It is March 25, 2026. The road to WrestleMania 41 is practically paved in gold right now. We have Cody Rhodes gearing up for a massive title defense in Las Vegas. John Cena is on his farewell tour. CM Punk is finally healthy and doing some of the best character work of his career. The product is firing on all cylinders, arenas are sold out, and the overarching storylines actually make sense.
But five years ago this week? Five years ago, Monday Night Raw was a terrifying, chaotic, and deeply frustrating television show.
A podcast I listen to recently did a retrospective on the March 22, 2021 episode of Raw, and it sent me down a massive rabbit hole. This specific show is the true master key for understanding the ThunderDome era. If you want to know what WWE felt like when Vince McMahon was locked in an empty building with thousands of webcam feeds and zero live crowd feedback, this episode has it all.
Let's just look at the board. We had a major star getting pulled due to COVID protocols. We had the main roster debut of a generational talent. We had a red-hot faction being actively sabotaged by the writing team. We had a grown man pouring slime on a giant. And we had a crispy, heavily-barbecued supernatural clown making his grand return.
It was absolute madness.
The Covid Pivot and Rhea Ripley's Arrival
The Raw Women's Championship picture heading into WrestleMania 37 was an absolute mess. Asuka was the champion, but she had been booked like an afterthought for months. She was stuck in random tag team feuds and desperately needed a high-profile challenger for Tampa.
The worst-kept secret in wrestling was that Charlotte Flair was penciled in for that spot. The build had practically already started on television. But then, real life hit hard. Charlotte announced she had tested positive for COVID-19, completely blowing up the planned title match just weeks before the biggest show of the year.
WWE panicked, but that panic resulted in one of the best audibles they have ever called.
Rhea Ripley made her official Raw debut on this very episode. She marched straight down to the ring, grabbed a microphone, and challenged Asuka for the belt at WrestleMania. It was aggressive, it was sudden, and it completely bypassed the usual weeks of meaningless squash matches that NXT call-ups usually have to endure.
Looking back from 2026, it is crazy to realize how much the current product was shaped by that one positive test. Rhea Ripley is the biggest female star on the planet right now. Mami is a global brand. But in early 2021, Ripley's stock had cooled off significantly after taking a weird loss to Charlotte at the empty-arena WrestleMania 36.
This debut was her lifeline. She beat Asuka at Mania 37, won the title, and firmly established herself as a main eventer. If Charlotte never gets sick, maybe Ripley debuts in May. Maybe she gets stuck chasing the 24/7 Championship. Instead, she got a rocket strapped to her back because the company had literally no other options.
The Unforgivable Sabotage of The Hurt Business
While the women's division stumbled into a great booking decision, the men's side was actively destroying the best thing on the show.
The Hurt Business was the only reason to watch Raw for a solid six months during the pandemic. Bobby Lashley, MVP, Shelton Benjamin, and Cedric Alexander were printing money. They looked cool, they worked stiff, and they brought a level of legitimacy that the rest of the show completely lacked. MVP had resurrected his career to become the best manager in the business, cutting promos that actually felt real. Lashley had just won the WWE Championship and was on a collision course with Drew McIntyre for Mania.
So what did WWE do on the March 22 episode? They continued teasing the breakup of the group.
Tensions were suddenly flaring between Benjamin and Alexander for absolutely no logical reason. MVP was acting annoyed with his own stablemates. They were planting the seeds to split the faction right when Lashley needed them the most for his title defense.
It was one of the most frustrating things I have ever watched. Vince McMahon apparently decided that Lashley didn't need the group anymore, completely ignoring the fact that the group dynamic was exactly what made Lashley so dominant in the first place.
They eventually pulled the trigger and kicked Benjamin and Alexander out shortly after this episode. The crowd absolutely hated the decision, and rightfully so. It killed a merchandise juggernaut and ruined the momentum of two veterans who had finally found the perfect role. Cedric and Shelton went from looking like untouchable hitmen to chasing people around for the 24/7 title within a matter of weeks. Five years later, I am still mad about it.
Slime, Train Noises, and the Strowman Burial
If you want to understand how juvenile the creative process was back then, look no further than the feud between Shane McMahon and Braun Strowman.
The entire premise of this WrestleMania program was that Shane thought Braun was stupid. That was it. There was no deep blood feud, no battle over a championship, no philosophical difference. Shane just walked around calling a giant man an idiot.
On this episode, they had a segment where Elias and Jaxson Ryker—remember him?—sang a mocking song about Strowman's intelligence. This brilliant piece of television culminated with Shane McMahon pouring a bucket of green slime all over Braun.
Yes, green slime. On the flagship show of the biggest wrestling company in the world. It felt like a rejected segment from Nickelodeon in the late nineties.
To make matters worse, the production truck had started piping in cartoon train noises whenever Strowman ran around the ring to do his shoulder tackles. The guy was a former Universal Champion. He had flipped ambulances. And now he was covered in slime and sounding like a literal cartoon train.
Strowman ended up throwing Shane off the top of a steel cage at Mania, which was a cool visual, but getting there was pure torture. Shane was stealing massive amounts of TV time that could have gone to literally anyone else on the roster.
The Extra Crispy Fiend
You cannot talk about the ThunderDome without talking about the absolute peak of supernatural nonsense.
Months earlier at TLC, Randy Orton had literally set The Fiend on fire in the middle of the ring. Bray Wyatt was written off television, leaving Alexa Bliss to carry the feud. She spent the winter shooting fireballs out of her hands and spitting black liquid while sitting on swings in the middle of the ring.
On March 22, the payoff finally arrived. The Fiend returned, but he was wearing a new costume. He looked like a burnt piece of toast. The mask was melted and charred, his clothes were covered in soot, and he moved like a zombie.
Visually? It was actually a pretty incredible piece of prop work. The melted mask looked genuinely terrifying. It looked like something out of a high-budget horror film, complete with the charred flesh and the lifeless eyes. But in execution? It was hilarious.
You had Randy Orton, one of the greatest wrestlers of all time, standing in the ring surrounded by thousands of iPads showing fans sitting on their couches, pretending to be absolutely horrified by a walking campfire. The disconnect between the serious tone Orton was trying to set and the inherently silly nature of a burned clown staggering around an empty baseball stadium was jarring.
They had a match at WrestleMania 37 that featured a giant Jack-in-the-box, a distraction from Bliss who had black goo pouring down her face, and a single RKO to end it. Wyatt was released just a few months later, making this entire burnt-Fiend saga completely pointless.
WrestleMania Hosts and the Piped-In Reality
The cherry on top of this episode was the announcement that Hulk Hogan and Titus O'Neil would be hosting WrestleMania 37.
WWE was desperate to project a massive, mainstream feel for their return to a live crowd in Tampa. They wanted the optics of a legendary name welcoming the fans back to a stadium setting. But when the show actually happened, the real fans aggressively booed Hogan every time he spoke. The contrast between the piped-in cheers on the ThunderDome broadcasts and the brutal reality of a live audience was staggering. It proved that you cannot artificially engineer a reaction when people have spent a year locked inside their homes.
Today, in 2026, WWE doesn't need to roll out Hogan for nostalgia pops. The current roster is stacked with legitimate superstars who draw money on their own.
Revisiting the March 2021 era is a tough watch, but it is deeply necessary. It reminds us of how bad things can get when creative control is entirely unchecked and the audience has no physical voice. The ThunderDome kept the lights on, but it gave us some of the most baffling television in wrestling history.
We survived the slime, the train noises, and the burnt clown. And frankly, we deserve the boom period we are experiencing right now.
