The Tiger and the Viper

On the current tangle with Kevin Owens, Cody Rhodes, and Randy Orton.

In 2018, Kevin and Sami broke my heart by attacking Ty Dillinger backstage at the Royal Rumble.

That’s a strange and random place to have your heart broken, I know. But the thing is, when Sami “turned heel” to help Kevin against Shane McMahon, for months I kept trying to find ways they were not in the wrong. Shane was a jerk—worse, a McMahon!—and had it coming! Okay, they were fighting Shinsuke, Randy, and AJ in underhanded ways, but really, weren’t they goaded into it? Wasn’t this a kind of justice? 

But at the Royal Rumble, Sami and Kevin beat up Ty Dillinger (later to become Shawn Spears) backstage and Sami took his place in the Rumble, and I could no longer deny it. Costing Dillinger—a lower-card babyface who had never done anything to Kevin and Sami, had stayed well out of their way—his shot at the Rumble was so clearly unfair, so patently heelish. That’s one of the possible clinchers of being a heel, that the less-powerful wrestlers suffer for the heel’s gain or their pleasure. Heels don’t generally care about the well-being of anyone but themselves-–not the fans, not other wrestlers. 

Which is why it gave me pause last week when Kevin interrupted Lash Legend and Jakara Jackson’s entrance last week… and he apologized to them.

He didn’t have to do that, he could have just bulldozed over their entrance. At some level it seems he still felt bad that he was cutting into their moment. That’s… not very heelish.

Last week, talking about Kevin’s attack on Cody, I wrote:

Attacking a friend when he doesn’t expect you to is basically a heel turn. Mostly. Heel turns, like face turns, usually require one more step to clinch the change, and that’s a recalibration with the audience. Wrestling is a collaborative art, and a wrestler’s relationship with fans is the base of their morality. Generally a wrestler finally seals the turn by either expressing newfound gratitude and respect for the fans, or by starting to insult and disrespect them. At the most basic level that’s the “cheap heat” of insulting a town’s sports teams or food, the quickest way to communicate disdain for the fans.

And I added that because, well, I didn’t want this to be a heel turn. I was bracing myself for Kevin’s eventual denunciation of the fans. And it might still come! But it hasn’t yet. Very much on the contrary, Kevin has taken to social media in the hopes the fans will hear him, in a video that wasn’t over-the-top, wasn’t ranting, wasn’t unhinged.

At the end, he said he demanded WWE play his video explaining himself on Smackdown this week…

I waited for him to unleash dire threats about who will suffer, about the destruction he’ll unleash if his demands aren’t met.

Oh, that’s… that’s not the same Kevin that swore to unleash a reign of hell on Ring of Honor, it it? This is an older Kevin, a more resigned Kevin—perhaps a wilier and more manipulative Kevin?--but definitely a different tiger this time around.

And stepping outside the fiction a little more, can I just take a moment to admire the way he ends this video? The awkward fumbling conclusion of a man who’s spoken his peace, then realizes he doesn’t really have a snappy ending ready and just fumbles for the stop button, a moment so real and relatable that I have to explicitly remind myself that this is scripted and he is acting.

So whatever is going on, Kevin hasn’t latched the door on that heel turn yet. It’s possible he’s doing a slower descent into madness this time, something more grounded and natural. It’s very likely he’ll progress to the final stages of attacking the vulnerable with no regard.

But… he hasn’t yet.

What’s going on? I have no idea. But I do know that Kevin’s not the only historically unreliable person on the roster, that Randy Orton didn’t get nicknamed “the Viper” for his square dealings and straightforward villainy. I know that this scene keeps nagging at me, when Randy promises Cody he’ll go talk to Kevin and convince him that it’s okay for Cody to help out:

Only to later have Kevin look very much like he had no idea Cody would be showing up.

And then last week once again Randy ever-so-kindly offers to go calm Kevin down and smooth things over, and yet somehow the violence escalates once more.

Randy Orton, the voice of reason. Who would have thought indeed.

It’s very possible Randy’s role is just to be the narrative intermediary that keeps Cody and Kevin, the protagonist and antagonist, from having a direct confrontation. It’s very likely that he’s truly being cast as the voice of reason in order to slow the pace of the story down.

But until Kevin completely clinches that heel turn, I’ll remember the look of shocked betrayal on his face here and I won’t rush to put my faith in a Viper.