The Problem With Aleister Black That No One Wants To Talk About

Transferred to SmackDown via one-week Raw stop-off after he and Ricochet failed to win the NXT and SmackDown Tag Team Championships over WrestleMania 35 weekend, Black immediately took to addressing the audience (and the blue brand's roster) from a darkened room.

"But as [with] all good things, give it time and I'm sure that the world that you grew up in will have me condemned," was how the former Tommy End closed his first vignette. Whether it was Black himself or one of the dozens of reality television and soap opera writers on WWE creative, whoever penned this line inadvertently prophecised the next 18 months of Black's career.

Aleister's "pick a fight" phase was excruciating. Sat in his darkened closet, overegging his enunciation and facial expressions to meet WWE's melodramatic edict, he was a head-kicker without a purpose, sporadically working good matches with the likes of Sami Zayn and Cesaro before retreating into another vignette, never moving up the card.

Switching brands in the 2019 Draft, Black was soon asking Raw wrestlers to pick a fight with him instead. Months of ineffective, say-nothing promos disguised as "character development" followed. A lot of words came out of Black's nothing but none drove him forward. The setting and presentation were different but at its core, this was hollow screentime - all the way up to his heel turn and feud with Kevin Owens.

Things are no different in 2021. Black has presence and talks well, but his diatribes on attending funerals as a child, high-school bullying hierarchies, and other edgelord-adjacent subjects come from the same empty pen as before. The window dressing is a little different, but Tales of the Dark Father is Pick A Fight 2.0.

And it'll end the same way too.

CONT'd...