What you need to know
Like it was 2004, Raw opened with a really long talking segment featuring Triple H. The Authority heads laid out the stakes for Survivor Series to their troops, and their plan for taking apart Team Cena tonight. They started their bid to keep control of WWE by showing Ryback a montage of all the times John Cena wasn't a Show Tolerance And Respect kind of guy to him. Oh, the drama! The Big Guy says he's sticking with Team Him.
Step two of their plan involves putting "team playa" Luke Harper up against Intercontinental champion Dolph Ziggler. This turns out to be one of the more successful facets of their scheme, ending with Harper as IC champ and Dolph with his face curb stomped into the mat by Seth Rollins. Less successful was sending Cesaro after Team Ryback, if that was even a step. The Big Guy won, and Cena tried to motivate him by continuing to not be a S.T.A.R.
Luckily for Team Authority, Step three involved Heath Slater, so Rusev got to warm-up for his role as a back-up to step four - trying to sway Big Show to the dark side by having Stephanie McMahon offer him a Hall of Fame spot. That's better than the foreclosure and Cialis she offered him this time last year, I suppose. He still didn't take it, though, and ended up in a match against fellow Team Cena member Sheamus.
But, remember that back-up plan? The Bulgarian United States champ and his friend that he made unconscious a lot earlier in the year, Mark Henry, ran down to decimate Show and the former U.S. titleholder before the could end their #1 contender's match. The World's Largest Athlete ended up passing out in the Accolade, while a World's Strongest Slam to Sheamus took the Celtic Warrior out of the pay-per-view (PPV) all together.
Meanwhile, Team Captain Cena was too busy to help any of his boys. Probably because he was backstage questioning Ryback's manhood.
Adam Rose's Bunny likes to hump things, like Tyson Kidd's wife Natalya and Rose himself. Like Renee Young, Grumpy Cat doesn't care about any of it.
What better way to set-up a tag team championship four-way than by taking the two good guy teams and having them wrestle the two bad guy teams? If there is one, WWE hasn't come up with it yet, so Goldust, Stardust, The Miz and Damien Mizdow beat The Usos and Los Matadores in a match that included the obligatory accidental face-on-face violence of an Uso superkick to un Matador. Jimmy & Jey got some momentum back with a win on Main Event over the tag champs.
Calling Bray Wyatt a BS artist may not have been wise. It worked for Dean Ambrose on Monday night, when he declined Bray's offer of a partnership and used his own camera tricks against him to stage a sneak attack. But the Eater of Worlds took this very badly, and sounded quite fired up when we next saw him on Tuesday night. The taunts he delivered to Dean while finished off Jack Swagger were as scary as anything we've heard from Wyatt to date.
In need of a sparring partner, Nikki Bella made her personal assistant Brie dress as Divas champ AJ Lee for their match. Lee had to enjoy watching Brie sneak out a win, but not as much as she must have enjoyed laying out both twins in a post-match assault. Elsewhere, Alicia Fox got revenge for her Liverpool loss to Paige, evening the score as they head toward an elimination tag showdown on Sunday.
Not to be outdone by Trips opening promo, John Cena decides to talk through the closing contract signing segment. Well, not all the way through, but enough to threaten to take on The Authority with a nun and some twelve year olds. John ends up doing better than that though, as the inevitable contract signing brawl is joined by Team Cena. Ziggler and Big Show inexplicably join despite the lack of help from the Ce-Nation leader earlier in the night, and Ryback despite his taunts. Those guys loyalties are nothing compared to the surprise addition of Erick Rowan, who threw his sheep mask in with Cena and sent us off to Smackdown with the good guys standing tall.
What to look out for
The show hit Knoxville, Tennessee on its way to St. Louis for Sunday's big show. If you want to find out what happened, you can tune in to SyFy tonight. But if you don't want to be drafted into two hours of sports entertainment on your Friday night, we volunteered to give you spoilers - get them right here.
We'll find out what's in Dean Ambrose's survival kit, which is hopefully a can of whoop ass and not more prop comedy, in order for this feud to continue building some heat before the PPV.
Otherwise, we can probably expect more of the same on the company's last chance to convince people to watch a free show on November 23rd. Expect more Authority-booked matches designed to punish Team Cena. And hope for a bit of build or maybe even explanation for Rowan joining - and the faces accepting the former Wyatt acolyte - their squad.
(Note: I know some folks have come looking for a more definitive match listing - that will be posted behind spoiler text in the comments. If WWE.com releases more information on anything that's officially going to take place on tonight's show, that'll be updated here)
With two hours left to get you fired up for Survivor Series, what does the blue brand have up its sleeve?
Find out tonight, and do it along with your fellow Cagesiders in our live blog!