Malakai Black criticizes WWE’s inconsistent ‘bipolar’ booking

The timing of Aleister Black’s release from WWE last month didn’t seem to make much sense. WWE spent several weeks airing vignettes hyping a new gimmick for him, and then he showed up on SmackDown to attack Big E. He was abruptly released before making any more appearances with the new gimmick. Tommy End quickly resurfaced as Malakai Black in AEW.

In an interview with Metal Injection’s Squared Circle Pit, Black criticized WWE’s haphazard booking decisions on the main roster, and laughed at the absurdity of his WWE release:

“I was sick of it, before everything went down. Loved my time in NXT, felt I did nothing of importance on the main roster, or at least not much of importance. Too much bipolar 50/50 booking. You know they would push me, they would, you know, pull me off TV. And honestly that’s the entire product right now. There’s nothing really consistent. Everything changes week-to-week, or is done to the point of beating it to death.

But as soon as I got released, it was funny...I actually kind of started laughing ‘cause I just went like, well you just built me for like five, six weeks. You made me come back, and now you pull me off TV. I don’t know. The whole thing to me just felt like I couldn’t just take it serious anymore...this is just not worth it. I felt like this huge relief, and I just started laughing. I immediately knew then that that was the feeling of the freedom that I had, and not having to deal with it anymore.”

I don’t disagree with the general points Malakai is making about WWE’s booking woes, but it’s hard to mesh what he’s saying here with last month’s strange comments where he said “plans change” is a cop out used by the media for fabricating stories. Now he is admitting that “everything changes week-to-week” in WWE. Maybe this guy needs to get his own story straight, because he’s sending out mixed messages about his time on WWE’s main roster.