. It’s so good to see The Revival being those guys I fell in love with in NXT again, but it’s impossible to feel like certain people in the back probably don’t love them because they’re professional wrestlers and not sports entertainers. This is all going to end with The Revival fighting the New Age Outlaws at the Royal Rumble, isn’t it?

And then there’s everything involving The Miz, who in only his second week back has easily cemented himself as the best part of the show again. Now not only is he palling around with Bo Dallas and Curtis Axel, cutting blistering promos and punking out Roman Reigns during mediocre matches, he’s also started paying Elias–the other best part of the show–to be his opening act! Maybe one day WWE will realize the error of their ways and put all their stuff in the first hour of the show; that way I can turn it off once they’re done.

What did you think of this week’s Raw? Let us know in the comments!