After teasing the next Star Wars animated series last year at Celebration Japan, today we got our first proper look at Maul—Shadow Lord, depicting the former Sith’s attempts to build his burgeoning criminal empire away from the watchful eyes of the Emperor. From an intriguing aesthetic spin on the Clone Wars animation style to fun lightsaber action, the trailer is filled with cool details; here are just a few favorites that we spotted.
6) A New World
Although it’s not explicitly mentioned in the trailer itself—and despite it giving some heavy Coruscant lower-level vibes—Shadow Lord is actually set on a brand new planet, Janix, with its capital city built inside a massive crater. It’s for good reason, beyond moving us away from a familiar place: Maul is not quite stupid enough to set up shop almost literally under the nose of his former master after Palpatine gave him and his brother Savage a kicking after Maul usurped the rule of Mandalore during Clone Wars.
5) TK Troopers
Speaking of another Star Wars animated series’ legacy, we get to see a bunch of very specific Stormtroopers in action throughout the trailer. Heavily inspired by early Ralph McQuarrie art of stormtroopers for the original Star Wars, the TK Troopers, as they are known, were introduced in The Bad Batch as the initial wave of non-clone military forces recruited by the Empire.
Although they were being trained in secret by former clone commandos before that, TK Troopers were formally inducted alongside the phasing out of the clone army with the introduction of the Imperial Defense Recruitment Bill in approximately 18 BBY, giving us a bit more of a specific timeframe for Shadow Lord‘s early-rise-of-the-Empire setting.
4) The Blade of a Dark Disciple…
While he’s kneeling before a tea set, we get a very interesting glimpse of Maul’s lightsaber in the trailer. Some of the weapon has been modified to make it a dual-bladed saber, using part of Maul’s original lightsaber that we saw him wielding in The Phantom Menace and The Clone Wars until it was thought lost after his aforementioned duel with Sidious on Mandalore. We actually see Maul use this new saber in Clone Wars‘ final season, during his duel with Ahsoka Tano at the climax of the Republic’s siege of the Mandalorian homeworld (it was a duel-y time in Maul’s life).
But what’s interesting there is the newly added part of the design already has precedence in Star Wars: the new part of the hilt is the same design as the one wielded by Asajj Ventress in artwork created for her appearance in the early canon novel Dark Disciple. Funnily enough, neither Maul nor Ventress herself keeps the weapon for long: the former gets a new weapon by the time of his appearances in Rebels and Solo: A Star Wars Story, with what looks like part of an Inquisitorius saber’s circular guard attached to the hilt, while the latter’s return from the grave seen in Bad Batch and Tales of the Underworld sees her wielding a curved hilt inspired by her original sabers wielded as a Sith apprentice.
3) … and a New Disciple Altogether?
But all that talk of disciples has us very intrigued by another character who appears prominently throughout the trailer—a young, pink-skinned Twi’lek Jedi. Named in ancillary press as Devon Izara (and voiced by Gideon Adlon), Devon is a Jedi on the run with her master, Eeko-Dio-Daki (Dennis Haysbert), and we see her doing a lot of typically ex-Jedi things like helping others and fighting off Imperial forces. But it also seems like, pushed to a moment of desperation, Shadow Lord might see her take a turn towards darkness and partner up with Maul.
Naturally, a young Twi’lek being framed as Maul’s new apprentice has Star Wars diehards raising their eyebrows at the potential canonization of a familiar Star Wars face from the expanded universe: Darth Talon. A red-skinned Sith Lord with very Maul-esque tattoos, Talon was created by John Ostrander and Jan Duursema for Dark Horse’s 2006 comic series Star Wars Legacy, which was set 130 years after the events of the original movies, where she was one of the two hands of Darth Krayt’s resurgent Sith Empire, alongside Darth Nihil (not to be confused with Darth Nihilus from Knights of the Old Republic II, but we’re getting distracted by Sith names here).
While it would be absolutely crazy for Star Wars to canonize Talon in some form, making her Maul’s apprentice is actually not without precedent. George Lucas himself previously revealed his keen interest in the character, to the point that one of his potential early ideas for the sequel trilogy before he sold Lucasfilm to Disney involved Maul’s return from the grave as the trilogy’s big bad, with a version of Talon as his apprentice. That never happened, of course, but considering we’ve already seen Lucas resurrect Maul and make him a crime lord in Clone Wars, it wouldn’t be too surprising to see contemporary continuity have its own spin on Lucas’ idea.
2) The Die Is Kast
Speaking of familiar faces, we seemingly get a brief glimpse of another comics character in the trailer working with Maul: a purple-haired woman wearing Mandalorian armor, seen blasting Maul’s foes with her wrist-mounted flamer at one point. While that description might have some people thinking of Rebels‘ Sabine Wren, who was indeed briefly a bounty hunter before joining Hera Syndulla’s rebel cell, the timing of Shadow Lord makes that a near impossibility—Sabine’s around 16 by the start of Rebels, making her a toddler by the time of this show.
Thankfully, there is another when it comes to purple-haired Mandalorian women that makes much more sense, confirmed in the show’s casting: Rook Kast. Voiced by, funnily enough, Rebels alum Vanessa Marshall, Kast was created for the Dark Horse comic miniseries Darth Maul—Son of Dathomir, based on an unproduced Clone Wars story arc that would’ve set the stage for Maul’s escape after his defeat on Mandalore. One of the still-loyal Mandalorian Supercommandos that was part of Maul’s Shadow Collective, Kast helped free Maul from imprisonment and eventually made her way back to her animated roots when she briefly appeared in Clone Wars‘ seventh season as one of his lieutenants during the siege of Mandalore, where we see her defeated and captured by Bo-Katan.
1) No One Expects the Imperial Inquisitorius
Back at it with the familiar faces, but the trailer leans heavily on the fact that, as much as he may have wanted to, Maul has yet to escape the shadow of his former master. Palpatine dispatches more than just stormtroopers to Janix, but also the Imperial Inquisitorius to hunt Maul down in the form of two familiar Inquisitors.
Briefly seen in the trailer is the bird-masked Eleventh Brother, previously seen in Tales of the Jedi and Tales of the Empire, but more prominent is Marrok, the gaseous Inquisitor introduced (and killed off) in Ahsoka‘s first season. The character, established at the height of the Inquisitorius as First Brother, isn’t a stranger to Star Wars animation, having made a brief appearance in the aforementioned Tales of the Empire.
We don’t have much longer to wait to see what other cool connections the show makes: Maul—Shadow Lord hits Disney+ on April 6.
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