Going Out in a Blaze: Fiend's TLC Loss to Randy Orton Perfect Way to Say Goodbye

It's only fitting WWE closed out its 2020 pay-per-view cycle with a superb offering at Sunday night's TLC: Tables, Ladders & Chairs.

And to a lesser extent, it's only right the main event of the card featured Bray Wyatt's The Fiend going out in a blaze of glory—and potentially killing off the character outright.

WWE spent much of 2020 with its back against the wall and had to scratch and claw with innovative ideas to surprise fans and make the product engaging during an audience-less era. It threw weight behind Drew McIntyre, threw high production values at pretaped cinematic matches and embraced the Roman Reigns heel turn—to detail some of the many examples as the company largely survived.

And Wyatt was a huge part of it. His alter ego was one of the big reasons WWE wasn't just ahead of the curve on pretaped cinematic matches that went down as classics—the company wrote the blueprint on them. His engaging Firefly FunHouse segments, sometimes weekly, plus the cinematic matches themselves let the character spread its wings.

Sunday night was more Wyatt/Fiend innovation via a curveball. He fought Randy Orton in a main event that could have easily been off-site at a random locale. Instead, they hit the traditional ring together and surrounded it and the barricaded areas with poles ablaze with flames.

Call it a stroke of genius, as WWE got away with something it could never do with fans actually in the arena. It almost had a high-production deathmatch feel to it, a major league contest where both Superstars truly felt in danger the whole time.

The storytelling was pristine, with Orton at one point out cold in a rocking chair as Wyatt sent flames at him courtesy of a trail of gasoline on the floor. By the end, The Viper had technically won by setting The Fiend on fire and then doused him with more gasoline and really lit him up as the show went to black.

Much in the same way WWE solved some of its long-running problems this year by going away from part-time talent and embracing the obvious (McIntyre the boss) and what fans want (Reigns the heel), it might have just axed one of its larger character problems: The Fiend.

Now yes, the above praised The Fiend plenty, and rightfully so. But the character was also plenty problematic. A certain feud with Seth Rollins had so many problems that The Architect himself had to turn heel to salvage his standing with fans. WWE's sometimes-miserable booking inexplicably fed him to a returning Goldberg ever so briefly and spoiled his momentum.

If, and it's a big if, WWE and/or Wyatt wanted to end the character for whatever reason, this was the way to do it. Fans never got a notable encounter with Undertaker out of the character. The match with Goldberg was a dud. He bested John Cena, and in one of those matches with Rollins, he kicked out of things that would have killed a normal person.

To put it another way, there was a power-creep problem with Fiend. It got to the point where pretty much nobody on the roster could realistically take him down through ordinary means, and two perceived titans—Cena and Braun Strowman—didn't beat him in a pretaped cinematic match either.

So a clever, snake-like Orton burning him alive is...certainly one reliable way to do it.

Then again, this is WWE, and Vince McMahon once survived being inside an exploding limousine, to name one of many, many examples. The Fiend bouncing back from this isn't the most unreasonable thing in the world.

But the timing perhaps hints at something else. Why this feud with Orton and why right at the close of the year? Why not put the send-off on a bigger show?

Ideas abound, but most fans could probably agree The Fiend specifically felt like it had run its course by now. Using the upcoming WrestleMania season as a launching pad for a new wrinkle to the Wyatt character to build momentum at the start of the year could be on the table. That, or maybe just a good-guy push for a "FunHouse" Wyatt. Don't forget Alexa Bliss is still out there somewhere, too.

Leave it to Wyatt to have a certain character wrinkle lit ablaze in the middle of a wrestling ring on a main event just to run a rebirth by fire sort of development as soon as things start to get stale. What makes Sunday's development so fun is the possibilities from here—the man who created The Fiend with what was clearly a full creative license from Vince and Co. is free to do it again.

And if it is the end of The Fiend for good, let's be honest—that's how the character would want to go out. Yowie wowie, right?