This week’s Maul: Shadow Lord episodes gave fans the encounter they’ve wanted ever since we first learned that the animated series would have Maul crossing paths with a Jedi he thought he could wield as a new apprentice. Maul’s educational, probing clash with the young Devon Izara certainly created some interesting and tempting friction in their dynamic already, but one moment in particular seemed like it raised a ton of questions.
Episode three of the series, “Whispers of the Unknown,” sees Maul and Devon duel after the former offers the latter the chance for an alliance he believes could bring down the Empire with their power combined. It’s a great little action sequence, with Maul the manipulator on fine form, but it reaches a fascinating climax. Just as Devon seemingly gives in to her anger and uses the advantage it gives her to start fleeing from Maul, the score swells as we hear a whispering chorus, just before he reaches out and reclaims his stolen lightsaber from Devon and learns her name in the process.
It’s that chorus that has our heads momentarily spinning. You hear the word “Rahtahmah,” which is, of course, a fragment of the lyrics from “Duel of the Fates” from The Phantom Menace, which is practically Maul’s anthem at this point in Star Wars‘ auditory lexicon. That’s neat, but it’s what the captions on Disney+ frame it as that might get your head spinning a bit:
That “Rahtahmah” isn’t just part of the score but diegetic, and it’s apparently Maul’s own lightsaber speaking.
We already know Shadow Lord‘s sound design was already going the extra mile with Maul’s lightsabers, incorporating Sam Witwer’s own screams into the mix of the blade’s soundscape. But that’s a fun Easter egg and very different from the implication that the actual lightsaber is capable of communicating to a wielder in this way.
And yet, it turns out that implication is not actually the case. I recently had the chance to talk to the producers behind Shadow Lord about the duel and this moment in particular—only for them to push back on the caption’s insinuation as being the interpretation they wanted for the moment.
“We know in the legacy of Maul, there’s a lot of times where you’ll hear chanting Sith-like… well, it’s not a Sith anymore, but chanting Sith-like whispers that are unintelligible. They’re not saying anything specific. I believe the subtitle is referring to that as opposed to, it’s not as though the saber is speaking to Maul or anything like that,” executive producer Brad Rau (and formerly one of the guiding forces behind The Bad Batch) told io9 over Zoom during a press junket for Maul: Shadow Lord.
Instead, the use of a part of “Duel of the Fates” was meant to signify to the audience the more supernatural importance of the moment. “We wanted to play it as though Maul already knew [Devon’s] name. He had already snatched that bit of power from this young character at some point. And this is just one of many moments that in his mind, the way we filmed it, he’s starting to train Devon. He’s opposed to her, but he has his own weird way,” Rau continued. “It’s not Sith, it’s not Jedi, but is he going to train her? We don’t know yet—but in his mind, these are the first steps he’s laying out, and that’s what’s going on there.”
So no alien-language-speaking lightsabers in Star Wars just yet, but still, the moment is still one that has a profound impact on Maul—one that Witwer himself had a lot of thoughts about as he prepared for it.
“I think it’s interesting because he’s in that phase where he’s discovering that he knows how to get to her because she is surprisingly like him. He trained to be a Sith, but never really got to be a Sith. She trained to be a Jedi but never really got to be a Jedi. So he thinks, ‘I’ve got this lady’s number,’ and he’s correct,” Witwer said of the duel scene. “But that goes both ways, you know? That’s the trick. Once you discover that someone is like you, what is your responsibility to that person? Because the way he was treated when he was her age was terrible. Was that wrong? If you don’t like that you were treated that way, do you have a responsibility to treat someone else at that age better? And what does that mean for a man who is never trained to do anything of that sort? And will he succeed or fail, in terms of forging any kind of connection with her? There’s a lot of interesting questions to be asked there.”
Questions that don’t involve a talking lightsaber, at least. Maul: Shadow Lord‘s first four episodes are now streaming on Disney+.
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