Star Wars: Maul – Shadow Lord continues to fill in some major gaps in the story of Darth Maul, one of the most iconic characters in the franchise. Shadow Lord is set during the early Imperial Era, when Maul was quietly trying to rebuild an underworld empire in the shadows of the Empire’s rule. Unfortunately for Maul, the Empire learns of his machinations on Planet Janix before the grand design is done, and not only sends Imperial forces to occupy the planet, but also a pair of Inquisitors to hunt down Maul.
In Shadow Lord Episodes 7 and 8, Maul finds the walls closing in when he and his gang are ambushed by the Empire. Maul has to take on both Inquisitors (Marrok and the “Crow”) and nearly gets killed in the duel. After barely escaping into some caverns, Maul is left injured and disoriented and finds his mind wandering. As he tries to limp his way out of a windy, sand-filled ventilation tunnel, the madness (which began after nearly dying in The Phantom Menace) starts to take hold, and all of Maul’s old trauma and fear surrounding his former master resurface in the form of sandblown visions of his past.
The first vision is the moment that Maul, as a child, was taken by Darth Sidious to be trained as his apprentice. Maul willfully submitted to Sidious, not believing he had a choice, even while his brother, Savage Opress, begs him not to go, while accusing the Sith Lord of somehow brainwashing Maul. A second vision shows Young Maul training with Sidious – “training” being a cleaned-up term for Palpatine torturing Young Maul with Force Lightning blasts, whenever he doesn’t perform well.
The visions continue through a montage of Maul’s pain and suffering as a result of being Palpatine’s apprentice. He’s cut down by Obi-Wan Kenobi and left for dead by his master (The Phantom Menace); he suffers an agonizing half-life, crippled, mad, and lost until his brother and the witches of Dathomir restore him, and finally, Sidious comes for him and kills his brother during their duel on Mandalore (all seen in The Clone Wars animated series). It all serves to rekindle the fire of hatred in Maul and his dark side abilities, as he marches forward with renewed vigor to kill his former master.
This sequence in Shadow Lord isn’t just highlighting a part of Maul’s story that fans have been wondering about for nearly 30 years (though that’s a nice bonus). It also highlights how Palpatine started as the wrong kind of “teacher,” before refining his approach.
Palpatine used a different approach with both Count Dooku and Anakin Skywalker: instead of using coercion and pain to bend those apprentices to his will, he instead used a long game of guile and flattery, appealing to their respective senses of disillusionment with the Jedi Order, and both men’s misguided sense of heroism, justice, and wanting to save people close to them. Unlike Maul, who almost immediately knew that his decision damned him, both Dooku and Anakin only realized their grave errors after crossing decisive points of no return. Anakin killed Dooku, aided in the death of Jedi Master Mace Windu, and committed a massacre at the Jedi Temple to become “Darth Vader” (in Revenge of the Sith). Dooku killed his friend, Jedi Master Yaddle, after she discovered him meeting with Sidious in secret (Tales of the Jedi).
What we can see from Palpatine’s three apprentices is a pattern of dark growth, as Sidious became better and more effective at being a true Sith Lord: one whose manipulative and corruptive powers were greater than any Force Lightning he could shoot from his fingers. By the time Ben Solo was his target, Sidious was literally using remote bodies (like Snoke) to mask his true identity, becoming the ultimate Sith Lord, still running an Empire from the shadows, as Maul could only hope to.
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