Star Wars legend Sam Witwer might insist that his new series, Maul – Shadow Lord, is entirely self-contained, but as the sequel to a midquel that spun off from a prequel, such a claim is a tough sell. While the animated series does all it can to contextualize this yet-unexplored chapter of Maul’s life, there may still be those who ask, “Wait, how is Darth Maul even alive? And why is he skulking around a sewer with a bunch of Mandalorians?”
So much of Shadow Lord only truly makes sense if one has seen The Clone Wars, the seven-season show that created an animated world all its own, almost totally divorced from the live-action goings on in the Star Wars galaxy. How Maul survived that deadly slice at the hands of Obi-Wan Kenobi in The Phantom Menace is explored in great detail there, alongside the revenge plot he enacts years later. Perhaps most crucially, though, The Clone Wars also established a clear blueprint for Mandalorian lore. It paved the way for the intimate exploration of the culture we see in The Mandalorian, which takes leaps beyond the clan’s militaristic origins to introduce the radical Children of the Watch, who never take off their Mandalorian helmets. The live-action series still hasn’t truly revealed how the Mandalorians splintered so severely after The Clone Wars, but Shadow Lord might just have the missing piece of this perpetually confusing puzzle.
