‘Star Wars’ Just Delivered a Duel Decades in the Making - The Ringer

On May 22, Star Wars will make its modestly anticipated return to theaters. But for some subset of the franchise’s faithful, the month may have already peaked with the arrival of an even longer-awaited event—on the small screen, instead. In the wee hours of Monday, May the Fourth, Lucasfilm sprang a surprise in the Season 1 finale of the animated Maul—Shadow Lord: a Star Wars Day duel decades in the making. For the first time ever, outside of a noncanonical comic and fans’ fevered imaginations, the Shadow Lord met the Dark Lord, as Maul crossed sabers with Vader in a double dose of Darths. Maul-ennials who imprinted on the brooding Zabrak and the child version of Vader when the two ill-fated Force users shared a few frames of The Phantom Menace have permission to party like it’s 1999. To paraphrase Yoda’s famous line from that film: Always two there are—an apprentice, and the apprentice who preceded him. That Maul would meet Vader at some point in the new Disney+ show seemed like a lock. But a confrontation so climactic and narratively rich figured to be something the series would save for its second season, whose production is already well underway. Not so: Their showdown in Shadow Lord closed out the first season on a high and left viewers wanting more, which the second season is certain to deliver. It’s a rare instance of Star Wars fan service that delivers something new and vital and doesn’t disappoint. Technically, the Maul-Vader skirmish on Janix was the second encounter between the two iconic baddies, if you count their close encounter in Episode I. Anakin, drop! That drive-by aside, the two characters’ paths hadn’t crossed until the 10th episode of Shadow Lord, “The Dark Lord.” But their destinies intersected significantly. By killing Qui-Gon Jinn, Anakin’s Jedi abductor, savior, and surrogate dad, Maul set the tempestuous chosen one on the path to be trained by Obi-Wan Kenobi and, ultimately, to be seduced to the dark side by Darth Sidious. And by catching Chancellor Palpatine’s eye, young Anakin rendered Maul redundant. Forsaken by Sidious and supplanted at the Sith master’s side by the postpuberty incarnation of the kid he’d nearly sideswiped on Tatooine, Maul dropped his “Darth” and dedicated himself to seeking revenge—this time, on the Sith, not the Jedi. In their first on-screen meeting, Obi-Wan warned Vader, “If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.” If the Maul of Phantom Menace had been more loquacious, he might have said the same to Kenobi. By cleaving Qui-Gon’s killer in half, Kenobi made Maul twice as interesting, granting him a fuller, elongated life in animation—both in comics and in a trio of TV series, The Clone Wars, Rebels, and Shadow Lord (plus a holographic, live-action cameo in Solo). As a crime lord with a grudge against the Empire, animated Maul (voiced by Sam Witwer) had much more to work with than he did in the prequels (well, prequel), where his stereotypically villainous name, devilish horns, and lack of lines might have made him a forgettable lackey if not for his double-bladed saber and actor Ray Park’s acrobatic choreography. Maul’s post-apprentice life and vendetta against Sidious put him on a collision course with the Emperor’s sidekick, so if anything, it’s an upset that his rendezvous with Vader was delayed this long. It almost wasn’t: Maul was supposed to fight Vader, and die at his hand, in the Season 2 finale of Rebels, which aired in March of 2016. But Rebels (and Shadow Lord) cocreator Dave Filoni decided to spare and develop Maul, opting instead to set up a memorable battle between Vader and his former apprentice, Ahsoka Tano. In the summer of 2016, IGN asked Filoni whether a meeting between Maul and Vader was inevitable. “Not necessarily,” he said. “It sounds like a great idea and then you start to develop it and you worry it’s a little more fan service-y. If it makes sense, it would happen but I’d say it’s a little unlikely.” The ‘Star Wars: Maul—Shadow Lord’ Season 1 Finale With Sam Witwer