Nick Aldis turned up on the July 6 episode of WWE RAW while still described as being on administrative leave after his altercation with Gunther at Night of Champions. His appearance came as WWE RAW opened with new Undisputed WWE Champion Sami Zayn arriving for a scheduled title defense against Cody Rhodes.
The timing mattered because Cody was then ambushed backstage by Gunther before the main event, pushing the issue from a routine title booking into something less stable. Adam Pearce was drawn into the dispute, and Nick Aldis and Pearce argued over whether the match could hold together and whether Cody was fit to go on.
That is the point that gives Nick Aldis’s appearance its weight: he was back in the mix on RAW, but not in a way that made the earlier leave easy to define. He had been placed on administrative leave after the Night of Champions incident, yet the July 6 show put him back on screen inside the same championship problem that had already pulled in both show managers.
The friction was plain. Security stepped in after a sharp exchange involving Aldis, which made the scene look less like a clean return and more like a temporary overlap between punishment, authority, and live television pressure. If the leave was meant to keep him out of the picture, RAW showed how quickly that boundary can blur when the Undisputed WWE Championship line is moving through both SmackDown and RAW management.
What remains unresolved is whether Aldis’s appearance meant the administrative leave had ended or whether he was simply present while that status was still in place. With SummerSlam speculation continuing, the July 6 episode did not close the issue so much as sharpen it: Aldis is back in the story, Cody’s condition is part of the argument, and the next decision around the title picture now carries more weight than it did before RAW began.
