Hey, can’t run the risk of any of the other matches going over better than the main event. Roman Reigns must look strong if we have to bury the entire rest of the roster to make it happen.
So I rather enjoyed the opening segment. I thought it was funny, but very against the heel mindset. What’s with the talk of family and togetherness? If you wanted that you could either have stayed in the SHIELD or just joined the John Cena Superfriends. That being said, I thought when RKO was making fun of everyone he was spot on (And Big Show…who cares what you think).
After that the rest of the show is kind of a blur to me and I honestly had it on mute a lot of the time. I mean…oh my good God the IC title BS is fun and all…but commentary literally angers me. I feel anger when JBL talks…I just can’t stand it anymore.
Wizdow was funny and all, but I’m scared that they are angling towards having him be in characters again which would be a HUGE step down for him. Let’s see how this goes.
Pointless concert.
And because we had a pointless concert we have to have rapid-fire matches. At the time I thought it was super odd, but in retrospect I don’t mind it. The champs lost to the latest YOU WILL LIKE THEM team, old champs lost to the El Torito all stars. It builds some drama (some…small…) and teases that this could be wide open…at least until the Ascension show up.
Something else about the Torito all-stars match. The all-stars won, but ended up hurting Torito in the process. Maybe you can call it the Lucha Underground effect, but I see that and think “Damn I hope that doesn’t mean they’re breaking that team up and Torito is going to LU” because IIRC he’s pretty famous in his own right. Guys, I really like Torito.
More muting so other matches happened that I didn’t pay attention to.
Main event was fine. I didn’t pay much attention to is since I knew what would happen, but I guess I didn’t expect SUCH a beating. The guys interacted with the crowd really well. I liked how Seth was reaching out to them as if you say “save me!”, and when RKO posed and told that girl to “take the picture!”. That was awesome.
Overall it was a pretty down Raw. I applied to lots of jobs though so I guess that’s a good thing…
/lana: внимание, внимание… Randy Orton is star of RAW. We have made him Honorary Russian Citizen. He will now be R. K. Ortonov and succeed VLAD uh meer POO tin as President!
As big a mark as I am of Seth Rollins, I was glad to see him finally get his comeuppance at the hands of Randy Orton without the midgets and giants getting in the way. I’m hoping their inevitable pairing at WM will be at least half as good as Seth’s matches with Dean Ambrose. I loved how Seth was so self-delusional in the opening drama and how he chided the Authority sycophants for falling for Randy’s jokes. Orton is the singularly revenge-driven psychopath type, like De Niro in Cape Fear. I loved the part where Orton grabbed Seth by the hair after he flattened him and said “Who did you think I was?” and Seth weakly replied “f-f-family?”
The IC contender scramble was barely tolerable, complete with typical BNB loss, and R Troof acting the clown. The tag-team shuffle was sleep inducing, and it looks like they’re just going throw all the teams into one match at WM, if they’re not relegated to the BR of Also-Rans.
Heyman delivered another epic promo, and Brock just stood there collecting money. Sting and UT did him better. They made promos in abstentia. If you’re building interest in a major event that’s two weeks away, wouldn’t it be better to have the actual warm bodies present? Although UT’s sound byte was marginally better than having some other goofball speak for Sting, it makes the rivalries so meaningless. Ho-hum, I can’t be bothered to face my mortal enemy in person this week. Just use a career collage and some dry ice for now.
Say what you will about JBL, but his references are sometimes so off-the-wall, they’re educational. He said something like “Who does he think he is, Ernest Shackleton?” referring to the heroic explorer who somehow survived being trapped in the Antarctic for a year and a half.
Which, since it happened about 110 years ago, means Vince just now heard about it and figured namedropping him would impress the social medias.
Well, on the bright side, who are the top contenders for the championship after Reigns takes it at WM31?
If Rollins cashes in, then we’re in for The Authority Part XLVII, with a Reigns-Rollins feud marred by Trips-Nips-Big Show-Kane-Noble-Mercury constantly interfering. Please, just DON’T.
Otherwise I think a DBD-Reigns feud (DBD never having lost the championship) would do wonders for showing RR how to work.
Hopefully they don’t go straight to Reigns-Cena. Two Supermen, one of which is still pretty green and the other overexposed and fairly disliked would not be pretty.
Orton-Reigns would be interesting, but I think they’ll keep RKO out of that pic for a while feuding with TA.
God Forbid they go to Reigns v Kane or Big Show. It just doesn’t work.
If the audience will indulge me a bit of fantasy booking, I think I’ve figured out a way to stop the inevitable coronation of Roman Reigns from being at best mediocre and at worst a trainwreck.
Most of the match writes itself. Brock is on the offensive most of the time, finishers get kicked out of, there’s a submission spot where Roman grabs the rope just in time, etc. Eventually, Roman gets that lucky bit of offense in that changes the momentum and allows him to Hulk up - he preens to the crowd, slaps Brock around, calls his finisher. Eventually, he goes for the Superman punch - and Brock grabs him in midair, turns it into an F5, and pins him for the three-count.
Brock and Paul are celebrating in the ring when Seth Rollins runs in with the briefcase and hits Brock in the back of the head, causing him to drop the belt and hit the mat. Paul scurries away and Rollins lays the briefcase on Brock’s head and curbstomps him through it. Just as he’s about to hand the briefcase to the ref and cash in, someone grabs the ref’s ankles and pulls him out of the ring - it’s Dean Ambrose!
Ambrose climbs into the ring and he and Rollins start shouting at each other. Reigns has come to at this point as well, and an epic three-way staredown ensues, with each man looking like he’s ready to kill the other two as the ref gets back in the ring and tries to restore order. Rollins raises the briefcase up in the air - and then hands it to Reigns, who hands it to the ref, and the ref tells Lilian to announce that Roman Reigns is cashing in the Money in the Bank contract.
Just as the bell rings, Brock begins to climb to his feet - and Reigns, Rollins, and Ambrose pick him up and triple-powerbomb him, and Reigns goes in for a pin and the three-count. That’s the shot the show ends on - Reigns being announced as champion while the reunited Shield hold the belt up in the air together.
End the show like that and I guaran-freaking-tee the crowd would lose its shit, and, depending on how you wanted to go with it, it could lead to either a lengthy title run for Reigns with Ambrose and Rollins as his Horsemen, or the three of them deciding to settle the bad blood between them with a triple-threat title match.
(None of this, of course, will actually happen. Roman will go over clean, the crowd will go mild, and the cleanup crew at Levi’s Stadium will have to spend days cleaning Vince’s man-goo off the ceiling of his office. But it’s fun to dream.)
Maybe… just maybe… all this pushing of RR is a bait and switch. Vince’s plan all along was not to push Reigns, but make Seth champ with the long-overdue MITB turn-in after RR gets demolished by Lesnar. It would be just like when Yokozuna won the title from Bret Hart, and then Hulk Hogan ran in to check on Hart. Yoko challenged him on the spot and ran into the Boot of Doom and lost his title 23 seconds after winning it.
The Tell will be the match’s placement on the card. If it ain’t the Main Event, there’s a good chance Rollins cashes in and takes the belt. No way Vince ends the show with that. Hell, even if Reigns wins, I wouldn’t be shocked to see Cena-Rusev as the last match. Not like CM Punk’s title defenses were the main event of those PPVs. No, it was Cena.
Really torn on the Wyatt-Taker match. If Wyatt loses AGAIN, he can only move even further down the card - like feuding with racist stereotype playing R-Troof, who bugs his eyes in fear. But Taker losing two years in a row? Ok, I can see it only if it’s a symbolic handing off of the torch and he retires.
Oh hell, let’s go way out in left field. Wyatt-Taker is on earlier in the card. Lesnar comes out during the intro, attacks Taker, then punks out Wyatt for good measure. Just because. Then Bray Wyatt goes back to the drawing board by gathering his directionless former henchmen and reforming the Family.
This is basically the opposite of how I feel about almost everyone in the WWE right now. Whoever it is, I think, “I hope he pisses someone off/gets pissed at racist/sexist/homophobic bullshit and clocks somebody/looks at his enormous pile of money and decides he doesn’t have to put up with this demeaning, unsatisfying misery any more and decides to come to Lucha Underground.” Y’all can keep, I dunno, R-Truth, Titus O’Neill, Show and Kane. You can have the part-timers too.
Oh! Almost forgot to mention. Lucha Underground has a merch page up now. Slim pickin’s at the moment, but you can get the basic shirt or cap or the like. “PUMA” is good for 10% off until the 13th, I think.
But keep in mind I don’t get LU, so I don’t get the benefit of still seeing the guy.
I said to Ms. Cups after the Shield broke up how much fun it will be to see them back together. But I think it’s too soon.
What needs to happen is that Reigns and Ambrose still need to be buddy-buddy, and have Rollins leave/get kicked out of the Authority and want to come back to them…but the 2 guys give Rollins a bunch of “prove-it” tasks like winning a belt, or beating 5 consecutive guys or whatever.
(Oh man, then how cool would it be if Rollins passes all the tests, and instead of welcoming him back Reigns turns heel on him and Dean and then has a long heel run)
WWE’s tried breaking up solid tag teams before to see how they fare as solo stars.
In some cases, it worked, like when they broke up Marty Jannetty and Shawn Michaels, but no so much for Jannetty.
Bret Hart and Jim “The Anvil” Neidhart were tag team champs before they went solo. Hart went on to become WWE champ while Neidhart pretty much stayed in the midcard.
The Powers of Pain separation was kind of eh. Barbarian had a pretty good solo career, but mainly lost to the main eventers. The Warlord proved to be too boring on his own. They eventually fell through the cracks, but the Barbarian came back to team with Haku.
The Dudleys breakup didn’t work so good at all, but indirectly it helped Batista, since his first role in WWE was Devon’s bodyguard. They eventually reunited outside of WWE.
Billy Gunn used to be in several tag teams before New Age Outlaws, and his only solo foray was as the abortion known as Rockabilly. They tried to make him into the new Honky Tonk Man and gave him the original HTM as his manager. I remember reading that Gunn once accused HTM of stealing his heat, and HTM replied “You can’t steal anything that’s dead.”
So, based on past history, WWE doesn’t reunite old tag teams until a couple of decades later for nostalgia. As much as we want the Shield reunited (and in my cases, the Wyatts), it’s probably a lost cause.
My budding grave robbing business disagrees with you
The only thing funnier would be hearing X-Pac say that.
How did I miss my chance to play Intellectual Savior of the Masses on this one? 
In Mexico, El Torito is better known as Mascarita Dorada, and he’s held minis champions in AAA, CMLL (the other big lucha league in Mexico), and WWA (the Puerto Rican territory). He also once held AAA’s “mascot tag team championship”, which is held by a team consisting of a normal-sized masked luchador and his mini-equivalent. However, he started out his career as, of all things, an incarnation of our little LU friend Mascarita Sagrada. Dorada (his real name, as is the case with most luchadors who have not been unmasked, is not a matter of public record) was starting his career in 2000 just as the original Mascarita Sagrada was leaving the company, and he took over the gimmick until he himself left in 2007. It’s not entirely clear whether the Sagrada now wrestling in LU is the original or someone else altogether, as it’s known that there was at least one other person who worked AAA as him.
And the original is retired and living in Patagonia?
I assumed that he’s back in Mexico helping El Generico take care of the orphans.
When Chris Jericho wrestled in Mexico, they made a comic book of him with a magic frog.
Bizarre Theory of the Day: What if WWE isn’t planning to renew Alex Riley’s contract and/or he wants out and won’t re-sign, so he asked them to let him get back in the ring before he leaves so he’s more marketable.