Eight is Enough

In keeping with long-standing Money in the Bank go-home-show tradition, this week’s Raw starts with all of the brand’s participants in Sunday’s Money in the Bank ladder matches in the middle of the ring standing and smiling awkwardly on ladders. It was, also in keeping with long-standing Money in the Bank go-home-show tradition, kind of a slog to get through even if we’ve reached a point where everyone at this level is somewhere between Ember Moon and great on the microphone.

Having both the men and women MitB qualifiers (along with the heavily advertised Fatal Fourways™ they were planning) made it obvious from the start that the action involved was going to be minimal. Of course, until this suave motherfucker showed up:

This, this right here, is the most important Big Boy Pants moment since Chris Jericho started wearing trunks. Now, yr correspondent is a long-time, unapologetic Baron Corbin fan since the days of Rudo Radio. But, essentially since then his look has held him back. He was by no means a bad or even problematically weird looking man but because of the ways in which attractiveness and masculinity are validated in modern society, the wet cat he had on his head for essentially his entire main roster run felt like a major impediment.

His look — not to steal Darnell’s gimmick  — fits his character much better (as no one that self-centered would walk around with hair that stringy and terrible), while streamlining his profile and making him look like a star who can buy palpably nice clothes instead of a heavy biker-adjace guy who’d try to pick a fight with you in a bar before retreating after the first punch. Which is to say that he now looks like a douche who knows he’s better than you, and doesn’t just think he’d be so much better off than you if he could just figure out what to do with his hair.

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Constable Corbin also adds some actual spice to the proceedings, reestablishing himself as Stephanie McMahon‘s proxy and adding actual stakes/consequences attached to the result of Money in the Bank matches. Whether those consequences are of the “Fire Kurt” variety or simply some kind of The Authority Redux is anyone’s guess, but given that SummerSlam season starts in earnest after MitB, the (pardon the pun) latter seems like the most likely outcome. Which is good in the sense that it allows us to tie up some post-WM loose ends between Angle and Stephanie, but is probably bad in the sense that it’s going to be a terribad boring rehash of all the things that came before it.

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