WWE Raw: ABA Undertaker tombstones kayfabe at a necessary price

The last episode of WWE Raw showcased a borderline kayfabe breaking hybrid between Undertaker’s Deadman character and his former American Badass persona. For better or worse, it’s what wrestling needs right now.

For context, I’m not a fan of drastic kayfabe breaking in wrestling storylines. This goes for WWE, AEW, etc. Blurring the lines between fact and fiction can work under the right circumstances, but under the wrong circumstances, it just feels obnoxious to watch.

For example, I’m perfectly fine with CM Punk dropping “pipe bombs” about his real life contract negotiations and his “real” grievances regarding his place on the card. It got obnoxious when he started shouting things like “This isn’t CM Punk talking to Triple H! This is Phil Brooks talking to Paul Levesque!”

Which is why I wasn’t the biggest fan of AJ Styles casually shouting, “The Undertaker and Michelle McCool are married and his real name is Mark Calloway!” the other week on Raw. That’s when I tuned out. To keep it short, it was a promo that bordered on the ones you’d see during WCW’s dying days.

But then The Undertaker came out the next week. His character, seemingly, was a hybrid between the usual Deadman, and the American Badass that dominated the early days of the Ruthless Aggression Era.

Initially, I didn’t know what to make of Taker’s evolution. Keyword: evolution. When I thought of it more as the latest evolution, and suddenly, this hybrid works. It’s drastic enough from The Deadman enough to feel different, but subtle enough that the usual quirks of said Deadman (i.e. the disappearing act) still feels appropriate. It makes sense, but most of all, it’s necessary.

Necessary for many different reasons and in different ways. One way being that we’ve already gone past the point of no return following Styles’ promo. After acknowledging what we already know, Undertaker can’t just do his usual schtick like nothing happened. This at least blurs those fact/fiction lines just a bit.

Most of all, it provides a weird, satisfying sense of nostalgia. Both for fans have been saying they want to see Taker return to his ABA routine (especially after he seemed to “retire” the Deadman character at Mania 33) and for fans who could just use a callback to easier, happier times, before the world was flooded with today’s chaos. 

Those fans are begging for such nostalgia and wrestling altogether as a break from reality and, ironically enough, this latest iteration of Taker does exactly that by blurring reality and fiction.