15 Worst Moments Of The WWE Pandemic Era

But nothing could be worse than the ongoing embarrassment that was the faction that became a laughingstock just weeks into its big debut, then persisted for seven months.

RETRIBUTION was a group of masked miscreants who showed up on Raw (and initially, SmackDown too) to cause “chaos” on the show. They started by throwing Molotov cocktails at a generator, then the next episode cut the ring ropes and vandalized the ring area in a low-grade imitation of Nexus’ assault a decade earlier.

The group – which initially varied in size from about six to more than a dozen – stated that they were products of the WWE system and were looking to wreck it due to their unfair treatment. Then came the unveiling, which completely killed the gimmick. A group of NXT wrestlers revealed themselves as semi-masked wrestlers who now went by the stupidest names ever conceived (Slapjack? T-Bar? Mace? Reckoning?) led by Mustafa Ali.

Despite all this, the group might have succeeded – if they hadn’t lost match after match after match. It took two months for this faction to win its first match. By then, RETRIBUTION was a joke, and you just hoped the wrestlers disappeared from TV and popped back up mask-less in NXT again like nothing happened.

Without a doubt, RETRIBUTION was the worst thing WWE produced during the Pandemic Era, because it took real effort to book this crap for more than half a year and actively bury five wrestlers for no good reason.