Darth Vader doesn’t show up in Star Wars lightly. The key figure in George Lucas‘ six-film Star Wars saga has already had quite the run but, in the years since, has been deployed only in very key instances. He fought his apprentice on Star Wars Rebels. He massacred rebels in Rogue One. He even gives Cal Kestis a good scare in a few video games. This week, Vader returned with maybe his most brutal moment yet, and Lucasfilm president Dave Filoni explained the cold, calculated reasoning behind it.
Vader appears in the final two episodes of the latest Star Wars animated show, Maul: Shadow Lord. He’s deployed to help his Inquisitors capture not just a pair of rogue Jedi but also the former apprentice of his master, Darth Sidious. The result is basically a 30-minute-long fight scene as Maul, Jedi Master Eeko-Dio Daki, and apprentice Devon Izara desperately try to defeat the Dark Lord of the Sith. They fail and face dire circumstances all around.
Lucasfilm held an event to celebrate the final two episodes of the show, and io9 was on hand. There, Filoni, who created the show and is now one of the presidents of Lucasfilm, spoke about his Darth Vader philosophy, and it’s dire as hell.
“The key to Vader for me is that he’s not Anakin,” Filoni began. “He doesn’t recognize that. He can’t. Anything that reminds him of Anakin, he’s going to destroy. So when he sees a Jedi, he’s going to destroy the Jedi, because the Jedi would remind him unconsciously or consciously that he betrayed all of his friends and everything he knew and the life he grew up with. For what? For nothing. He lost everything. He made a bad trade. He was lied to. He was deceived. He can’t accept that truth. So he’s even farther down the path than Maul.”
“Maul is struggling to let go of hate, but Anakin got consumed by it,” he continued. “If he were to face what he did, it would destroy him more. I find a lot of pity for him because of what he did and the depth of his treachery. And that’s Darth Vader. Anakin’s trapped in there somewhere, and Darth Vader won’t let him surface. And so to me, the key is not to actually give him a character. He’s devoid of it because he doesn’t care. Darth Vader does not care. He does not have compassion. He does not see you. He sees the thing he wants to destroy, and he will do that. It’s like the same feeling you got in Rogue One when he comes down the hallway. He doesn’t talk to those guys. He’s going to destroy them. He has one mission, and all of his remorse and all of his anger and all of his hate is in every swing that he does. That’s how it’s resolved.”
“And [when] he saw Ahsoka, he wants to destroy her,” Filoni said. “She, of all people, would remind him of who he was. He’s like, ‘I gotta destroy that. I can’t face that.’ Obi-Wan, he wants to destroy him. So he is a destroyer, Darth Vader. And critically, only his son, only his offspring, could make him spark, could make him see something. But at first, selfishly, [he said] ‘You and I can rule the galaxy.’ That’s where he goes. He doesn’t come all the way back. It’s a long process.”
Critically, Filoni feels very careful about the use of Vader for one big reason above all. He didn’t create him. George Lucas did.
“This is George’s character. This is the backbone of the whole thing,” Filoni said. “And you don’t want to do anything that interrupts that, or changes that, or diverts that. This doesn’t do it because this is the price you pay when you give in to your anger, when you give in to that terrible side of yourself. And it should terrify all of us. Because we’re all capable of that depth of terror. We’re all capable of doing the wrong thing. Daki’s capable. Devon’s capable. Maul’s very capable. But so are Lawson [and] Riley. They’re all capable of doing terrible things. It’s not something that’s just for the Sith or the Jedi.”
“These are the lessons that George is trying to teach us and wants to show us in these stories,” he continued. “And so that was the important thing to reflect if you dare to put Vader in a story. You have to do it for the right reason and then show him the right way. So yeah, he’s a powerful character.”
But how powerful? And what, if anything, has Maul figured out about him? “You did so well with the question I could answer, and then you went into a place where I won’t,” Filoni said when posed with the follow-up. “You were doing this one thing, and then I’m like, ‘Come on.’”
Okay, so no answers about the show itself. But using Darth Vader on it was not something that happened lightly.
The full season of Maul: Shadow Lord is now on Disney+.
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