The arrival of Darth Vader in this week’s finale of Maul: Shadow Lord has generated a lot of discussion about finally seeing two apprentices of Darth Sidious finally clash—especially from Lucasfilm co-president Dave Filoni. After sharing his thoughts on Vader earlier this week, Filoni has now turned to draw a finer contrast between what makes the fallen Anakin Skywalker and Maul himself two different, yet still villainous, characters.
In the wake of Maul and Vader’s duel, there’s been much debate online among certain circles about the “imbalance” of the battle, that it was somehow skewed that Vader so thoroughly rebuffed any attempt at an assault Maul could throw at him (mind you, losing over and over and persisting, even through certain death, in spite of it, is kind of Maul’s whole thing). But speaking to the official Star Wars website, Filoni made it clear, that even with the circumstances that Maul was battered and broken by the time Vader emerged from the mists of Janix’s jungles, it was a fight he was destined to lose. “Vader is better,” Filoni said. “More powerful, more destructive, more of a weapon for the Emperor, which is a problem.”
But that’s not necessarily Filoni talking from such a rote perspective of powerscaling debates that fandom groups can get lost in. It’s just that simply, in Shadow Lord, Vader is meant to represent to Maul the terrifying possibility of what could’ve been if he hadn’t failed Sidious on Naboo.
“The challenge with using Darth Vader here is to show Maul the horror of what you can become when you have power and evil come together in a more perfected version than what Maul is,” Filoni continued, “which is a broken, scrambling version of evil.”
That’s the other thing that’s important to remember: Maul might have been the protagonist of Shadow Lord, and we’ve spent much of the first season rooting for him and his goals, but he is still evil, and as Filoni said, a conniving, underhand, scrappy version of it. We’re reminded of that when Maul, having clearly realized that he’s been bested by Vader as he duels him alongside Master Daki and chooses to retreat on his own, even going so far as to use the Force to push Daki even closer to Vader, so he can watch from the shadows as Devon witnesses her master die at Vader’s hands—just in time for Maul himself to swoop in and reunite with her.
“We love Maul so much, but even though we are now cheering for him with our good guys, we needed to showcase that he is a very bad guy,” Shadow Lord supervising director Brad Rau added. “That was really important to me. And he does a move that leads to the tragic demise of Daki while he waits in the shadows, watching Devon. She unleashes her rage like never before. It is not the final lesson, but it is a very big, terrible lesson that he’s teaching her.”
It’s being two differing sides of the same tragic coin that ultimately leads to Maul and Vader’s differing paths—the former eventually laid to rest by Obi-Wan, certain that at least someone will get revenge on Sidious, if not him, the latter given time to return to the light and enact that vengeance in the first place. But even united by throughline of being Sidious’ apprentices, the two have always taken on different aspects of what it means to be agents of the dark side.
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