Ranking All 24 WWE Debuts & Returns In 2023

22. Indi Hartwell

CM Punk Trish Stratus
WWE.com

In NXT, Indi Hartwell was a central character in the women’s division and very likely was the masked attacker who took out several wrestlers, before her April callup forced them to change direction and make Blair Davenport the culprit.

Hartwell was drafted to Raw as the reigning NXT Women’s Champion, relinquishing the title before being carried off the developmental brand by her storyline husband, Dexter Lumis. She would appear in a few backstage segments, but she didn’t wrestle on Raw until July (though she was recovering from injury).

Since then, Indi has wrestled several times on Main Event and grabbed an NXT Women’s Championship match against Becky Lynch in October. The match wasn’t great, and Hartwell has yet to win a bout on Raw, making her little more than cannon fodder at this point.

By virtue of her pairing with Candice LeRae, Indi should always have a chance to be a challenger of the week for the WWE Women’s Tag Team Championship, but this still was a very disappointing callup for someone who was an NXT champion at the time of her promotion.

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.