James Caldwell, Torch Assistant Editor (5.5)

Very slight thumbs up for this week's Raw with the pros outweighing the cons. Pros were increased emphasis on Kofi Kingston's character and the Miz vs. Jack Swagger feud to continue establishing new stars on the Raw brand. I also thought Ricky Hatton was a good guest host despite mumbling a bit to where it was hard to understand him at times.

Cons of the show were the lack of PPV title match build for John Cena vs. Shawn Michaels vs. Triple H and the overall "house show" feel to the entire show. The show looked like a repeat on paper before the show aired on TV and the show came across like a bunch of filler and repeat matches when I actually covered the show. The main event of DX vs. Jericho & Big Show just about epitomized a "go through the motions" house show match. There was an overall lack of urgency or a sense of this being an important episode of Raw building toward one of the Big Four PPVs during the year. Really disappointing.

Reviewing the show's pros and cons, it seems like the cons outweighed the pros from this show unless I put a ton of weight on the "star-making" aspects of the show. I'm sticking with a slight thumbs up, but the disappointing aspects of the show stand out more than the benefits from this show. The poor TV ratings reflect a complete lack of interest in Raw this week, which matches viewers being left with the "cons" as their impression from this show, as well.

Shane McKinley, PWTorch.com Contributor (2.5)

WWE seems almost proud of it's lethargy. They will probably blame the low ratings on the critical need of pushing young talent (Kofi, Miz, Sheamus, etc.). They won't blame it on the by-the-numbers Mark Henry vs. Randy Orton match, the unimpressive Swagger vs. Bourne match...it's no wonder why many people just simply got bored with this Raw. The old Raw staples looked really, really old last night. The Cena-Trips-HBK feud is baffling and stinks of laziness. Heck, I want to check to see if this Raw was the same exact segment-by-segment of the Raw. Why would anyone agree to pay more for the PPV if they are shown content like this? Lukewarm, gutless and uninspiring crud.

Greg Parks, PWTorch.com Contributor (5.0)

As with most episodes of Raw, there was a combination of bad and good here. But even the good stuff was still relatively uninspired. I'm really tiring of the DX-buddy-buddys-with-the-guest-host theme. It's hard to think that the Guest Host concept could get boring so quickly given the wide variety of hosts they've had, but when you do the SAME THING with different hosts every week, it can certainly grow old quickly. There's no imagination in using the guest hosts differently. The closest they came was when Jeremy Piven turned heel.

WWE seems to be going full-steam ahead with the Kofi Kingston push, at least for now. Who knows when they could pull the rug out from under him, but it'll be fun while it lasts. And isn't it sad that when a young guy gets pushed, we as fans always look for when that push will stop rather than getting excited about where the push could ultimately go. A. Fox got a good win to continue her build to face Melina. Sheamus got another squash to enhance his character and they did a nice follow-up with the Jamie Noble stuff from last week.

Evan Bourne got a win, but it didn't seem to mean a whole lot. Henry vs. Orton was blase. Chavo getting embarrassed by the GMs is one of those predictable uses of the GMs I was writing about earlier. I thought the main event was a tad better than the usual multi-man main-event TV tag match. That's the good news, but the bad news is there seems to be no serious build to the WWE Title match at Survivor Series yet. I say "yet," because knowing WWE, they probably wanted to save the big swerve for MSG next week.

We suggest these recent related articles...

PARKS'S WWE SMACKDOWN REPORT 10/8: Ongoing "virtual time" coverage of Thursday show, including Roman Reigns & Randy Orton vs. Bray Wyatt & Braun Strowman

METZGER'S ROH TV REPORT 10/4 & 10/7: IWGP World champ Okada vs. Roderick Strong main event, plus Briscoes vs. Time Splitters, more from "Field of Honor," Overall Reax

MCMAHON'S TNA IMPACT REPORT 10/7: TNA Title Series kicks off, Bound for Glory fall-out, more; Overall Reax