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Pat McNeill, Torch columnist (4.0)
The wrestling wasn't all that bad tonight, but it's hard to remember a show where the storylines were so completely flat and dull. After two weeks of fuss over the hair vs. hair match, Chris Jericho doesn't actually shave all of Kevin Nash's head. Nobody did. Instead, he gets a buzz cut so that he can look like Scott Steiner's other brother, The Big Tall Doozy Daddy. Actually, he looked a little like that Oz guy who used to wrestle in WCW back in the day.
The most tedious part of the program featured Linda McMahon's attempt to build up some heat for the Bischoff vs. Shane match. The skits where Linda interacted with Eric were flat out embarrassing. It was awfully nice of that rich Mrs. McMahon to leave her front door unlocked and nobody ever questioned why Linda didn't just fire Bischoff on the spot. To Bischoff's credit, he became only the second man to kiss both Linda and Stephanie McMahon on the lips on national television.
The best action of the night was in the Intercontinental Title match between Christian and Rob Van Dam. And for the second consecutive week, Kane's storyline didn't make a bit of sense. See, Kane doesn't want to give the fans what they want and the fans obviously didn't want to see him set Rob Van Dam on fire, so, er, I have a headache.
Combine that with the awful skit Brian Gewirtz put together for Rosie and you have a bad night for the creative team.
To top it all off, we had episode no. 300 of "Bill Goldberg Looks Like An Idiot." The Man somehow got outhussled by the man with the torn groin in the opening segment, then gets jumped from behind at the end of the show by Kevin Nash, who was performing the world's slowest run-in. Little wonder the fans are having difficulty getting behind this guy.
Jason Powell, assistant editor (5.0)
And to think that all of these years we've all assumed that Test was trying to look like Kevin Nash when it was actually just the opposite. Take it from a bald guy, Bill Goldberg and Steve Austin are bald. Howard Finkel is a different kind of bald. Kevin Nash is not bald, as was advertised. I think the main reason the hair vs. hair match had so little heat had nothing to do with the fact that Kevin Nash was wrestling, but rather that the fans were expecting, and ended up getting, a screw job. Not a good move for a company that expects viewers to dish out PPV money a few days from now.
The only segment that came off particularly well was the main event match between Goldberg and Randy Orton. The match itself was about as good as Goldberg is capable of having, and the post-match angle set the stage well for the Elimination Chamber match.
Unfortunately, the big angle between Linda McMahon and Eric Bischoff was horrendous. Bischoff was about the only thing that kept it from being the worst segment of the year. Linda's performance was absolutely embarrassing, as she was at her all-time most monotone. It's bad enough that Vince and Stephanie are dominating one show, but now we have to put up with Shane and Linda on the other? Please, Spike TV, just give this family their own reality TV show so that WWE can get back to wrestling again.
Bruce Mitchell, Torch columnist (0.0)
Even in today's society, putting a wink and a nod (rape attempt?) on a show with a goofy superhero chasing a cat up a tree, a show that still has a substantial children's audience is despicable. That it was staged by the ghost of Ed Wood just makes it worse. Enough's enough. I don't want to hear the rape was bad but the last sequence built for the f---ing pay-per-view, either.
Wade Keller, Torch editor (2.0)
This show was all over the place, and somehow in going all over the place, they managed to avoid visiting anyplace good. Well, I will upset Bruce by saying the final segment did build for the PPV. And I'm not as outraged at the rape insinuation as Bruce because I don't think kids small enough to get a kick out of the Rosie skit have clue one that there was a rape implied later. However, that doesn't make the Rosie skit any less stupid. This show was just tone deaf. Raw lately is tone deaf. There is just no sense that there's a vision for this world that Vince McMahon creates each Monday night. Is it a world where men fight over titles? Sort of, because everyone at the end seemed to be willing to stab someone else from behind to get the advantage headed into Sunday, although the IC Title match earlier was treated as nothing. Is it a world where rapes occur or where kitties are saved from trees. Both segments were as far-fetched as if gets, yet neither was done nearly well enough to have much of any positive effect.
In fact, any show with the Rosie skit by definition cannot be a show where people are going to get worked up over rape. And any show that has implied rape isn't a show that leaves any room for chuckling about a cartoonish skit with a stuffed kitty getting banged against the trunk of a tree. Tone deaf, that's what Raw's writers are.
The Kane angle with RVD made no sense. They've taken their eye off the ball with Kane, which is easy to do when you're booking on the fly. The La Resistance thing with the fake miliary guy was a nice swerve, but it got lost in the shuffle and seemed open-ended without explanation. Do we really need to wait until next week for someone to try to figure out who this guy is and why he aligned himself with La Resistance. Same with Lance Storm. The notion that writers think it's cute to have one wrestler instruct another to assault a woman in a women's locker room with an uninvited kiss shows the gutter mentality that WWE writers are attempting to appeal to. To not have any follow up on it makes it even worse.
And we haven't even touched on the blatant false advertisement of someone "getting shaved bald" (Jim Ross's exact words) only to have Nash get a crew cut. They should have just advertised it as a "crew cut" match. It's still a lot of hair getting cut off. But why tell the truth when you have a chance to alienate your fanbase for a small ratings short-term ratings boost by lying.
The wrestling on this show was terrible. The women's match was especially bad, but Christian vs. RVD had no spark and clearly was just there to set up the run-in by Kane. Test vs. Steiner barely existed as a match. Rosie vs. Mack was the next step along the path to wasting whatever potential Mack had. Which left Orton vs. Goldberg, which was a passable one star five minute match.
The fundamentally sound element of the show was that the heels ended up one-up on the babyfaces in the angles that mattered most to building up the PPV. How they got to there was ridiculous, infuriating, incompetent, and tone deaf, but at least they were smart enough to give the faces reason to need to get revenge next Sunday. That's why this 1.0 show gets a 2.0.
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