WWE’s The Judgement Day faction got a major shake-up on this week’s Monday Night Raw. The group kicked off the third hour with a promo announcing that a fourth member was finally being added to the group, which turned out to be none other than Finn Balor. The former NXT Champion explained that he realized joining the group was obviously while fighting them at Hell in a Cell and that he was tired of pretending to be someone he wasn’t.ย
Videos by ComicBook.com
Damian Priest then grabbed the microphone and said it was time for the group to take the next step, but that it required kicking Edge out of the faction. The three then turned on Edge, beating him down in the corner, powerbombing him through a table, griving him a Glasgow Grimace with a broken chair leg and nailing him with a Con-Chair-To.
The turn marks the first time Balor has been a heel on WWE’s main roster and is the closest he’s been to his “The Prince” NXT persona since returning to WWE’s main roster last year. Balor has stated publicly in interviews that he felt his 2019-21 run in NXT, which saw him work as a vicious heel, was the best work of his career.
“The idea of going back to NXT was to give Finn Balor a break from Raw and a break from SmackDown,” Balor said on The Bump last year. “It was to reset the character. It wasn’t supposed to be anything more than three months. It was to give me a little rest off TV, rest off the road and to kind of give me a reboot and revamp. Obviously, things folded a lot differently than we expected; it turned into a two-year run almost in NXT.
“For me, personally, I feel like it’s the best work that I’ve put into my career. To do that at 19, 20 years into your career is quite strange,” he continued. “I really feel like I’ve just started to come into my best stride in NXT in recent months. I’m so grateful, obviously, for the opportunity to be in NXT and to be part of a new NXT landscape that’s completely changed. The guys there have completely changed the boundaries of what NXT is. To be in the ring with guys like Kyle [O’Reilly], guys like Pete [Dunne], it’s impossible to not have a good time.”
