9 Stables WWE Debuted In The WORST Way Possible
3. Retribution, Again
After weeks of the group indiscriminately attacking people for various unclear reasons, the mass collection of idiots was filed down to a core few, and the leader (and "mastermind", as dumb as it would have been to take credit for anything that had happened over a cursed summer) was revealed to be Mustafa Ali - the man behind a hidden camera campaign mysteriously dropped around WrestleMania season.
A couple of weeks before Ali's reveal on the October 5th edition of Raw, the key figures were hilariously named T-Bar, Mace, Slapjack, Retaliation and Reckoning, and celebrated officially signing for as WWE Superstars (!) with a disqualification (!!) loss (!!!) to The Hurt Business. With new leadership and theoretical focus though, WWE and Ali attempted to tie his old mystery gimmick to his new one somewhat, with some social media activity bolstering the narrative that a grand plan had worked a treat.
In reality, it all reeked of desperate panic booking, retroactive stapling of bad ideas onto...other bad ideas, and when it didn't seem as if things could get any worse, their formal re-introduction was an all-time awful night for any act in wrestling history. A week removed from being drafted to Raw permanently, Ali led his charges out to interrupt Alexa Bliss & The Fiend standing still, before the lights went out to bring that to an abrupt halt.
With that squared away, The Hurt Business came out for another eight-man tag, T-Bar tapped out clean to a Bobby Lashley Hurt Lock, and they'd lost again. To make matters worse/funnier, The Fiend turned back up and decked them easily. With the new version immediately established as as toothless as the old, what might have remained of the gimmick's credibility was stone dead; salvaged only by the absence of live crowds to truly highlight the indifference.