By Shane McKinley, PWTorch Specialist

Raw opens up with the cast of High School Musical 3 in the ring. Those crazy kids! There's the loner C.M. Punk, the beautiful girl Kelly Kelly, and the smug lacrosse player Cody Rhodes. It's hard to believe people like Dolph Zwiggler are considered "realistic."

Nice of Raw to have Stephanie explain actually why Cena gets a title shot. "He was a top contender before he got injured."

Pretty good rap with Santino. His bits this year show that work went into them, and it pays off.

Whatever happened to Umaga? Manu looked good here but in the long scheme of things we are still waiting for the Priceless Team to really take hold.

Chief Jay Strongbow and Akon were featured on this show. Standard but efficient promos by Orton, Cody, Punk, Kane, and JBL.

It was surprising that Evan Bourne got a bit with Raw talking about his injury. Mike Knox and his beard Mr. Fuzzy show up to...stare. In the old days, Knox would have chopped him at the knee and that would have been that. But WWE felt it prudent enough to lay down groundwork (?) by having Knox stare at him. Uh, yeah.

The bit with HBK being cheesy might as well have been the Raw writers saying, "Hey! We're not stale and old! We can poke fun at ourselves!" Then the rest of Raw presented the same predictable bits we come to know and love. How will Kane and JBL coexist? How indeed? You watch these characters for years. You have seen every sort of interaction they could have with each other. Stay tuned.

WWE tag team of the year is JoMizzy (not that there was much competition). Some people will not like the fact that HBK lost to JoMizzy, but let's face the facts. One, the finish of the match was well done (WWE continues to have good finishes in their matches), the finish was close, and WWE knows that they sooner or later have to start pushing the younger talent.

Michael Cole and Jerry Lawler talk about "Green Week" and being environmentally friendly.

Cole: "When I go shopping for hair conditioner, I reuse my shopping bags!"

Lawler: "Hey, did you know that I reuse my 'sporting goods?' Saves me a bundle!"

Cole: "Ho ho ho that's great! I'll pretend I know what you are talking about. Did you know that Raw re-uses their scripts? Heck, I even reuse the same description of characters! Green Week is swashbuckling!"

Lawler: "The entire WWE Universe should re-use!"

Am I wrong for assuming that the WWE trucks which store all of the equipment of Raw run on clean-burning fuel?

Jericho and Stephanie talk backstage. Jericho needs to win to prevent "total anarchy" on Raw. Uh huh. "Total Anarchy" for Raw writers might mean when the lights go out, or when they hire a football guy who can't announce to announce and keeps him for nearly a year. For old time's sake, Jericho calls Stephanie a "trash eating ho bag."

Sad to see that they are now struggling to fill in semi-relevant info for the "Did You Know?" bits. Writing propaganda is tough.

There we go. Knox beating up on Kofi "I am Raw's Punching Bag" Kingston and Bourne. How will the clean-shaven Bourne stand up to the big bearded bully? And will they have a Raw match that lasts longer than four minutes? Stay tuned.

And hey, Jack Swagger gets his own ECW commercial. Must...destroy...Ricky "O-Ring" Ortiz.

For a minute there, I thought that it was going to be an actual contest with William Regal and Matt Hardy, busted leg and all. Things ended quickly with a double count out. Reason for the match? Hype up Survivor Series. Hmm.

A lot of Survivor Series is "how will they co-exist?" or "how will it play out?" But the actual consequences? Not much. So if you order the PPV, you are putting a lot of trust that WWE will execute and have good bits. Because, from where it stands right now, the PPV might come off as a longer episode of Raw.

The smartest man in the biz, Chris Jericho, comes out to do a promo. Considering the insane amount of hype poured into Cena's return, and it is a tall order to have Jericho come out and do a great money promo. I liked the promo, but there were some things worth mentioning.

When Jericho mentions he became undisputed champion in 2001 after beating the Rock and Stone Cold, it is not really that effective. For one, it is in 2001, and anyone can have a lucky night.

But then Jericho proceeds to show us his previous matches from the past months: The scramble match, the cage match with C.M. Punk, the ladder match with HBK, and the cage match with Batista. All of these video bits showed Jericho getting "lucky wins." Barely winning it.

And since Jericho held the title, not once did he ever truly get a dominating win because Cena was always going to be in the bigger picture. Jericho was set up as a heel champion, but to be a champion that looked somewhat weak in getting "lucky wins."

Jericho proceeds to be cocky in his promo and talk about how "things will stay the same when I retain the championship this Sunday." You felt that, if Jericho really had his way with his promo, he could make anyone who feels that Cena will no doubt win the title at the PPV actually question.

Jericho could have brought up previous hard fought battles in the past such as wrestling in Japan, WCW, Canada, and Mexico. But he couldn't because every WWE wrestler has to use WWE history. You never really got a sense of how many years Jericho has been in the business or the great challenges he has faced in his career.

Secondly, while Jericho shows intensity in his promo, the promo itself lacked that "killer" instinct. There was no real hatred of Cena. There was no sense that "Cena is out of his league" or that "Cena is coming back too early and I am going to make him pay." For example, Jericho did not point out that he was going to work on that injured neck and make Cena tap. In this promo, Jericho pretty much set himself up to lose Sunday.

Indeed, it was an effective promo. But for me Jericho to fully win me over about the PPV was near impossible, given the circumstances. There were no seeds of doubt planted that Jericho will win the title, unless absurdly he joins forces with Stephanie and Raw proceeds to have a "brother vs. sister" conflict. But that is stretching it.

Jericho, in his title reign, was never going to be bigger than Cena. I don't pretend to know how to run things, but the decision to have Jericho during his title reign pretty much get "lucky wins" in order to spoon-feed fans the notion that Jericho is a great but not totally deserving champion to make them more apt for a title change... I don't know. It seems that Jericho was just holding the title for Cena's return and no matter what could not take his character above what WWE said he could do.

Jericho could have looked much more dominant going into his match with Cena, where jaded fans could root for Cena in getting a tough and extremely difficult win over a dominant champion. But as it looks from this point, Survivor Series might play out like this:

Cena gets a long-ass opening video package, Cena looks dominant, Jericho does submission holds, Cena counters and wins the big one.

I don't watch wrestling for "spoon-fed" storylines, where WWE drums up all of this false hype about this being "Cena's biggest night." But it is what it is. The avalanche of Cena's video packages is sure to get more PPV buys, but in contrast, Jericho got pretty much next to nothing in terms of hype.

And then whatever storyline they had in place for Cena that they written months ago goes back into play. It was kind of cheesy how Jericho won the title in the first place (that awful "Scramble" concept) and it will be cheesy how Jericho loses the title.

Back to Raw, Deuce and Snitsky are still there? Orton and Punk looked good. I had a lot of fun just watching Orton sell moves. It's actually Orton returning that is the bigger motivation to watch Raw instead of Cena, but that's me. Might be something here with William Regal vs. C.M. Punk, but I don't really want to see that.

POSTIVES

-- Interesting opening
-- WWE explains why Cena gets title shot
-- Santino is once again comedy goodness
-- Manu looked good in his loss (that's what we have to settle for, it seems)
-- Chief Jay Strongbow and HBK backstage bit keeps thing fresh, although somewhat weird
-- Raw loves Bourne
-- JoMizzy gets a big win over HBK and Mysterio
-- Orton and Punk look very good

NEGATIVES

-- Raw does not really have matches, they usually have "showcases"
-- Mike Knox stomps his way to Bourne to ... stare at him
-- Kane and JBL stink it up, Cryme Tyme are overhyped
-- Largely useless match with new IC champion Regal and Matt Hardy
-- Fans are largely unsure to buy the PPV

VERDICT: In The Middle Of Absurdity

Email is mckinley.torch@gmail.com.

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