RIOTUS

I’ve talked plenty of times here about how the animated Star Wars shows are my favorite entries into the franchise. Even now, as Dave Filoni has a bit more complicated status with the fandom as his place in Star Wars has risen ever since The Clone Wars started, I went from hater to general fan of the universe. One of my favorite characters from the animated era of Star Wars is Darth Maul, or now just Maul. Bringing him back from his apparent death at the end of The Phantom Menace could have been a disaster, but having this clear villain that’s not in alignment with Palpatine but actively opposed to everyone from the Republic to the Empire. With Sam Witwer voicing the character, he went from what folks would say now as pure aura farming in the film because of Ray Park‘s presence. Witwer brought a tragic gravitas through his voice work over the years as a character who will never win, no matter how much he tries.

In this new show, Star Wars: Maul – Shadow Lord, we follow Maul a year after the end of the final Clone Wars season and the events of Revenge of the Sith. Focused on rebuilding his stranglehold on the galaxy’s underworld and getting revenge on the different underworld bosses who turned on him, he still plots his final revenge on Emperor Palpatine. Set on the mid rim world of Janix, whose struggle to keep the Empire off of their world, Maul actively throws the whole place into chaos. The season is very much a crime show set in the Star Wars world. It feels familiar in tone to last year’s Star Wars: Tales of the Underworld; here, they push it even further into some noir tropes and more visceral action setpieces.

To balance out Maul, we also have Brander Lawson, a local Police Captain who’s very wary of dealing with the Empire and tries everything he can to not bring them to the attention of any activity on Janix. Lawson is a single dad struggling to raise his teenage son while being separated from his wife, who currently works for the Empire. Being a post-Andor series world, the audience should have an idea of what she’s dealing with there and why they aren’t together. Lawson is voiced by the incredible Wagner Moura, who brings a wary, street-smart police officer. He became an instant favorite for me when watching the show. You worry about and root for him as he tries to figure out who Maul is and what this disruption to the organized crime of his world is doing to it.

Lawson has a likable and by-the-book police droid named Two Boots, because he wears two boots voiced by Richard Ayoade. Here, Ayoade is a perfect voice for a Star Wars droid, and the partner duo with Two Boots always wanting to do things by the book, and Lawson preferring to handle things in his own way. Two Boots’s desire to follow procedure is a major plot point of the season, and the second half of the season is almost like a coming of age for the droid. It’s interesting to show this type of story for a droid instead of a non-robotic character. It adds something new to Star Wars and can do something you might not expect to happen.

But if we have Maul, we need other lightsaber users. Here we have Master Eeko-Dio-Daki, voiced by Dennis Haysbert, and Devon Izara, voiced by Gideon Adlon, as two Jedi and his Padawan on the run post Order 66 from the Empire and anyone else. Master Daki, voiced excellently by Haysbert, fulfills a Yoda-like role here as the wise Jedi. He comes off as old, maybe not Yoda old, but older than most Master Jedi who are very much focused on survival and not being noticed in the world in these trying times. Then we have his student Devon, who is struggling with this change to her life. Everything that she believed in is in crumbles, and as a teenager, just sitting there and accepting this life of not helping people and hiding instead of fighting is hard for her to accept.

Her dissatisfaction makes Devon enticing to Maul as he wants to make her his apprentice. As we’ve seen before in Star Wars: Rebels and his desire at that time to make Ezra Miller into his apprentice, Maul believes that to face off against Palpatine and Vader truly, he needs to be evenly matched. This plan causes concern with Maul’s Death Watch ally Rook Kast, voiced by Vanessa Marshall, who is Maul’s most loyal member of his crew. Maul’s crew looks cool as they do jobs, attacking each syndicate in Janix. I really like the two Dathomirian brothers who always have the blasters ready. It’s cool to see other folks like Maul in the world, and with him, as we’ve mostly seen them slaughtered by Dooku and Palpatine during the Clone Wars.

The show doesn’t try to make Maul a hero, but it does add even more motivation for Maul’s actions and mindset. The show focuses on just how he was manipulated into the ways of the dark side by Sidious/Palpatine and just how much loss he’s taken from essentially being used as nothing more than a disposable tool for Palpatine to get to Anakin. Losing much of his people to Palpatine’s machinations haunts Maul, and he can only see the path of revenge as the option. For me, it’s interesting that Asajj Ventress suffers much of the same losses and background but comes out of the whole thing in a completely different place. Knowing Maul’s end with Obi-Wan allows the writers and animators to make every single scene with him so deliberate. You want him to make other decisions, but you know he won’t. You get why he wants to do what he wants to do, but you can’t completely root for him as all these normal people are getting hurt in the middle.

Where you can root for him is when he’s fighting the syndicates and especially the Empire. You get to see some great fights with Inquisitoris, along with Maul versus Master Daki and Devon. The painterly style of the show adds something new to the familiar design and aesthetic style that’s been used for Star Wars for almost twenty years now. There’s a lot of texture to the models, adding brushwork and creative lighting, showing the mood and characters. Along with a taste of the cyberpunk look of Janix, it feels like an evolution of the style and freshening it up for a new era of Star Wars animated shows. The show also takes from The Acolyte and the Sequel trilogy with how the red lightsaber looks more fiery and wild in how the energy comes out of the saber. It makes each slash more raw and full of emotion. It adds more contrast to the Jedi’s sabers with its clean and smooth lightsaber.

Devon’s feelings of wanting to fight and not being allowed to, along with Lawson’s struggle against the Empire once they bring their totalitarian force down on Janix, make Maul’s points much more reasonable to Devon. The street life is calling to Devon as her only way to have a semblance of freedom, and that core conflict with Maul playing the Miltonesque devil to Master Daki’s angel is an engrossing back and forth. While we’ve seen it before, adding in a cop fighting those same forces and the pressure of things getting worse as all the ways of the Jedi and Republic have failed these people. The institutions have fallen apart, and should Devon choose Daki’s path when we’ve seen other Jedi not be so passive in their survival. Good stuff is going on in this show.

Star Wars: Maul – Shadow Lord excited me ever since it was announced, and it lived up to my expectations with each episode I saw. While I’ve only seen eight episodes of the full ten-episode season, I’m looking forward to seeing how the season ends, and knowing we’re getting a season two already just lets me know it’s going to fire. Maul is perfect for being the center of a series, and Sam Witwer is perfect for this leading role. This show might just make more Maul fans, and I’m ready to welcome them all to the club.