Review: Star Wars – Maul: Shadow Lord “Chapter 3: Whispers in the Unknown; Chapter 4: Pride and Vengeance”
OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)
Maul begins to seed his dark teachings into the captured Devon, while her master Daki works with Brander Lawson to find her, as pressure to alert the Empire grows.
OUR TAKE
We’re on to the second week of this Darth Maul show and I’m starting to see where there could be some potential to make this a story worth telling over at least two seasons. This isn’t the first time we’ve seen Maul try to take on an apprentice as a prospective tool against Sidious, and it also won’t be the last time chronologically that he tries this, as we see later on in Rebels when he tries to tempt Ezra Bridger. But in his more, for lack of a better word, intimate first “session” with Devon, there is a more unique point of commonality between them which he calls out, that being they were both raised to achieve a role or task that was then taken away from them. In Maul’s case, that was being Sidious’ Sith Apprentice, while for Devon, it was being a Jedi, both of which you could argue were both taken away by Sidious through different means. You could also say that it was Obi-Wan who took that from Maul, but going after either of them is shown to have an equal amount of possible success. And while Maul does let Devon leave and reunite with her master Daki (voiced by the guy from the All State commercials!) for the time being, it’s clear that he expects her to come back of her own volition for more training.
But force users aren’t the only ones getting substantive plots this week, as we follow Brander Lawson and his droid partner Two-Boots on their further investigation of Maul and his connections to the syndicates and smugglings he once controlled but is now going on a revenge rampage against. We see some more of that this week but honestly, seeing Maul simply be a badass killer is all we ever saw him as for over a decade before Clone Wars gave him more of an actual character, so that’s kind of the aspect about him in this show that I am the least interested in seeing. Anyway, as mentioned last time, Brander doesn’t want to involve the Empire in the investigation, even if his team are out of his depth in getting Maul in custody, because he knows that they won’t leave once they’re called. And on the other hand, there’s Two-Boots, who is simply following protocol and figures calling the Empire is just the same as calling the recently dissolved Republic, and eventually just makes the call. So, it looks like next week we’ll find out just how wrong he was for doing that!
