Star Wars: Maul – Shadow Lord Season 1, Episode 8, revives a major movie storyline that didn’t get its due on the big screen. Maul – Shadow Lord‘s timeline puts it in an interesting position: since it’s set approximately one year after Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith, it can explore the growing Empire and fallout from Order 66, but it’s also able to push things forward for some later stories (for instance, Maul’s attempts at corrupting Devon feel like a precursor to his efforts with Ezra Bridger in Star Wars Rebels). Episode 8’s ending is a particularly good example of this. Warning: SPOILERS ahead.
Much of the seventh and eighth episodes involve Maul and Devon fighting against the Imperial forces that are now hunting them, led by two Inquisitors. But alongside this, it also continues Maul’s efforts to regain control of the Star Wars criminal underworld on Janix and beyond. He’s already taken a step towards this by eliminating the leader of the Pykes, and now another familiar name steps into the story, wanting an audience with Maul: Dryden Vos, leader of Crimson Dawn.
Dryden Vos was first introduced in Solo: A Star Wars Story as the apparent leader of Crimson Dawn, a crime syndicate that was taking over large parts of the galaxy and really making its presence felt. However, the end of that movie not only saw him betrayed and killed by Qi’ra, but also revealed that the person who was really controlling things from the shadows was none other than Maul himself. Unfortunately, Solo bombed at the box office (the only Star Wars movie to ever do so), meaning the story didn’t really go anywhere, though tie-ins have fleshed out some of Qi’ra backstory.
Shadow Lord takes place around eight years before the events of Solo, but is now very directly setting them up with the return of Vos. He and Maul previously worked together in Star Wars: The Clone Wars Season 7, which established Maul running things as the leader of the Shadow Collective, with Vos (and Crimson Dawn as a whole, along with several other syndicates) operating under him, before fleeing into the shadows as the Empire took control.
This would seemingly mean that Vos continued leading Crimson Dawn in Maul’s absence, but that dynamic is presumably about to shift. It seems likely that this is headed towards Maul taking over Dawn, while keeping Vos on board as the puppet leader, as they quietly begin to regrow their operations and take back power in the galaxy. This is something of a long play, given where things are in Solo, but it does seem as though that status quo will have been in place even longer than we realized in that movie.
There are only two episodes of Season 1 remaining, so while it seems likely Vos will appear in at least one of them, Maul – Shadow Lord Season 2 might be where the Crimson Dawn story can be given even greater focus. That can add more depth to the organization, and end up painting a clearer picture of things before Solo. It might not be a sequel to that movie, but it is nice to feel its story and characters still having an impact on Star Wars, despite its box office failure.
New episodes of Star Wars: Maul – Shadow Lord release Mondays on Disney+.
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