WWE Monday Night Raw 2/27/2012 - The Good, The Bad And The Ugly

I really wanted to give heel Eve a chance. I hated the lazy, misogynistic way that WWE turned her into a villain, but I was hopeful that they might find a way to turn her character into something interesting – a heel with a very specific point-of-view. Instead, she came out this week and proceeded to cut a promo on...men, I guess? While the promo was great at getting people in the audience to boo her, Eve’s soliloquy about using men didn’t really hold much water, especially since the only way she could have really been using Zack Ryder is if she was in cahoots with Kane all along, planning the whole ambulance abduction thing as a convoluted way to score a makeout session with Cena.

Still, Eve’s character is something different at least, and while I doubt that WWE has the tact to feature a manipulative female character without veering into full-on misogyny, I’ve still got my fingers crossed. Or at least I did, until WWE hinted that Eve would be going into a program with Kelly Kelly. All of which raises a big question:

Where the balls is Kharma?

I’m growing tired of the Raw Supershow concept. At first, it was neat seeing all of my favorite WWE guys on pretty much every episode of Monday Night Raw, but now that WWE is cramming four SmackDown guys into tag team matches just to get them on the show, it’s starting to look like diminishing returns. Even worse, not only was the match pitting Sheamus & Big Show against Cody Rhodes & Mark Henry not really about anything, but it ended with Henry, one of 2011’s neatest and most intimidating heels, laying flat on the mat as part of a clean finish.

But as much as I hate seeing monster heel Henry squandered, there’s something that bothers me even more about a match like this. By filling out Raw’s running time with matches featuring top SmackDown guys, WWE leaves less time to devote to Raw’s midcard, which at the moment is criminally underserved. I get the impulse to feature as big of stars as you have each week on your flagship show, but when you do it without any kind of storyline to advance, it doesn’t actually benefit anyone. Not counting Divas stuff, there’s not a single Raw midcard storyline in play right now, which I’m thinking is a big part of why the show feels light and inconsequential on a week-to-week basis.

Of course, the SmackDown tag team match wasn’t all bad, as it gave us an excuse to see another one of Cody Rhodes’ “Embarrassing Big Show WrestleMania Moments.” If you had asked me last year whether Rhodes could survive as a heel without his mask and brown bag gimmicks, I would have shook my head sadly, but fortunately, Rhodes has proven us all wrong, as he has evolved into a more versatile, but no less effective heel, capable of some truly great in-ring storytelling. Although it’s early on, his feud with Big Show has the makings of some really tremendous stuff, and I’m looking forward to seeing the two square off at WrestleMania.

The WWE’s handling of the entire John Cena/Rock feud has been exceedingly bizarre, from announcing the match a year out, to ignoring it for months at a time, to undercutting the spectacle of them getting in the ring at WrestleMania by having them team up at Survivor Series. So, while I was still interested in seeing the Rock on Raw this week, I wasn’t exactly excited. And in his promo, which seemed to go on for ages, Rock gave me very little to get excited about.

Last week, Cena cut an absolutely fantastic promo on the Rock, laying into him for his inaccessibility and the fact that he broke his promise to never leave WWE again. But this week, instead of playing with Cena’s accusations and building off them, the Rock chose to say that one of Cena’s major assertions was flat-out false and then attempted to rule-lawyer another away by claiming that he was speaking figuratively. The Rock broke a major rule of improv here, which is that you’re never supposed to say “no.” Saying “no” closes doors and makes things less interesting, like when the Rock told everyone that everything Cena had said the week before was just false. His promo didn’t make him look any better, and even worse, it made Cena’s awesome promo last week look dopey in hindsight.

Then, as if that wasn’t enough, the Rock inexplicably decided to start calling John Cena a “Kung Pao Bitch.” It’s a testament to the Rock’s charisma and microphone skills that he was able to get everyone in the audience chanting a bit of nonsense like “Kung Pao Bitch,” but it does nothing to further the storyline or put either wrestler over – it’s just a stupid, meaningless catchphrase that suffers by comparison to what happened next...