The hype continues to pick up for the newest Star Wars animated series, Maul – Shadow Lord, ahead of its premiere on Monday, April 6. The Lucasfilm social media team is firing on all cylinders, churning out plenty of promos, clips, and teasers.
The latest one was a thirty-second teaser about how Maul prefers to lurk in the shadows, which of course is the same thing the 7th Sister called him in Rebels, too: “the shadow.” But it’s a moment with a different Inquisitor that stands out to me in this teaser. Marrok, the Inquisitor seen re-animated in Ahsoka, will apparently feature pretty heavily in this series, and there’s a glimpse of him kneeling in front of a hologram, saying, “My lord. Maul lives.”
This is very interesting, as it doesn’t exactly seem like the Inquisitorius to refer to the Grand Inquisitor as “my lord”, which leads me to think this is either Emperor Palpatine or Darth Vader. My guess as to what happens is that these Inquisitors are sent to Janix because of Jedi Master Eeko-Dio Daki and his padawan, Devon Izara. But while on that hunt, they stumble upon an even bigger prize: Maul. That information would be quite valuable to the Sith, that the former Sith padawan lives. So I’m guessing that we will see either the Emperor or Vader informed of this development.
But it also raises my suspicions that this show could lead to a confrontation between Vader and Maul. That was something Dave Filoni originally had planned for Rebels, actually, which gives me reason to think he might recycle the idea here. In Rebels, Filoni planned for Maul to fight Vader, leading to Maul’s death, after which Vader would have turned his attention to fighting Ahsoka Tano. Filoni rightly decided that this would have been trying to do too much and too distracting from the real emotional weight of the Vader vs. Ahsoka duel. He was correct about this. But we know that Filoni doesn’t let any idea just go to waste and is often finding ways to incorporate these threads elsewhere. While Maul won’t die in Shadow Lord, since he dies in Rebels at the hands of Obi-Wan Kenobi, this show could explain why, by the time of Rebels, Maul believed he could not defeat Vader alone. What if, say, they had fought before, and Maul lost? I’m growing increasingly optimistic that we could see that as a sort of culmination for season one.
The Inquisitors are informing someone that Maul lives. I have to imagine this is one of the Sith. And that opens up some really exciting possibilities for this show.
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