The Shield Was Only Two Members Raw Review

For those that don't get it, the title is a reference to Dean Ambrose being irrelevant now. With his former Shield brothers in a WWE Title program, he's kind of just there. Speaking of Roman Reigns and Seth Rollins though, they opened Raw. Reigns came out and cut a short promo, which is how it should be. Seth ran him down and Reigns wanted to fight. The Authority showed up and told both men to get teams for the main event as they would have a Survivor Series style match. Cool, so fuck what makes the PPV special because you get it on Raw. The opening contest pit Dolph Ziggler against Kevin Owens. They had a decent outing and Tyler Breeze appeared. Of course they cut to commercial as he came out for dumb reasons. Breeze barely distracted Dolph but it was enough to get the win for Owens. Breeze attacked after an took a selfie with his fallen body. Fine stuff to further push Breeze/Ziggler and get Owens a win.

Backstage, Seth Rollins kissed Kevin Owens' ass to get him on his team. Becky Lynch gets interviewed by Renee Young and is just so adorable. She's better on the mic than given credit for and comes off as more likable than the rest of the faces on the roster. Cesaro wrestled next and defeated the Miz in a match that was kind of just there. At least Cesaro looked impressive. The Cosmic Wasteland was again in the crowd with their Stardust Section signs. Moving on, the Wyatt Family came out and Bray Wyatt cut a promo about taking the bodies of the Undertaker and Kane. He says that what mattered was their souls and how he has their powers. Terrible looking CGI lightning hit the ring and we were to believe that he has mythical powers. I love this kind of thing on Lucha Underground but the WWE likes to call this the reality era and it really seemed out of place here. I'd really like the idea behind it if it wasn't for that or the awful special effects.

Next up, a video package aired to hype up the Lucha Dragons which was pretty random. It was a cool video but wouldn't be needed if they built and developed the team properly. They faced King Barrett and Sheamus in what turned out to be a damn good match. It was a blast, the Lucha Dragons are so much fun and are most likely headed to a Tag Team Title shot. I don't like Sheamus being in a tag team though since Mr. Money in the Bank shouldn't be fussed with a tag team. Backstage, Jack Swagger met up with Zeb Colter and questioned the partnership with Alberto Del Rio. Del Rio made things tense and it ended there but I assume we get a match soon between them. In a rematch from Smackdown, Del Rio then beat R-Truth. The crowd at this point, is beyond dead.

In the back, Seth Rollins bumped into Kofi Kingston and Big E, who wanted to be on Seth's team. He agrees but says they are still down a man. Using the power of unicorns, we hear a trombone and Xavier Woods returns. It was glorious and I've missed Xavier. Brie Bella, Becky Lynch, Paige and Sasha Banks met in a Fatal Four Way match to determine the number one contender for Charlotte's Divas Title. Overall, they worked a good match. It had a few issues in the middle but they worked through them and managed to have a good match. My only real gripe besides a few missteps was Brie doing does Daniel Bryan kicks again. The girl has shown that she is more than capable of having good matches but being a heel and trying to get face reactions is a bad move. As expected, Paige got the win and Becky took the pin. We now get Charlotte vs. Paige at Survivor Series and I suspect some sort of Team Sasha vs. Team Natalya match. Paige gets questioned after the match and calls her opponents losers. She then shouts that it is her house, because that's pretty much the entirety of Paige's vocabulary at this point. Charlotte was interviewed after the match and as usual, was kind of just there on the mic. She's not bad at it but she's not really good either.

With tons of time left on the show, we got our big time Survivor Series main event match. Seth Rollins and his amazing team stood in the ring but we hadn't heard anything about Roman Reigns' team. He chose Ryback, Dean Ambrose and the returning Usos. Outside of a quick elimination of Woods, I thought this was a very well done match. It got about thirty minutes and everything made sense. It came down to the Shield members as Rollins was left along with the men he turned on. last year. Like a classic heel, Seth tried to run but when they failed, he resorted to using a chair to get disqualified. This was an instant where the DQ made a ton of sense. The only post match part that I didn't like was that Reigns ran him off. I think Seth standing tall with a chair would have been a good image. All in all, this was a solid episode of Raw. Nothing was great but nothing was really offensive either. 7/10.