WWE Raw: Brock Lesnar was the lone highlight on a rocky premiere

Brock Lesnar was the saving grace of an otherwise uneven, and occasionally terrible, season premiere of Monday Night Raw for WWE.

If you had only watched the first segment of Monday Night Raw, you would likely have been thrilled by the new season of WWE TV.

Brock Lesnar’s assault on both Rey Mysterio and his son Dominic was absolutely vicious. It had the feel of a can’t-miss moment fitting for such a grand week of wrestling action. The simple fact that it just didn’t seem to end until Lesnar wanted it to end made the entire moment just that much better too.

It was also the perfect kind of brutal mauling for establishing a great rivalry between the Mysterios and Lesnar down the road.

At this point, I don’t know what form that rivalry would take. Based on the exceptional selling from Rey and Dominic though, I can’t wait to see what happens in it regardless.

Group in Paul Heyman’s intense backstage promo later in the show reacting to that beating by hyping his client’s upcoming match against Kofi Kingston on SmackDown, and you have what I would argue was the perfect segment to lead this so-called new season of WWE programming.

It was such a great segment that it’s really almost a shame that Raw didn’t close with it, especially when you think about what they did in lieu of the scheduled Rey Mysterio versus Seth Rollins Universal Championship match.

After that amazing Lesnar beatdown, the show struggled to keep up the momentum as it began to gradually limp towards the main event.

Both titles matches leading to the show’s climax were solid, but puzzlingly didn’t feature any gold changing hands. With a sparse Hell in a Cell card at the moment, one would have to hope WWE chooses to run those back this coming Sunday to give us an actual title change or two.

Meanwhile, an episode of Miz TV featuring Hulk Hogan and Ric Flair ended up as some sort of confusing mess of an advertisement for another ill-conceived Saudi Arabia WWE special.

Even if you were to somehow remove Hogan and Flair’s presence from the segment, something that would be incredibly hard to do given their awkward promos, the alliances that were formed felt completely random at best.

Randy Orton and Baron Corbin were put on the same Survivor Series-style team in a partnership with absolutely no context. Then, they proceeded to beat down Seth Rollins, who was subsequently saved by Rusev, a superstar who had been portrayed as a heel up to that point.

The fact that the spot seemed ready made for a Chad Gable run-in only added to the head-scratching nature of the whole affair.

Either way, it was apparently all necessary to set up an absolutely atrocious final few minutes of Raw that saw Rusev watch a returning Bobby Lashley awkwardly make out with his wife onstage in some horrid early 2000’s angle that then gave way for a random “Fiend” attack on Seth Rollins to close the show. All of this during a Universal Championship match no less, I might add.

In short, it was a train wreck of massive proportions. The worst way to end the show after perhaps the strongest way to start it.

Let’s just hope WWE can clean up their act heading into SmackDown’s big debut on Fox this week, and actually give us a consistently exceptional WWE program that looks less like that cringe-inducing main event, and more like the Brock Lesnar angle that preceded it.