Review: Star Wars – Maul: Shadow Lord “Chapter 7: Call to the Oblivion; Chapter 8: The Creeping Fear”
OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)
Brander, Rylee, and the Jedi work to escape the planet as the Imperial forces close in. Maul is injured in a fight with the pursuing Inquisitors and is drowned in his past regrets.
OUR TAKE
In our penultimate week of this first season of The Maul Show, the series continues to show hints of what a fully realized story about Maul could be, but also continues to swing at it halfheartedly while resting on the laurels of some of the established and somewhat overused aspects of this era of the timeline. I went on a semi-rant about the Inquisitors last time, and my issues with them remain present as a second Inquisitor, Eleventh Brother (AKA “the Crow”), joins Marrok in their hunt for Maul and the two Jedi. If you follow along with other Disney+ Star Wars stuff, you might recognize Eleventh Brother from his brief and flashy fight with Ahsoka where she swiftly eliminated him, which didn’t really give us the best first impression of him. Well, good news for all you Eleventh Brother fans, he’s back to be slightly more intimidating while still having zero personality, which works well for his double act with Marrok, who is just as much of a blank slate! You would think with them getting a rather intense fight with Maul, there would be some acknowledgement of how they are on different points in the spectrum of Dark Side force users, or maybe show how their willingness to be nothing more than tools for Sidious makes them no match for Maul’s hatred driving him as an individual…but then they send Maul packing so it kind undercuts him too.
But it’s that loss that leads to seeing Maul at a particularly vulnerable moment, which brings us the highlight of these two episodes: getting in Maul’s head about how his failures and mistakes and losses push him forward. In obscured, faded flashbacks, we see a representation of Maul leaving to be trained by Sidious, the harshness of that training, his eventual defeat by Obi-Wan, and his reuniting with his brother Savage during the Clone Wars. This is the kind of thing that we could ONLY get to this extent in a series focused on Maul, so it’s good to see they’re finally tapping into that. Maul’s pre-Phantom Menace history with Sidious is something that has hardly been explored in canon material (numerous novels and comics expanded on it back in the day but were never quite counted in continuity even before the Disney era), so hopefully we get more of that here while we can. Also, it’s worth noting that the new flashbacks that don’t use archived audio have Savage and Sidious voiced by Sam Witwer, Maul’s voice actor, so you could interpret that as just Sam showing off his vocal range, or as Maul filling in the voices of these two significant figures in his life with his own mental voice to highlight how consumed he is by regret and self-hatred.
Oh yeah, there were other characters doing stuff this week too, right? Well, Brander, his son, a reformed Two-Boots, and the Jedi are still trying to find their own way out of there now that the Empire has full gotten its iron grip, which was sufficiently fun to watch. Meanwhile, Maul and Rook Kast (a Mandalorian ally of Maul from Clone Wars who I’ve just not had any reason to bring up until now) have driven off their other mercenary allies because of their poor management skills, so the walls are closing on in them both, meaning they may have to work together once again to survive. And maybe Maul will be able to convince Devon to be his apprentice? For now, Maul’s remaining group have business with Dryden Vos, leader of Crimson Dawn who you might remember from the Solo movie, so maybe we’ll get to hear Paul Bettany in this thing. That just leaves us with two more episodes left in this season to premiere on Star Wars Day, May 4th. Anything could happen in the finale, aside from Maul dying because his death has already been written to happen in Rebels. I’m just gonna hope for the best here and see if this season at least does a good enough landing.
