Image Source: wwe.com
Oh, dear friends, was this week’s RAW not a humdinger? And just when we thought the world was coming to an end because of Roman Reigns, who shows up but Shane McMahon, to drop a bombshell (if not quite a pipe bomb) that he has some kind of lockbox full of blackmail against Vince himself! The prodigal son returned, but not to beg his father for charity and compassion, oh no! Shane came back to fuck shit up, if you’ll excuse my French. Wrecking Stephanie’s ceremony for that fancy corporate-looking award, demanding control of RAW, and getting into quite a row with his father, who became so seething mad he dropped an F-bomb on live TV! It was muted by the time it got to my timezone, but here’s a video somebody in the audience took:
https://twitter.com/DeathToSmarks/status/702035013693353984
I feel as though a rare mist of kayfabe is beginning to take form. This whole thing is ultimately a work, but it felt loaded with various bullet points of shoot. Shane laid bare the company’s plague of injuries, lagging stocks, and abysmal ratings, and declared himself WWE’s savior for future generations. What is really going on here? At the time of this writing, I have not yet seen an explanation of Shane’s return. I read a bit about Shane’s business ventures a few years ago, and got the distinct impression he was not interested in being involved with the company anymore. He cast his father as a tyrant as well, and was fairly explicit about not wanting to make his way in the world on his father’s coattails. Does Shane’s return hint at a significant changing of the guard in carny-corporate politics? Or was this prodigal son storyline wrestling’s best kept secret, an ace kept tucked away by the family in preparedness for desperate times?
If you told me a year ago that Shane would show up out of nowhere a few weeks before Wrestlemania and turn the narrative on its head, I would have called you a dreamer. This almost qualifies as deus ex machina. I mean, things are beginning to look up, are they not? Later Triple H even did a crotch chop and bashed Roman Reigns’ face to a blood pulp. (I know it was fake blood, I also saw evidence of that on the Twitter. But I didn’t know it in the moment. I let myself get carried away with pathos for poor Roman’s career and saw the blood as a logical extension of the beating he has taken in public opinion this year and his Suplex City bitch role at the last Wrestlemania. And by the way, I hope all you savage meanies in the IWC were happy to see all that fake blood on that once noble dark knight of justice.)
Oh, and let us not forget that Dean Ambrose has finally scratched and clawed his way out of the midcard and looks to be wrestling Brock Lesnar at Wrestlemania! My back was starting to hurt on this too-long road through the wastelands that lead to Wrestlemania, but suddenly there are dazzling lights on the horizon.
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