Movies & TV Star Wars: Maul — Shadow Lord It’s Been a Strange and Winding Road to Arrive at Maul — Shadow Lord But the first season is still worth every second. By Emmet Asher-Perrin | Published on May 5, 2026 Credit: Lucasfilm Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Lucasfilm There are many versions of me who want to talk about Maul — Shadow Lord. There’s the critic version, who has largely felt that the best Star Wars media for the past couples decades have been the animated shows created by Dave Filoni and a slew of talented creatives. There’s the lifelong Star Wars fan, who enjoys nothing so much as filling in character arc gaps. There’s also the twelve-year-old version of me, hanging out under layers of my psyche, who is both stunned and elated at this turn of events—that guy? The one-off baddie who spoke two sentences, used entirely for (gorgeous) fight choreography, and summarily discarded before the end of Episode I? He’s… one of my favorites now? It took a lot to get here, okay? For both the character, and for me. I had a “Jedi vs. Sith” poster on my wall as a kid, featuring Obi-Wan, Qui-Gon, and Maul. That film-ending fight was built up to an unnerving degree prior to The Phantom Menace’s release: The piece of music that heralded its arrival—the “Duel of the Fates”—was treated like a pop single, bequeathed to a desperate hoard of fans in the lead-up. It still holds its place as an iconic piece of soundtrack music that effectively showcases everything Star Wars is best at. (Star Wars is a story told almost entirely through music and visuals, but that’s a talk for another time.) The film came and went, and rather than Darth Maul being made into a villain for the ages, he was cast off. Same with Count Dooku in Round II. General Grievous in Round III. It made sense from a narrative standpoint, of course: They were all Palpatine’s “prototypes,” as it were. He was waiting for Anakin, and used other apprentices in the meantime to achieve his ends, built up and discarded with no remorse. But films aren’t particularly long mediums—even the longer ones are still giving a fraction of the story allotted by television or books—and the Star Wars prequels were stuffed to their proverbial gills with characters, places, and ideas. Those prototype villains barely got a breath of air before landing in the bin. Either you hated the prequels for serving up a lavishly coursed meal and taking away each dish after a single bite, or you did the fandom thing—you searched for more. There were books and comics and even fanfic to satiate… and then The Clone Wars series arrived.  Credit: Lucasfilm I scoffed when I heard they were bringing Maul back. Oh, sure, I thought, let’s just do the superhero thing, where no one has the ability to die, and no consequences stick. But my curiosity (and a certain amount of homesickness) got the better of me, and when I broke, I stumbled into some of the best Star Wars stories we’ve got. The Clone Wars was designed to fill in the gaps left by the prequels and in many ways surpasses them because it had enough room to tell the entire story—every explanation required can be found there. Among those explanations were further arcs for all three discarded apprentices: Grievous, a useful but tragic puppet, making up for his lack of thought with brute force. Dooku, who believed himself cleverer than everyone else, full of gravitas that cannot save him. And Maul… abused and molded by multiple masters, a prophet who no one will heed. He blames everything on Obi-Wan Kenobi, of course. But there’s care in that hatred, a closeness that Maul is desperate to make sense of—they are the same. Unfavored apprentices who did what was expected of them, both cast aside in favor of Anakin Skywalker’s sparkling midichorian count. Throughout The Clone Wars and Rebels, we see Maul’s repeated attempts to warn people of the evil Palpatine poses, but he doesn’t have enough of the full picture to bring the allies he desires over to his side. Then the release of Solo threw a curveball: for some unfathomable reason, Maul was in charge of a sizable portion of the entire underworld in their galaxy, for a time. Sure, I guess. Just make him a mob boss for the sake of a pointless shock cameo. This was additionally a bit silly because, well… Rebels had already shown us how Maul died. (It’s a gorgeous death, and if you haven’t yet watched it, I highly recommend it. The episode is called “Twin Suns.”) But there were technically a few years in the interim, so the animated shows did what they always do: The started to explain it. The introduction to Maul’s rise as underworld overlord began in the revived and final season of The Clone Wars, where we learn that he has installed himself as the leader of Mandalore’s Death Watch—yes, the group who eventually form the cult that raises Din Djarin—and destroyed various criminal bosses to consolidate a different kind of power. They made it work, as they always have. Credit: Lucasfilm And now they mean to do one better: They’ve given Maul a story entirely his own. This has been a long time coming, thanks to the work of several separate series and the impact of one actor—not Ray Park, who embodied Maul’s physical form in live-action, or Peter Serafinowicz, who offered up those sparse bits of dialogue on film, but Sam Whitwer. Whitwer has played Maul for the entire run of animated shows, and it’s his performance that has molded the character into someone formidable and worthy of an entire series to himself. He has been given some incredibly fun material to work with—Maul out of his mind and alone, Maul agonized and vengeful and sitting on your doorstep, a once-quiet character now showing that he has a penchant for monologuing—and has never wasted a fragment of it. He has infused every breath with operatic pathos, making it impossible to imagine anyone else in the role. To that end, Maul is going on a somewhat familiar journey in Shadow Lord: Yes, he’s going to gain control of Crimson Dawn, but he’s also found himself an apprentice. Well, not found. He kinda coerced a bunch and also let her Jedi Master perish. But for a Dark Side user, that’s basically a totally coincidental discovery! And, you know, you’ve got to become some kind of reluctant dad in Star Wars. It’s good for you, probably.  Maul — Shadow Lord takes place in the early days of the Empire (unclear how early, timeline-wise, though we know it’s well before the events of Solo and Rebels), when everyone is getting used to the new status quo and trying their best not to attract the new regime’s attention. As Maul is on Janix, working with a few allies from Mandalore and Dathomir to begin his underworld takeover, he comes across Devon Izara (Gideon Adlon) and her master Eeko-Dio Daki (Dennis Haysbert). Maul is certain that he and Devon are linked and destined to be important to one another; as the two enter each other’s orbits, they’re also being circled by Brander Lawson (Wagner Moura), a cop who doing a terrible job raising his son after he and his wife split up for totally understandable reasons: She joined the Empire. (Not gonna start thinking about how many relationships that ended.) Credit: Lucasfilm Despite all attempts to keep the Empire away from Janix, they are eventually called thanks to Lawson’s unfortunately lawful-good aligned partner, Two Boots (Richard Ayoade), not understanding fascism at all. The whole group are eventually forced to work together and trust one another in order to escape the planet, with Inquisitors and stormtroopers hot on a their trail. The fight choreography is gorgeous, and very thoughtful in its styles and execution. Force-users all have favored forms in lightsaber combat, and the best sequences animate these choices as a way of cluing the viewer into emotional states. The Kiner family is back on music duty, and the operatic vibes never let up. It’s a slow-moving season, but I appreciate that decision more than I can say—in an era where television rarely gets enough time to unspool, it’s particularly enjoyable to watch an entire season (even a 10-episode one) center on a single question: What will bring Devon around to Maul’s teachings? While this is going on, Maul is busy trying to work through multiple stages of loss and abandonment all in one go, because he can’t do anything the easy way, of course. He’s also harboring an injury to his robot leg that is a wonderful stand-in for both aged aches and pains, and the genuine disability he has harbored since being fully cut in half by Obi-Wan when he was, like, 22. (Are there separate thoughts here about the fact that mechanical replacement parts still cause their user to feel pain in this universe when they malfunction? Hoo boy, you bet, but that’s also a talk for another time.) You’ve got to be proud of the guy for all his massive personal flaws—he actually manages some effective self-therapy later in the season, realizing that he might have to stop rejecting the “weakness” of his inner child and start protecting him. Might be useful for a guy about to gain an apprentice of his own. Credit: Lucasfilm Devon Izara is more than a worthy foil to Maul in all of this, and part of the enjoyment at watching this series unfold is similar to the enjoyment to be had in shows like Andor: We know this partnership ultimately doesn’t work out between them, but we don’t know why. And there are so many ways for a catastrophic fallout between the two to go… but we’ve got to watch them get close first. We’ve got to maximize the pain for everyone involved, and see Devon struggle with this path. She’s full of rage, certainly—anyone who’s ever been a teenage girl knows the drill—but deeply loving at the same time. Despite the desire to see this relationship form and change them both, it’s in service of a devastating conclusion.  What? Maul’s mental instability has fully reasserted itself by Rebels. Whatever is coming, it’s about to break him all over again—losing an apprentice he fought so hard to win and a criminal empire on top of it? The potential betrayals already stacking in a corner? This is the beginning of the end, and we get to watch the whole wreck pile up… hopefully. I’m glad to know that Maul — Shadow Lord will have at least one more season, but who knows what will emerge beyond it. All I know is, these animated series continue to be the place where Star Wars is doing all its best work. They are perfectly suited to the task at hand, and powered by artists who love the world. It doesn’t get much better.[end-mark] The post It’s Been a Strange and Winding Road to Arrive at <i>Maul — Shadow Lord</i> appeared first on Reactor.