#3. The Hacker
It would probably be fair to say the hacker storyline is not forgotten but considering it was perhaps the biggest storyline of the early lockdown era, it has since become more-or-less swept under the rug.
The hacker was an omnipresent observer who watched over the events of various superstars from Sonya Deville’s betrayal of Mandy Rose to teasing the immanent split of a popular tag team, a storyline resembling Sami Callihan’s Solomon Crowe gimmick a fair few years ago.
The consensus was that the hacker was likely Ali, considering the notable blue ring light whilst other names such as Drew Gulak, Xavier Woods, and The Forgotten Sons were banded around whilst Mark Henry even suggested CM Punk.
Before the culprit was revealed, Ali was moved over from SmackDown to Raw, allegedly because “he was tired of being ignored by Bruce and Ed,” in reference to writer Bruce Prichard and Ed Koskey. The move of Ali subsequently led to the temporary scrapping of the storyline as the vignettes stopped airing for a while as many showed apathy at the apparently dropped angle that could have yielded interesting results.
When Ali was revealed as the leader of RETRIBUTION, he did eventually say it was him who was the hacker but done so in a muted way. Blending two seemingly unrelated storylines together, the once-hot hacker angle was completely overshadowed by the RETRIBUTION gimmick, one of the most critically-panned in modern wrestling.
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