Bray Wyatt’s reboot has serious potential, as long as WWE doesn’t mess it up

Mister Rogers meets the stuff of nightmares in Bray Wyatt’s “Firefly Fun House.”

Bray Wyatt has spent his WWE career portraying a swamp-cult leader, mostly affiliated with the Wyatt Family. There has been times, though, where he’s stepped away from on-camera and in-ring work, sometimes to recover from injuries and sometimes for purported creative reboots.

None quite stuck — and none felt much like a true reboot, even after Matt Hardy threw him into the Lake of Reincarnation in 2017’s Ultimate Deletion — and his act, while featuring the truly charismatic Wyatt (and a very compelling ring entrance), had increasingly been viewed by fans as stale at best and embarrassing and corny at worst.

But Wyatt finally seems on track to revitalize his character, finally taking it in a new direction — but one that does not skimp on the creepiness factor that has been his hallmark.

It all started two weeks ago, on the Monday Night Raw after WrestleMania, when a vignette aired regarding a smoky buzzard puppet in a Hawaiian shirt popping out of a cardboard box, and continued the following week to reveal a creepy-toned dollhouse and a Sister Abigail-esque puppet/doll in a rocking chair, all things that pointed directly to Wyatt’s imminent return.

And now we know what form this “new” Wyatt will take: Mister Rogers, But Spooky. If you missed it (or if you want to watch it again, which is highly recommended), welcome to Wyatt’s “Firefly Fun House,” which premiered on Monday’s episode of Raw.

Featuring a children’s laugh track and Wyatt wearing a sweater and khakis, the former “Eater of Worlds,” gave us an introduction into his Fun House, Wyatt’s “special place” where “fireflies can feel safe.” The puppets were given names — the buzzard is Mercy the Buzzard and the Sister Abigail-type woman is Abby the Witch.

It’s certainly twisted; at one point, Wyatt brings out a cardboard cutout of himself as the previous iteration of his character and eviscerated it with a chainsaw, after proclaiming that he “used to be a very bad man,” and that he has “been barbarically punished for all of my wrongdoings and that part of me is dead now.”

There’s no indication of when Wyatt will return to in-ring action or exactly what a feud against a twisted host of television programming would even look like. But there are doubtlessly more episodes of “Firefly Fun House,” and a lot of weirdness, ahead.

The problem is that we’ve seen Wyatt go from innovative spookiness/creepiness to it getting old and going nowhere fast. Not all of that blame falls on Wyatt’s shoulders, of course; most of the time, he’s just working with the material that WWE provides him with. And while that material has often started out as engaging, it has kept stalling, not least in part that all of Wyatt’s feuds have followed the same arc and led to him repeatedly losing.

Most all of them have been, essentially: Wyatt finds an opponent, he stalks or creeps them out in some way, Wyatt claims he’s a god or some other supernatural being, Wyatt hits a few Sister Abigails in low-stakes situations on television, Wyatt loses the big blow-off match at the pay-per-view and repeat.

At the very least, while Wyatt is busy in the Fun House he cannot lose matches. But at some point, he’ll have to get back in the ring and he will need to be booked to not only win matches but in a way that doesn’t follow the old formula. We’ve all wanted Wyatt to be somehow retooled in a way that plays up his greatest strengths — his ability to build and deliver a character believably, his ability to menace, his ability to physically and psychologically intimidate — in ways that don’t lead to us cringing with secondhand embarrassment, as it has so often in the past.

Hopefully, this time it will stick and it will work. And even if it fails miserably as the weeks roll on, we at least have this burgeoning moment of Wyatt’s “Firefly Fun House,” and how much actual fun the gimmick is at its inception.