Last week, Lucasfilm revealed our first proper look at Star Wars: Maul—Shadow Lord, a new animated series that follows the titular ex-Sith building up his criminal empire in the aftermath of Revenge of the Sith. This, as is common in a franchise that has now perfected the “Somehow, X Returned” format, raised a number of questions from certain areas of the internet expressing some shock, sincere or otherwise, that this time it was Maul—a character famous for being very cool and then almost immediately getting chopped in half in his debut appearance—doing the returning.
Putting aside some of the peculiar oddities that came with these reactions (a failure to remember that not just that Maul’s survival after Phantom Menace has been a thing for almost 15 years now, but that also that said survival was at the behest of George Lucas himself, who was clearly still fascinated by Maul as a figure well after bumping him off) Maul’s death, rebirth, and second death speak to a thorny aspect of recent Star Wars media—that the franchise, so beholden to its past, cannot help but turn death into a revolving door, wrenching characters and stories that had seemingly been granted finality back to life for the sake of pointing at the familiar over and over.
On the one hand, it is an objectively funny thing, and part of Star Wars‘ goofier aspects, that a character can survive being sliced in half and falling down a massive hole simply by being really mad about it. On the other hand, Maul is perhaps the rare Star Wars character whose return from the seeming grave worked to really enrich both his character—by, no offense to Phantom Menace, actually giving him one—and also have something to say about what it means to erase yourself from Star Wars‘ narrative.
From the moment Maul’s survival was revealed to us and Obi-Wan Kenobi in Clone Wars to the moment we and Obi-Wan Kenobi again bid him farewell in Star Wars Rebels, his character was defined by that ceaseless, unyielding rage. Maul’s fury—against Obi-Wan, against Palpatine, against a story that discarded him as little more than a cool image—is what sustained his survival and drives everything we see him do across his animated appearances. There’s an endearingly chaotic sense of aimlessness to the plots Maul gets himself involved in over the course of those appearances, each one raised up as his Next Great Plan to get back at those who spited him, from his attempt to create a new Sith duology with his brother Savage, to his side quest in briefly wanting to take over the planet Mandalore, to eventually his more successful stint as a crime lord, and ultimately to his climax as a faux-wizened crone negging a tween into helping him find out what his old frenemy has been up to after all this time.
There’s a charm in Maul, originally garnering his reputation as this stoic, seething badass, becoming something of a loser running increasingly zanier schemes. But that feckless lashing out and biting of his thumb toward galactic machinations that chewed him up and spat him out the moment his usefulness came to an end is also deeply tragic: if rage is what kept Maul alive in the first place, it couldn’t actually fulfill his life or his dreams of revenge, leaving him a husk flitting from one plan to the next, lashing out fruitlessly as he tries to get someone, anyone, to care about his plight. All Maul had wasn’t some place in the galaxy, but this anger he couldn’t put anywhere or keep in one place for any period of time to do anything meaningful with it.
That is, until Rebels beautifully pays it all off. “Twin Suns” is arguably Maul’s finest hour, despite it being an episode that brings him to the cusp of everything he wanted only to cut him down once again, as quickly as the first time. There is no final howl, no epic clash of swords as he is finally drawn back to Obi-Wan Kenobi on Tatooine. A single strike lays him low, and the end of Darth Maul is upon us once again. As he begins to slip away in Obi-Wan’s arms, Maul breathlessly realizes that his place in Star Wars‘ narrative has to go to someone else—seeking reassurance from Obi-Wan that at least someone, if not him, will get revenge against his former master. His decades of fury at the galaxy have led him to this one moment that couldn’t be granted by his first “death”: that the only way he can find peace and an actual sense of direction is by letting it all go. And if Maul lets go of that rage, then what was keeping him around?
It’s a lesson a lot of Star Wars characters have been asked to grapple with as their long arcs have dragged out across new eras and iterations of the franchise—the realization of when the time is to exit the story, through death or otherwise, and leave the galaxy’s struggles to other generations. But to take a character whose initial death was so meaningless and have him experience this long journey that is essentially about reckoning with and accepting that to grant him an actually meaningful departure is far more resonant than the delightful absurdity of what he survived in the first place—and perhaps the rare example Star Wars has gotten right out of letting a character cheat death.
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