WWE has finally revealed who was behind the SmackDown Hacker angle. Yes, it was Mustafa Ali all along.
WWE has a habit of dropping angles when it realizes it might not have thought them all the way through. An idea that sounds cool, but no one thinks to consider where it might be going. Honestly, weekly television or not, it happens far too often to a company that is worth billions of dollars and has a show that airs on Fox each week.
One of the most recent and perhaps most frustrating examples of this happened over the summer. SmackDown Superstars were being tormented by a mystery person in a room full of cameras. That person had made it their mission to expose certain things about WWE and its wrestlers. However, one day, the hacker just stopped appearing, never to be mentioned again.
Or so we thought. This week on Raw, WWE finally decided to reveal to us who the hacker was, and honestly, it didn't come as that much as a surprise. After being attacked, and frankly embarrassed by The Fiend, Mustafa Ali cut a scathing promo backstage with Retribution behind him. It was at that point Ali revealed that he was the hacker, which makes sense as the hacker's aim and message was similar to that of Retribution.
Ali was one of the names on a shortlist of possibilities when it came to who the hacker might have been. The only question we have now is if Ali really was the hacker during the height of the angle, or WWE has fallen into an opportunity to patch up a plothole via making him the leader of Retribution. That's probably something we won't know the answer to until Bruce Prichard covers it on a podcast 10 years from now.
As for what's next for Retribution, as we mentioned briefly above, they didn't exactly look great on Raw last night. The Fiend chased off the whole faction, although their bitter rivals The Hurt Business were too scared to even tangle with Raw's new acquisition. Perhaps we will see the entire group take on Bray Wyatt's alter ego inside of Hell in a Cell this Sunday.