Battle of the Brands - Raw Vs. SmackDown Live: May 30, 2017

#3 Storyline Advancement: Winner - Raw

Where’s this leading?

Raw’s main strength this week was in its storyline advancement. Several different threads were running through the episode, like the mysterious revelations involving Kurt Angle, and the fact that Cory Graves was the one to bring it up to him. It’s said that Stephanie McMahon could be the one behind the texting scandal, setting up a return to RAW in order to ‘ruin’ the RAW GM, according to the Wrestling Observer. Angle and Stephanie have a lot of history, thus it makes sense for such an angle to play out.

You also had the Enzo Amore angle, leaving us all guessing as to who has been attacking him this past couple of weeks. It was a nice touch to see Big Cass come out to the commentator's booth and stare down Cory Graves after the colour commentator made some comments about him.

You also had the continuation of the story between Alexa Bliss and Bayley. While the execution wasn’t perfect, we know more about the dynamics of the match on Sunday, which has made it feel like more than just another WWE women’s wrestling match.

It would have been nice to see Paul Heyman again this week, as the back and forth between him and Balor last time left many people anticipating some kind of progression in the Finn Balor character. Perhaps we will know more about this next week. Overall, however, Raw certainly kept us interested in all the backstage, storyline plots, which is what WWE is supposed to be doing.

SmackDown is finding itself caught in a bit of a ruck at the moment. It’s next PPV is not for another three weeks, and considering we’ve known who the competitors for the MITB match are, the best the show can do is give us some kind of variation between the six of them. This week Dolph and AJ were split off to do their own thing while the other four competed in tag team action. Last week it was Zayn and Corbin who took centre stage. Expect a lot more of this until the PPV.

The WWE Championship picture wasn’t really added to either. Orton’s promo was pretty mediocre and said pretty much what we’d expect him to say. Other than the main title matches, there’s not a lot happening on SmackDown at the moment. The Fashion Police are still providing some good comic relief; however, it’s just a shame not many people are going to care about their new feud with the Colons.