9 Stables WWE Debuted In The WORST Way Possible
4. Retribution
It was on the August 3rd 2020 Raw that announcer Tom Phillips acknowledged a series of technical hiccups that had taken place during the broadcast before throwing to footage that security cameras had picked up from "earlier that day". That this was very clearly shot at night (and thus presumably the day before) was the least of the problems with tale of insurgency and threat.
The crew threw a petrol bomb at a generator before running away from the scene, explaining why the product had suffered the blips, but the fact that they were just blips didn't bode well for whatever havoc they were looking to wreak. What really scuppered them was their pathetic assault on SmackDown a few days later.
Closing out the August 10th 2020 show, the five masked assailants hit the ring with baseball bats, pipes and other assorted weapons and knocked out a pathetic version of Nexus' original, transcendent debut. The ultimate collapse of that group wasn't tragic because some legendary or generational talents were squandered, but that the specific moment of their arrival was. It felt like an enormous shock to the WWE system, not least because even John Cena couldn't do anything to stop their wrath.
The 2020 retread carried no such gravitas. Retribution beat up a couple of the NXT talents charged with watching the COVID shows in the Performance Center, spray-painted some of the set, a bit, and cheered wildly for one of the members cutting the ropes with a chainsaw like any of it made a blind bit of difference. They rose and grew in numbers arbitrarily, some of the roster seemed to care while others were totally unmoved, and at one point they even appeared to be inexplicably aligned with The Fiend.
It couldn't have come across less threatening, so WWE, hilariously, went back to the drawing board...