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.
Shadow Lord picks up shortly after the events of Order 66, aka the Jedi Purge, following Maul in his efforts to destroy the Empire once and for all. When we last saw him in The Clone Wars, he was forming a crime syndicate on Mandalore to fulfill this goal — but we’ll have to go even further back in the animated series to understand how he recruited Mandalorians like Rook Kast to his cause.
Mandalore has always been a part of Star Wars history, but it was introduced to the new canon in 2010, with an episode of The Clone Wars called “The Mandalore Plot.” There, we saw the planet in crisis, with its pacifist leader, Duchess Satine Kryze, fighting to reform Mandalorian society and put its violent traditions to rest. Suffice it to say that her plans don’t come to fruition, thanks in part to corruption perpetuated by a splinter cell of Mandalorian warriors called “Death Watch,” and later to some meddling by Maul himself. When Death Watch joins Maul’s “Shadow Collective,” their first order of business is to oust Satine and install Maul as the new leader of Mandalore. (This is all part and parcel of a long-festering revenge plot against Obi-Wan, who’d long been in love with Satine.)
Maul’s reign is blistering but short-lived. A devastating duel with his former master, Darth Sidious, and an earth-shaking battle with the Republic’s Clone forces strip Maul of all the power he spent seasons building. Though he’s briefly captured by the Nite Owls (a Mandalorian group led by Satine’s sister, Bo-Katan), he does slip into hiding alongside a few surviving members of Death Watch, Rook Kast included. Shadow Lord takes place almost right after that defeat at the end of The Clone Wars, with the remnants of Maul’s collective struggling to regroup after the Siege of Mandalore. Fans of The Mandalorian know that the warrior race will be forced to the margins of the galaxy during the Age of the Empire, but Shadow Lord could show us how a new group of Mandalorians — Din Djarin’s Children of the Watch — came to be.
Could some of Maul’s hired Mandalorian guns be the first to say, “This is the Way?” If we’re going by Witwer’s claims of self-containedness, maybe not. But Shadow Lord could still iron out the Mandalorians’ long, confusing history, depicting the next chapter of their fall from grace and teeing up their fight to reclaim past glory.
