[COLUMN] Shadow Lord Forgets What We Loved About Darth Maul | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

Note: This piece contains spoilers for the first two episodes of Maul: Shadow Lord, now streaming on Disney+. It also contains spoilers for The Phantom Menace, just in case you aren’t caught up.

In 1999, Darth Maul (Ray Park, Peter Serafinowicz, Sam Witwer) hit the culture like a dose of pure and unrefined sugar.

Maul made his impression even before The Phantom Menace opened.  Maul igniting the second side of his lightsaber was a huge moment in the film’s teaser trailer, and the first full-blown trailer opens with one of the handful of lines that Maul has in the film, “At last we will reveal ourselves to the Jedi. At last we will have revenge.” Maul was a striking visual. He was a literally demonic villain, his skin an intricate tapestry of red and black, horns atop his head.

While the reaction to The Phantom Menace was (to put it kindly) mixed, Darth Maul emerged as one of the unambiguous highlights of the film. On top of the character’s distinctive design, it helped that he was a relatively stoic and silent character, and so unburdened by George Lucas’ awkward exposition. It also helped that he was at the center of the movie’s powerhouse action sequence, a truly kinetic lightsaber duel with Qui-Gon Jinn (Liam Neeson) and Obi-Wan Kenobi (Ewan McGregor).

One of George Lucas’ strengths has always been a strong eye for visual design, creating characters who tend to lodge in the viewer’s imagination, even if they don’t actually do that much within the confines of the films themselves. In some ways, Darth Maul recalls the introduction of bounty hunter Boba Fett (Jeremy Bulloch, Temuera Morrison) in The Empire Strikes Back. He might not actually do much, but he looks very cool while doing it.

To give credit where it is due, Lucas has always had a very canny understanding of this and a wry self-aware sense of humor about it. Boba Fett’s death in Return of the Jedi, in which this extremely cool looking character has his jetpack activated by a blind Han Solo (Harrison Ford), flies into the side of a pleasure barge and then falls into the mouth of a gigantic sand monster, is a hilarious punchline. It’s an illustration of the extent to which Boba Fett is quite literally an empty suit.

Darth Maul dies at the end of The Phantom Menace. Apparently, Lucas wanted to make it very clear that Maul was dead. “At one point, when Obi-Wan kills Darth Maul, he just fell in the pit,” Lucas recalls. “I looked at it and thought this isn't going to work because, if people like him enough, they're going to want him to come back and they're going to assume somehow he gets out of it. So I had to cut him in half to say that this guy's gone, he's history, he ain't coming back.”

Lucas has always understood fans better than fans have understood him. Fans did want more Boba Fett and more Darth Maul. In both cases, they proved reluctant to allow these cool toys to be put back on the shelf, and insisted on bringing them back into play. The Mandalorian began as a show based around a character who looked like Boba Fett, before eventually resurrecting Fett himself, and spinning Fett out into the staggeringly mediocre The Book of Boba Fett.

Maul was actually resurrected before that, in the animated spin-off The Clone Wars. This was reportedly done at Lucas’ suggestion, with the creator informing Dave Filoni that they would be bringing Maul back. When Filoni asked how they were expected to resurrect a character who had been chopped in half and thrown down a bottomless pit, Lucas seemingly replied, “I don’t know, you’ll figure it out.”

They certainly figured it out. Maul was resurrected as a crime boss. He initially appeared in the animated spin-offs, before making a live action cameo at the end of Solo: A Star Wars Story as the crime boss behind Dryden Vos (Paul Bettany) and Qi'ra (Emilia Clarke). Now he returns as the star of the ten-episode animated spin-off series, Maul: Shadow Lord, which follows the character as he navigates the gap between Revenge of the Sith and the original Star Wars film.

As with The Book of Boba Fett, watching Shadow Lord creates the impression that Lucas might have been right the first time. Maybe less is more. Maybe Boba Fett was better as a cool costume lurking in the background of one of the greatest movies ever made than as the star of a seven-episode blob of streaming content, maybe Darth Maul was better as the undisputed highlight of a divisive film than he is as the protagonist of an underworld epic.

As with a lot of the modern Star Wars stuff, particularly that overseen by Dave Filoni, there is a recurring sense that nobody involved with the production actually understands what made these characters so appealing in the first place. Boba Fett was an unknowable dude who lurked silently in the background in a cool helmet, so making him a would-be crime boss with a heart of gold who rarely bothers to wear his helmet felt like it missed the point somewhat.

So much of what made Darth Maul pop in The Phantom Menace was his physicality. He was played on film by stuntman Ray Park, which meant that Maul could really move. Park was not necessarily the strongest dramatic actor, but Park knew how to move his body to great effect. He could dance, glower and pose. The character was dubbed by Peter Serafinowicz, but only had a handful of lines. This contributed to the sense that Maul was dangerous and animalistic.

So much of Maul’s character was communicated non-verbally, which was refreshing in a film laden with exposition about taxation and trade routes. The best character beat in the film might come during the final fight, as Qui-Gon Jinn and Maul are separated by a force shield. Qui-Gon closes his eyes and starts to meditate, seeking some sort of calmness and communion with the larger universe. In contrast, Maul anxiously and impatiently paces, like a spring coiled and ready to unload.

“Ray said, ‘I don’t know what to do. What do I do?’,” recalls stunt coordinator Nick Gillard. “I said to him, ‘When you see those tigers in the zoo and they’re just pacing up and down their cages all the time — why don’t you do that vibe?’” It is a choice that says so much about Maul, and it does it without pages upon pages of dialogue and monologue about the character’s back story and motivations. The audience sees Maul in that moment and knows exactly who he is.

The problem is that the kind of internal logic of modern fan culture doesn’t parse that. These characters are not allowed to be defined by their look or their physicality. They have to be imbued with back story and continuity and lore. This is very apparent in Shadow Lord, where the show’s entire understanding of Maul seems to be extrapolated from the character’s only significant line in The Phantom Menace, about his desire to “have revenge.”

One can almost hear the “eureka!” moment in the writers’ room. The key to the character is “revenge.” Maul is the “revenge” guy. His whole schtick is “revenge.” So the first two episodes of Shadow Lord are burdened with monologue after monologue of Maul talking about how he’s plotting his revenge, how he’s taking his revenge, how he will have revenge. It’s an entire characterization retroactively derived from a single line of dialogue in a movie from a quarter-of-a-century ago.

“There are many who have prospered from my misfortune,” he monologues to Rook Kast (Vanessa Marshall). “Soon, they will all pay.” Tracking down Looti Vario (Chris Diamantopoulos), he vows, “Vario’s betrayal demands consequence. And something else: our actions serve a greater purpose. Events are falling into place.” Recruiting a young Jedi, Devon Izara (Gideon Adlon), he exposits, “I shall fashion her into a weapon which can help us destroy all those who have betrayed me.”

This is a frankly absurd approach to characterization, but it is par for the course with Star Wars. Part of what made Maul so appealing in The Phantom Menace was his relative silence and stoicism. That was his defining character trait, to the point that Attack of the Clones implicitly contrasts Maul with Darth Sidious’ (Ian McDiarmid) next apprentice, Count Dooku (Christopher Lee), who is established as counterpoint to Maul: a character who talks and reasons.

Indeed, there is something interesting in the idea of building a show like this around a character who is defined by their relative silence and their dynamism. In The Phantom Menace, it is a joy to watch Maul move. It is fun to imagine what original Clone Wars animator Genndy Tartakovsky might do with that premise. Maul would work very well as the protagonist of a series of largely silent animated shorts, akin to something like Genndy Tartakovsky’s Primal.

However, that is not what Dave Filoni’s ideal version of Star Wars looks like. So Shadow Lord is filled with scene after scene of Maul monologuing pseudo-philosophical nonsense and expositing revenge plans with his arms tucked behind his back like he’s Grand Moff Tarkin (Peter Cushing). “You’re operating under the premise that I am somehow the villain here,” he tells Devon at one point, “but it is not as simple as good and evil.” It’s a strange thing to hear from a guy who looks like a literal devil.

There are moments of action. The first episode teaser ends with Maul leaping into action, cutting away as he is mid-air. The second episode features Maul singlehandedly tearing through a Pyke ship. Even then, though, there is too much yapping. “Everything that was yours is now controlled by Marg Krim,” boasts the captain (Andrew Kishino). Maul, a demonic Sith Lord holding a two-sided light saber, should probably let his actions speak for him, but instead replies, “I’m sure you believe that.”

Bringing back Maul is an inherently fan-service-y choice, and very much in keeping with the way that modern Star Wars operates. However, as with the resurrection of Boba Fett, there is a strong sense that the creative visionaries guiding the character back to screen have no real understanding of what made the character so compelling in the first place, and seek to sand down any distinctive attribute to make the character in question a more conventional – and more boring – protagonist.

Sometimes less is Maul.