Maul: Shadow Lord has, for better or worse as it stretched itself out over the course of its first season, always had one very interesting nugget of potential at its core. It’s so far done a good job of kicking the can down the road on really digging into that promise with some stunning action and lush visuals to distract us, and its final two episodes do much the same. But this time, it’s an action of a more surgical sort, using its grand stakes to peel away almost everything about show that won’t have to matter going forward… leaving that core potential finally ready to be exposed.
It would not be unfair to say that Shadow Lord‘s final two episodes of the season, “Strange Allies” and “The Dark Lord”, are not really episodes about much in the way of theme happening, but rather they are episodes about Things Happening. Stripping away the dazzling artifice of their battles—both episodes are by and large extended fight scenes, one taking place around a perilous river of toxic sewage, the other in the jungle ruins around the edges of Janix’s cityscape—beyond the surface of the show’s slick visuals, there is really only one thing on Shadow Lord‘s mind at this point in the game: Who is in the way of putting Maul and Devon on a path together, and how do we get rid of them?
“Strange Allies” is the slightly weaker of the two here when it comes to tackling this question with violent efficiency, because it largely focuses on winnowing down Team Maul as the united groups of Maul’s crew and the Jedi make their way out of the city to be picked up by none other than Dryden Vos (played here by Scott Whyte, rather than Solo‘s Paul Bettany), who has offered Maul aid in exchange for using the former Sith as a weapon to establish himself as the head of Crimson Dawn. The action is, again, spectacular, as the Inquisitors and our fleeing protagonists battle over a highly toxic stream of sewage, only crossable by a tiny repulsorlift platform—but beyond that, it’s broadly empty.
Only a few of the deaths we see here have any real emotional resonance to them beyond a shock value, mostly because Shadow Lord has not done the best job of making Maul’s crew really feel like characters beyond Rook Kast occasionally disapproving of Maul’s increasingly narrowed vision. It’s only really poor Spybot getting sliced in half that really stings, mostly because he was the show’s Funny Little Guy (and really, a much better version of that trope than Vario ever could be). Combined with the fact that it’s once again Marrok and the Eleventh Brother providing the bulk of the threat, and they remain as impotent as ever beyond twirling a lightsaber, and it makes for a fun bit of tense action even if it all rings a bit hollow.
… So it’s probably for the best then, as the remnants of the group make their way out of Janix and into the jungle, when the group is whittled down further and Darth Vader himself walks out of the mists, ready to show us what a real threat looks like.
Vader’s presence as the titular Dark Lord of the finale makes this an interesting foil to “Strange Allies”, because now that Maul’s crew is almost entirely dead (save for the aforementioned Vario), it’s time to turn that deadly focus to Devon’s side of the group. We get Vader at his most mechanical here, brutish and unyielding as he hunts. In contrast to his last animated appearance in Rebels, where he allows himself the fun of gloating and trading barbs with his opponents, this Vader is a silent stalker, a machine more than man who is the embodiment of the narrative’s surgical precision to take out as many barriers as possible between putting Devon in Maul’s hands at long last.
The action continues to be great—after all the dazzling spins and whirls of lightsaber duels with the Inquistors, there’s something delectably base about Vader, more often than not, just beating his opponents down with a single wave of his saber hand, a visual transition from the high choreography of the prequel era to the style of duelling combat seen in the original films. But while it’s the only thing this episode is interested in, much like “Strange Allies” before it, the deaths here hit a little harder. First we lose Master Daki, speared by Vader as Maul limps away from the duel, and then in the final race to Vos’ ship, we lose Captain Lawson, sacrificing himself to ensure that Rylee and Two-Boots can get away, a loss that’s arguably even more important to Shadow Lord: now there is no one to distrust Maul enough for Devon to question the rage she feels within her, and no one to openly question what Maul tells her. Maul has now lost so much, and so has Devon, but to him the grim caluclus of all this death is worth it if she still stands (which is why he leaves Daki to die at Vader’s hands, of course).
As Vos’ ship speeds away from Janix with the survivors, there’s an intriguing potential contrast between Devon and Rylee, in that they’ve both lost parental figures in this escape—a contrast we already begin to see in the episode’s final moments, as Rylee huddles up and shuts down, while Devon, her face still slick with tears, grasps Maul’s lightsaber and commits herself to learning from him. If Rylee does appear in Shadow Lord‘s sophomore season, it’ll be interesting to see how he’s shaped by all this, but given the way these two episodes brutally cut down the show’s cast, it feels all the more likely that the show will cut him loose between seasons to make Devon truly alone as Maul begins to shape her.
This was a finale about a grim economy: even as the show opens up from Janix to set up transitioning the story to be about Maul’s role within Crimson Dawn, its key focus was always about thinning out this cast to get us down to Devon and Maul. Maybe all that’s left to say with Rylee is that, at the end of the day, some people just don’t get to contemplate revenge on the Empire when it takes someone they love, their resistance lost in their grief as they fade back into its systems. But he could be a good grounding point for Devon as she’s pulled further and further into the dark, so who knows?
So now we know where we’re headed for season two, back more into a story about the criminal underworld compared to the twin focuses of Shadow Lord‘s first season. But the thing that remains most interesting about the show is Maul and Devon, and that will persist. The show seems to realize that now that it’s effectively wiped the slate of 90% of its cast, and although surely season two will flesh it out again, you can’t really kick the can on putting those two characters together as a unit any more now that you’ve done these episodes, especially after playing the Vader card to do so. It’s a bold bet to make the faces of Star Wars animation right now such dark, broken people—but it’s something Lucasfilm Animation hasn’t really had the chance to do before across its oeuvre, so there’s a lot of promise in what’s to come to really dig into the potential this show has now whittled itself down to.
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