By Jon Mezzera, Torch Specialist

RAW HITS

Rhodes & Hunico vs. Kingston & Sin Cara: This was a pretty good tag team match. It had a nice fast pace to it and featured some good high flying offense. It wasn't great and was too short to really amount to much, but at least it was a good tag match that helped to introduce Hunico to the Raw audience and helped to start to establish Cody Rhodes sans mask.

Show & Punk vs. Del Rio & Henry: There are times when I get a little hope watching Raw that the writers actually know what they are doing. These times don't seem to come up very often, and when they do they seem to involve people from Smackdown. That was how I felt about this tag match between the two top Champions in WWE and their two top challengers. It is amazing to me how well WWE is doing building to the Big Show vs. Mark Henry rematch. The crowd was eagerly anticipating a lock up between these two huge wrestlers. This was a good tag match. They also effectively built up the WWE Title match between CM Punk and Alberto Del Rio as well. It was nice (and unusual) to see a heel on Raw actually getting the better of a babyface when Del Rio pinned Punk and then applied the Cross Arm Breaker after the match. This was well done.

The Rock: I am giving The Rock a Hit for being very entertaining as I expected him to be. I even liked his interaction with John Cena. I liked the fact that they didn't even look at each other during their verbal sparring with themselves and Awesome Truth. I will talk later about why the segment was ultimately a failure, but for now I will focus on being entertained for much of it by Rock. I am always amazed at how easily that man can get a wrestling audience to start a new chant. "Boots to Asses!" Clap, clap, clap, clap, clap. "Boots to Asses!" Clap, clap, clap, clap, clap. Cena sure as hell can't do that. I enjoyed Rock a lot this week.

RAW MISSES

Michael Cole Challenge: 3 Hour Raws are bad enough, but when they start with this crap, you know you are in for one bad night of wrestling viewing. CM Punk was right when he came out and said that this entire segment had been a waste of time. It was a huge waste of time. It was not entertaining at all in any way. I am sick and tired of Michael Cole and not in a good way. I don't care about seeing feuds between announcers. When you present a piece of crap, it does not make it ok to then have someone point out that it is a piece of crap. Any way you look at it, it is still a piece of crap. This was not the only time during the show that WWE had a horrible segment that someone pointed out how horrible it was. If you know that it is so horrible, don't do it in the first place.

This is Your Life: This was the second overly long overly crappy segment of Raw that they tried to laugh off by having someone (in this case, two someones - John Cena and The Rock - point out how bad it was). I will repeat what I just said. Pointing out how bad a segment is doesn't make it ok to have the segment in the first place. If the end game is to have Rock come out suddenly, Rock Bottom Mick Foley, and then turn around and leave again, then you have just spent a ton of time with horrible television just to get to a punch line. It is like the Purple Guerilla joke, only not funny (the Purple Guerrilla joke takes about 10 minutes to tell and has a cheesy punch line, but most people laugh because of how long you have invested in the joke at that point, that you just kind of have to. It is still better than this segment of Raw.). I don't feel like going into the particulars, but this was terrible.

Twitter: After a few weeks that were better in terms of not mentioning Twitter too many times, WWE was right back to where they were going overboard on the Twitter references. I hate the pop ups that tell you when something is trending. I think of it as preaching to the choir. We have chosen to watch Raw. They don't need to remind us of how great they are to get us to watch. We are watching and knowing that something is trending won't make us keep watching the way good wrestling matches, good promos as part of good storyline advancement and well hyped upcoming segments/matches will. I don't mind some talk of social media. I think if you have one or two characters who are big on it, or a storyline that has something to do with it (like Zack Ryder's online petition), that works fine. But, to constantly mention it is dragging down the quality of the show. Having Rock on doing the same doesn't help. If Rock's Twitter talk had been the only Twitter Talk in 3 hours of Raw, that would have been fine, but it wasn't.

Selling Survivor Series: As I said above, WWE did do a good job of selling Survivor Series' two Title matches. But, they did not do a good job of doing anything else. Nothing on this show made me care at all about the traditional Survivor Series tag team elimination match. We saw the babyfaces easily beat up the heels, so what's left to prove at the PPV? They did nothing good to hype the Divas match. What did the Michael Cole challenge have to do with the PPV? That was a lot of time devoted to nothing. I like Ryder and I like this petition to get a US Title shot. But, now I see that John Morrison is getting shot instead, so all the time with Ryder on Raw was wasted in hyping a match that won't be on the PPV. Ultimately, WWE did not do enough to make me care about the main event of Survivor Series, Rock & Cena vs. Awesome Truth. The Miz and R-Truth looked like chumps. They looked like jokes. They looked like anything but a threat to Rock or Cena. I know the intrigue is supposed to be whether or not Cena and Rock can coexist, but why not tease that they can't and that by not being able to, they might be in trouble? Have them get in each other's way and have Awesome Truth take advantage of it to get the upper hand at the end of the show. As I said above, I liked the idea that Rock and Cena didn't look at each other. But, we believed before that Cena could defeat Miz and Truth by himself. This made it look like Rock could too. So, who cares if they don't get along? It doesn't appear that they have to, so now the entire intrigue for the match went out the window.

Jon Mezzera is PWTorch.com's WWE Hits & Misses Specialist, providing his point of view for Raw and Smackdown each week. Email him at jmezz-torch@sbcglobal.net.

For another view from the original Hitlist author, compare Jason Powell's views to mine by visiting prowrestling.NET's "Hitlist" section here.

[Torch art credit Grant Gould (c) PWTorch.com]

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