RETRIBUTION immediately caused chaos during the summer of 2020 on WWE television, wrecking the WWE Performance Center inside and out.
The group ended up featuring NXT talent Dominik Dijakovic (T-BAR), Dio Maddin (MACE), Shane Thorne (SLAPJACK), Mercedes Martinez (RETALIATION), and Mia Yim (RECKONKING) under masks and quickly fizzled out.
Appearing on the Two Man Power Trip podcast, Thorne details RETRIBUTION's run.
"When they first started RETRIBUTION, these segments were awesome. They were flipping cars, throwing Molotov cocktails, trashing the place. I don't know who did that, but that wasn't us. Then they were like, 'we're gonna have some people join RETRIBUTION.' I'm like, 'Fuck yeah. I'm gonna smash people and do this shit and be hooligans doing this pre-taped things.' MACE did stuff on the backstage, he was one of the people launching people over boxes and he was like, 'this is cool.' I'm like, 'Fuck yeah, we're gonna get in there and do that.' We did not," he said.
When asked why he thought the group didn't work out, Thorne gave his own theory and revealed names that they pitched to be the leader of the group.
"My theory, I've never been told anything solid, but my theory was, we were running out of the PC at the time with a skeleton crew, none of the big stars were coming every week. We moved to the ThunderDome, all the big stars came back, and Vince had his stars to play with now. That's what happened. When your TV show gets the main characters back, you're going to use the main characters. We pitched ideas to have a lot of different people as the leader like Shane McMahon, Edge, or someone higher. We pitched for Vince to be the leader as well. We went as high as possible with who the leader would be. We wanted to be attached with one of the main characters. I guess, at the start, we were. We were doing stuff with Bray Wyatt and Hurt Business," he said. "The only direction we really got was after we did something. We got a lot of creative freedom in that, to an extent. 'Be like this,' then we'd do it, 'sort of not like that.' It was very trial and error and I think they got bored of it, honestly. Ali becoming the leader was not something we pitched, but it was a happy coincidence. It was great when we found that out. We were stoked about that, then the little storyline we had there with him turning his back, that was great and was a story. Then it wrapped up and finished again."
It was revealed in October that Mustafa Ali was the man behind RETRIBUTION.
Asked if Ali being named as the leader was disappointing after they had pitched for names like Vince McMahon, Shane McMahon, and Edge; Thorne replied, "When you're pitching ideas, you have to start at the top. By no means is Ali the lowest. He has been in a lot of great moments. We were kind of beaten down by then. They were just throwing us out there with such little direction and we're just getting steamrolled. Ali has such a passion for this. He was going in there and seeing Vince and being like, 'Let's do this, let's do that' and pushing it to be more for as long as he possibly could. He reinvigorated it all, kind of."
Despite being known names on NXT, all members of RETRIBUTION ended up wearing masks to "hide" their identity.
Thorne said about the masks, "We assumed the masks were going to be an entrance thing. That was a whirlwind of a day. We knew they wanted masks. I don't know if it came from Dijak pitching, even before, he was pitching terrifying mask things for himself. He said he had given Vince that pitch and Vince loved it. The guy who made Bray Wyatt's masks, made these masks as well. The quality were amazing. [Jason Baker] did not design them, he did the best with what they gave him. We saw how mine turned out. I guess they wanted to see how we did with it because we did do a promo where it showed us before the masks and then Ali, the name thing was like, 'You're going to make fun of these names like you did with my name, so I've taken these people and this is the identity I want....' It was like to shock you and then we become ourselves again. I think that's where it was going to go, then it didn't go. It was rough."
Thorne said that Vince loved the masks. He ended up making small changes to his mask to improve some functionality as the vision on the mask had "almost horse blinders" that he wanted cut down. He also said the mask was hard to breathe in and keep straight.
As far as the name SLAPJACK went, he said about the name "We were in the opening segment, it could have been the first time we had the masks. We were running through it. We had to run backstage and as we run backstage, we get pulled aside and were like, 'here are your new names; SLAPJACK, T-BAR, MACE, RECKONING.' We were just like...the wheels are off. I know what a slapjack is, but I wanted to hear it from them. 'What a slapjack?' 'It's this badass weapon.' I knew it was going to be bad."
Thorne did believe that the characters were marketable and "toyetic" for kids, though he noted that SLAPJACK never got a toy.
RETRIBUTION turned on Ali at WWE Fastlane 2021, effectively ending the group. Thorne was released by WWE in November.
If you use any of the quotes above, please credit the original source with a h/t and link back to Fightful for the transcription.