5 Ups 8 Downs From WWE Raw (Oct 19)

1. RETRIBUTION Neutered

The Fiend T-Bar
WWE

For the past couple of months, we’ve been forced to accept a group of black-clad dopes as a serious threat to WWE Raw’s stability. No, we’re not talking about Akira Tozawa’s ninjas, we’re talking about RETRIBUTION.

The group gained identifiable “named” members recently, and a leader in Mustafa Ali a couple of weeks ago. As bad as things had been, there was a slight chance this could have turned things around. Instead, we watched the four male members lose an uninteresting, uneventful match to the Hurt Business when T-BAR tapped out to Bobby Lashley’s Hurt Lock.

As if losing to the Hurt Business clean wasn’t bad enough, the quartet had gotten punked by the Fiend earlier when they surrounded him and Alexa Bliss, only for the creepy couple to disappear on them. Then after the match, Fiend returned to lay out the entire stable. (No word on if the other countless members of RETRIBUTION were back in catering and couldn’t make it out to help.)

This stable that has been a focus of Raw for two months got punked out twice in the first half-hour of the show. Just terrible.

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Contributor
Contributor

Scott is a former journalist and longtime wrestling fan who was smart enough to abandon WCW during the Monday Night Wars the same time as the Radicalz. He fondly remembers watching WrestleMania III, IV, V and VI and Saturday Night's Main Event, came back to wrestling during the Attitude Era, and has been a consumer of sports entertainment since then. He's written for WhatCulture for more than a decade, establishing the Ups and Downs articles for WWE Raw and WWE PPVs/PLEs and composing pieces on a variety of topics.