Maul has lived a very long life in Star Wars, which is already miraculous considering his first appearance climaxed with him getting cut in half and shoved down a generator trash chute. But it’s been a long road from there to his very own animated TV series, Maul: Shadow Lord, and he’s been carried on that road by several pairs of legs. Let’s rank them, shall we?
4) Legs (Organic)
The OGs. They’re perfectly cromulent legs; they get the job done of all that skulking about by his master’s side. They let him do cool backflips and spins and everything! But they are also kind of boring in a lifetime where a man has had multiple leg options available to him, albeit rarely by choice? And let Maul down when he needed them most, following him tumbling shortly thereafter after Obi-Wan separated them from the rest of his body. Alas!
3) Legs (Clawed)
Maul’s third pair of legs, made for him by the Nightsister witch Mother Talzin, is overcompensating for something, even if they are an explicit reference to a classic what-if Star Wars comic. They’ve got a nice finish, sure, but they’re huge, making Maul tower even over his sizeable brother, Savage Opress. They’re multi-jointed, for a man who was not previously so jointed. They even end in massive claws, because, you know, spikey things are evil and things of that nature. Maul is indeed a bit of an edgelord, but these legs are practically screaming it. And the screaming’s just too loud, you know?
Plus, it kind of feels like Talzin looked at Grievous and went, “I can do that with scrap metal and magicks,” so it’s more about her than it is Maul.
2) Legs (Spider)
Okay, I know I just knocked the clawed legs for being too edgelordy, but the spider legs—what we see Maul with when he first returns from the grave in The Clone Wars, skulking about on the junk planet Lotho Minor—are the equivalent of being called an edgelord in about as complimentary a manner as possible. Spider-Maul is Maul at his lowest (his actual lowest is probably wherever that Naboo trash chute ended): a broken husk of a man fueled by a shattered spirit and yearning that can only be awakened by the call for revenge against those who wronged him.
And thus, the legs match: all exposed wiring and skittering about, raw and jagged and as frantic as Maul’s frenzied mind is. And they’re also self-made legs, which has to count for something. The fact that they’re spider legs and he even gave himself an abdomen for no discernable reason at all is almost not even relevant. But it is! He made himself spider legs; he didn’t make them to impress anyone else.
1) Legs (Mandalorian)
But at the end of the day, sometimes you just need an actual pair of just kind of normal legs. Except these legs are better! They’re Mandalorian legs.
Maul gets these when his clawed legs are damaged attempting to get revenge on Obi-Wan, and he and his brother are picked up by Death Watch when their escape pod is found floating in space—who decide, much like us, that the clawed legs are a bit gauche. So maybe they have some beskar in them? Who knows! But they look nice, echoing the smooth lines and art deco design aesthetics of Mandalore by the time of the Clone Wars.
This is a good pair of no-fuss appendages that get the job done. Sure, he doesn’t have claw feet anymore or another four of them, plus an abdomen. But they let Maul do what he needs to do, and they seemingly let him do it better than any other pair of legs we’ve seen him have: they last through the rest of the Clone Wars, into Shadow Lord, and beyond into Solo and eventually Rebels (with some aesthetic differences, although that’s down to the style of those two particular pieces of media). They’re the legs he finally passes on with, so they go through almost 20 years of Maul putting them through their paces, literally and metaphorically.
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