WWE Raw, SmackDown takeaways: A test of faith, patience or strength

Five hours of flagship WWE programming is a lot. Here’s a breakdown of the best bits from this week’s Monday Night Raw and SmackDown Live, featuring Kofi Kingston running the gauntlet to nowhere.

Last week, WWE continued traveling down the road to WrestleMania and laid down the foundation for more match-building ahead of April’s event.

The Shield bade farewell to the live, television audience only to find itself the target of Drew McIntyre. Bobby Lashley yet again won the Intercontinental Championship from Finn Bálor, Kurt Angle announced that his WrestleMania match will be the last of his career and Batista showed up to beg for what he wanted out of Triple H (while simultaneously yelling that H knows exactly what Batista is after — it can’t all make sense) and got it: a no-holds barred match at WrestleMania.

Shane McMahon versus The Miz and Randy Orton versus AJ Styles were also finalized for WrestleMania and Vince McMahon announced that Kofi Kingston could indeed challenge for Daniel Bryan’s WWE Championship, but only if he successfully runs a gauntlet of Orton, Samoa Joe, The Bar (Sheamus and Cesaro) and Rowan on the following week’s SmackDown Live.

With those notes out of the way, here are the biggest happenings and developments for this week’s episodes of WWE Monday Night Raw and SmackDown Live.

Kofi Kingston masters the gauntlet

What is the WWE doing with Kofi Kingston and The New Day? There’s a payoff coming, but how we get to it is not very clear right now unless the company is truly willing to wade in some very fraught waters.

Perhaps it’s simply the fact that we all know that a Kingston versus Daniel Bryan match for the WWE Championship is coming at WrestleMania next month that they want to make us think it isn’t. That we all assumed that Kingston would win his five-man gauntlet, probably also get screwed in some way by Vince McMahon and then ultimately overcome that which prompted Kingston being denied again on Tuesday night. That the Kingston-Bryan feud seemed so similar to Bryan’s struggles with the McMahons five years ago that it needed a bit of a detour.

It’s all a work, right? We want #KofiMania and we’re going to get it, even if we don’t like or understand what it takes to get there. It’s clearly taking a lot of storytelling. A story of hope, and hope squashed. A story of WWE’s own history regarding champions of color. A story of The New Day being loyal soldiers in McMahon’s army only for McMahon to believe The New Day only has merit and usefulness to him as a unit and not as individuals. A story set to remind everyone how McMahon repeatedly views his employees as playthings, his whims having far greater control over how he treats people rather than the talents and accomplishments of his wrestlers.

Kingston ran the gauntlet and defeated Sheamus, Cesaro, Rowan, Joe and Orton (in that order), despite taking a serious beating for 55 minutes. McMahon then sent a sixth competitor, Bryan; without a win, there would be no WrestleMania for Kingston, no title match. Bryan defeated Kingston, but — as Big E and Xavier Woods rightly noted in the Fallout video afterward — had Kingston won, McMahon would send another, and another, and another challenger until Kingston finally fell. Because wins and losses don’t make a wrestler championship material; it’s the dictum of McMahon, ultimately, that makes that call. And to McMahon, Kingston ain’t it.

Something is clearly coming that will change McMahon’s mind or force his hand, but what that thing is, we do not know. Will he somehow remember that at the start of the year he and his family declared the fans the Authority and the support of Kingston means he must acquiesce? It seems unlikely given how entrenched his apparent non-belief in Kingston is (with an assist, of course, by the former B+ player Bryan). Will the contemplation of all three members of The New Day leaving somehow strike panic in McMahon, giving them the leverage they never knew they had to get their way? There are two SmackDowns left until WrestleMania.

Kurt Angle’s farewell tour

Kurt Angle is having the final match of his career at WrestleMania, but on the Monday Night Raws leading up to that, he’s also on his farewell tour, taking on younger talent who clearly look up to him. Last week, it was Apollo Crews and this week, it was Chad Gable. It was a match as one would expect out of the aging, and probably aching Angle, but it was still good in the ways that it can be: Gable giving his all against someone he admires, Angle breaking out the hits to give us the hit of nostalgia to make this all appropriately bittersweet.

But, perhaps more of note, is that Angle announced his WrestleMania opponent and — surprise — it’s Baron Corbin. Corbin gets the nod because Angle still wants retribution for Corbin costing him the Raw general manager job. The crowd, of course, hated this which was the intent of the decision. On the one hand, that’s great: Everyone hates Corbin, but everyone should hate Corbin, as that’s the thing about wrestlers positioned heel. On the other hand: Everyone hates Corbin, and in front of a WrestleMania crowd this match could be a big dud.

WWE knows this, though, and it may just be that the Corbin announcement is a bait-and-switch. WWE analyst Justin LaBar thinks so, but he does give a bit of a caveat just in case that’s not the real plan (or if it is and it gets changed):

The Chicago crowd was chanting for John Cena, who would be an appropriate challenger for Angle (Angle was Cena’s first televised WWE opponent) and who also needs something to do at WrestleMania. Perhaps he will be subbed in. Or perhaps he won’t. And the good news for Corbin is that everyone will continue to love to hate him, which is worth just as much as love itself in the world of pro wrestling.

The Miz is so good at this

The Miz opened Tuesday’s SmackDown Live to address being turned on by his former tag team partner and best friend Shane McMahon and cut a promo that thoroughly encapsulated just how good The Miz has gotten at this whole professional wrestling and sports entertainment thing (something we should all keep in mind, by the way, as we work through slagging Corbin).

In a not-overlong way, The Miz explained that yes, he’s been a jerk in the past, mostly because he’s sacrificed his every personal relationship save the ones with his wife, Maryse, and their daughter in pursuit of WrestleMania immortality. The one relationship, though, that he’s sought not to destroy but to repair via the squared circle was that with his father, and through partnering with McMahon, he was given the love and respect from his father that he had been seeking for so long.

The trust, though, he put into McMahon which stemmed from all of that, was where he was mistaken: The McMahons are snakes (“rotten to the core, just like your father … born worst in the world”) who only achieve in pro wrestling because they own the business. The Miz, meanwhile, has worked on his own to reach his dreams, to which the crowd responded with coveted “you deserve it,” chants. The look in The Miz’s eyes when he heard that seemed genuine, a reaction not by The Miz, but by Mike Mizanin, who has likely always hoped he’d get a “you deserve it” chant someday and was amazed it came then.

But: He does. The Miz does deserve it. Nothing he said was a lie; he’s had to work hard — very, very hard — to earn the respect of not just crowds and viewers, but lifelong wrestlers, the locker room and the McMahon family. He’s not a natural, but he’s someone with so much love, passion and dedication that he made it work, because he had to make it work. This is how a heel becomes beloved, by becoming self-aware and becoming human in a strongly relatable way. The Miz will get his catharsis at WrestleMania. He deserves it.

Additionally …

Batista appeared on Raw, via satellite in his Tampa Bay office, to clue us in on how much of an “insecure, selfish, jealous control freak” Triple H really is and, just scouring H’s career body of work, it’s hard to see the lie. Batista claims it was Triple H’s habit of using and/or holding down those around him that led him to quit the WWE in 2010 and now that he’s independent, a movie star in his own right, he’s returned possessing just enough control to force H’s hand into giving him what he wants: A chance to end Triple H’s career at WrestleMania. It was good, effective storytelling and much better than last week’s confrontation between the two in Pittsburgh. A little less Spice Girls.

Ronda Rousey also showed up on Raw, along with her husband, mixed martial artist Travis Browne, to take on Dana Brooke and also be flanked by a phalanx of WWE-provided security goons. Brooke was arm bar’d and tapped out for her troubles. Ronda’s refusal to relinquish the hold, though, sent security and referees into a frenzy, and while trying to free Rousey from their grasp, Browne handed out a forearm. Per Rousey, he is now banned from Raw.

A plea: Please, please don’t let Browne play any type of deciding role in Rousey’s WrestleMania meeting with Becky Lynch and Charlotte Flair. It would be a shame (amongst many other bad things) if a man’s involvement influenced the outcome of what is, without question, the biggest and most important women’s match in WWE history.

More plans for WrestleMania were also advanced on Raw and SmackDown this week: Roman Reigns will take on Drew McIntyre, Rey Mysterio will challenge Samoa Joe for the WWE United States Championship and Beth Phoenix and Natalya and/or Nia Jax and Tamina and/or The IIconics will take on the WWE Women’s Tag Team Champions Sasha Banks and Bayley. Elias, meanwhile, will serve as the headlining musical act and Alexa Bliss will be hosting the whole affair.

Oh, and where’s Asuka and what is she doing for WrestleMania? We’ll find out next week as Carmella, Naomi, Mandy Rose and Sonya Deville will take part in a fatal four-way to determine Asuka’s WrestleMania challenger for her SmackDown Women’s Championship. Asuka has been on, what, two episodes of SmackDown since the Royal Rumble? Well, isn’t that swell.