Warning: This review contains full spoilers for Maul: Shadow Lord Episodes 7 & 8!
Watching Maul: Shadow Lord is certainly an interesting experience relative to the various other Star Wars animated series. It’s far more serialized than Rebels, The Bad Batch, and the majority of The Clone Wars, to the point where this entire season has played like one long movie. No doubt some enterprising nerds are already hard at work cutting a fan edit to transform it into a film. However you ultimately choose to consume this particular piece of Star Wars media, there’s no denying that Shadow Lord has only gotten steadily better as it’s gone along. Episodes 7 and 8 are the best yet, giving us a healthy mix of action, suspense, and a welcome glimpse into Maul’s troubled psyche.
If it didn’t already feel as though Maul had bitten off more than he could chew on Janix, Episode 7 cements that with the introduction of Eleventh Brother/The Crow. The Crow is part of that proud tradition of Star Wars villains who look cool but don’t really do much before being summarily killed off. Luckily, Shadow Lord is taking advantage of this pre-Tales of the Jedi point in the timeline to make use of the character and show us how dangerous he can be.
Having two Sith Inquisitors on board only serves to further ramp up the tension and unease in these episodes. No, The Crow doesn’t really show any more personality or individuality than Marrok does (I don’t believe they even bothered to bring back voice actor Clancy Brown here), but as a purely physical threat, he more than gets the job done.
Episode 7 culminates in a truly epic showdown between Maul’s forces and the Empire. This sequence is easily the most memorable so far when it comes to scale and choreography. It’s also a showdown that puts Maul on the back foot in a major way. If he and Devon could barely handle Marrok together last week, how is Maul alone supposed to take on Marrok and The Crow? The answer, it turns out, is by leaning into his more cowardly side and stalling them long enough to drop a cave on top of everyone. Classic Maul…
That defeat leads directly into Episode 8, where our heroes struggle to rescue Rylee (Charlie Bushnell) from the Empire and Maul is left by his lonesome to walk a long, dangerous, and very psychedelic road. Those scenes where Maul pushes forward while grappling with images of his past are terrific. They serve as a reminder of how psychologically complex this character has become over the years, and we get some welcome glimpses of the formative moments of his origin story (being recruited by Sidious as a young Nightbrother, training under his master’s cruel gaze, etc.).
Best of all, these scenes wind up paying off by hinting at a larger mission for the series. Originally, we were led to believe that Shadow Lord is nothing more or less than the story of Maul rebuilding his criminal empire in the time of the Empire. That’s basically the story the show was telling in its first four episodes, and only once the Empire really entered the main stage did the series start to fulfill its true dramatic potential.
Now, we get hints that rebuilding the Shadow Collective is really all part of Maul’s larger plan to punish Sidious. He even vows in Episode 8 that no one else will be made to suffer as he did. I’m very eager to see how Maul attempts to fulfill that promise in future seasons, even if the show may ultimately be limited by the constraints of the Star Wars canon. The very fact that we have a Darth Maul-led show set years after his apparent death in Episode I is a reminder that canon doesn’t have to be a prison.
All in all, these two episodes deliver exactly what they need to at this dramatic point in the Season 1 narrative. They deliver a nonstop barrage of beautiful action and suspense, and they usher Maul into the forefront of the series after he spent Episodes 5 and 6 lurking in the shadows. Not that we don’t still get some strong scenes centered around the rest of the cast. The drama unfolding among the Mandalorians is a nice added wrinkle. And the droid characters are always reliable for a bit of much-needed comedic relief, whetehr it’s the wisecracking Spybot (David W. Collins) or the eternally optimistic Two-Boots (Richard Ayoade). This may be Maul’s show, but he’s built up a strong supporting cast around himself.
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