Matthew
Hello and welcome to this very special episode of the Star Wars Generations Podcast, friends. The long wait is over. Maul: Shadow Lord episodes one and two are here, and Erin and I are here to talk about it.
Erin
What do you think? Well, yeah, that was so cool. It was so fun to watch. Lots of cool fight scenes, lots of fun new characters. It’s really shaping up to be a fun storyline. So I’m very excited.
Matthew
Yeah, there’s so much hype and you’re always worried that it’s not going to live up to the hype. And there’s a lot that were not my favorite. But overall, Sam Witwer is just such an incredible voice actor and he carries it so well. With something like this, it’s a hard story to tell because this is coming in the middle of Maul’s story. And we know that he’s going to do a lot in later points in Rebels. And I’m always worried with something like this, where the villain is the focus, that they’re going to try to make it a redemption story — that they’re going to try to make it like, oh, look at all the — no. They are making it clear that he is still a horrible, terrible person who has some grievances.
Erin
And you know, we support Zabrak rights and we support Zabrak wrongs. And did you get chills when he first appeared and that music from Phantom Menace started to play?
Matthew
Yo, that was crazy. That was so well done. It was such a good mic drop. It was beautiful.
Erin
And I don’t know — has that just become Maul’s theme? I don’t remember that music playing when he’s shown up in Clone Wars and Rebels and stuff like that.
Matthew
I don’t think I remember it during Clone Wars at all. I don’t know about Rebels.
Erin
Yeah. Maybe we’ll check in. I’m sure our listeners will let us know if we were wrong. But we’ll go from there. So where do you want to start? What do you want to talk about?
Matthew
Let’s talk about our new police character. I didn’t catch his name, but this Captain — Lawson?
Erin
Yeah, Captain Lawson. Which, for a guy who has a son and is an officer of the law, is a little on the nose.
Matthew
But this felt so much more real world than anything we’ve had. Did you catch that he’s separated from his wife? He’s raising his teenage son. I was just like, am I watching a 90s cop movie? This is so weird.
Erin
And I literally was watching it and I was like, oh, trouble at home. He’s an absent father.
Matthew
Well, is he an absent father? He’s not absent exactly, but I think it felt like he’s more absent than the mother — less present, I mean.
Erin
Yeah. I felt like he has main custody, but the kid wants to visit his mom. Yeah.
Matthew
That’s what it seems like — I’m curious to see how the story shapes up. But yeah, it appears he has main custody. Or even that if custody is split in some way, the wife lives off planet and that’s too much for the son to manage on his own.
Erin
Right. Which is fair because he seems to be somewhere between 14 and 17.
Matthew
Right. And in the middle of having this conversation with his son, he gets called away by Two-Bots. How do we like Two-Bots?
Erin
The new droid? Two-Bots is a cutie. Two-Bots is fun. I’m excited to see that character because he’s shaping up to be our true moral good. Or he’s just like, well, the rules say call ISB, so we should call ISB. And the Empire would agree. And Lawson’s like, you don’t understand what that would do to the politics in our world. We need to not call the Empire.
Matthew
Yeah, I think you don’t mean moral good — I think you mean lawful good. He’s the rule follower. He’s like, we should do it by the book. It’s interesting that after Andor, we’re once again getting a story of local law enforcement trying to figure out whether they can deal with this situation or not.
Erin
And I feel like Lawson is clearly going to be someone who’s critical of the Empire, because he’s very hesitant right now to get them involved. I also like that we get so much of the local crime situation happening here. Again, this feels like a gangland movie.
Matthew
It feels like a cop movie. We have two different rival factions, and Maul does a pretty good job of getting them to fight against each other and take each other down. Because his goal at this point is just to cause as much havoc and exact revenge on this former Shadow Collective of his.
Erin
Yeah. His goal seems to be revenge, but also just stirring things up — revenge, while also maintaining as much anonymity as possible. Because he did a lot of work setting it up to look like the two crime bosses, Demis and Vario, were just fighting each other — not because Maul started things and tried to pin it on Vario.
Matthew
Yeah. I think we’re getting into an interesting story with him. He wants revenge. For those who don’t know what the Shadow Collective is, by the way, we talk a lot about that in our last episode — the primer episode. Definitely check that out. But just a very quick summary: towards the end of The Clone Wars, he had brought together all of these different criminal syndicates — the Pykes, Death Watch, Crimson Dawn, a number of others — to take over Mandalore. The plans were foiled, it was overthrown. And as he sees it, all those groups basically said, this is a sinking ship, and they got off like rats. As he sees it, they all abandoned him. This man has a persecution complex, and that’s a big part of who Maul is right now. He’s got three goals that are all kind of warring with each other: he wants revenge, he wants to have the Shadow Collective back in some way, he wants to be running criminal enterprises again. And as they say in The Dark Knight, some people just want to watch the world burn.
Erin
That seems very on the nose for him, especially with the intro we get — it’s just brushstrokes painting out the word “Maul” and just fire. Which is very cool.
Matthew
Right. I apologize — this is going to be a very short episode. I’m going to let Erin talk for a little while because my parents are making an unscheduled visit. They’re going to be here in just two minutes. But let’s talk about what’s happening with him and the Jedi prodigy — the one he’s trying to get to be a disciple of his. What do you think is going on in that story?
Erin
It seems clear to me that she was living on the streets with her former Jedi master. We see the Jedi master has a chance to choose between trying to rescue his apprentice from Maul and the Shadow Collective, or trying to save a broken bridge full of innocent people. And the master chooses the bridge, which I feel like will probably come back. And Maul will probably use that — along with the fact that when they were starving, he wanted her to beg. She stole a piece of fruit and got arrested. His response was, well, I’m sure the criminal justice system will work it out on its own. He made no effort to try to save her or get her out of processing or bail her out. He just went back to the streets.
Matthew
Because his mindset is like, the less trouble we cause, the better. Just go in there, don’t give them any identification — they’ll keep you for a night and eventually let you go. And she seems pretty unsatisfied with that plan, which I would be too.
Erin
If I were a teenager who was starving and just wanted a piece of fruit and then got arrested, that would suck. And then here’s the thing about Maul — he’s clearly trying to play on that. He’s trying to get at the Jedi indoctrination. He says things like, you’ve been indoctrinated since you were a child, now you must adapt. He says, you’re operating under the premise that I’m the villain here, but things are not as simple as good and evil. And I watched this and compared it to the Emperor seducing first Anakin and then Luke, or The Acolyte — what the Stranger does — or some of the other stories we’ve seen in books. So often the idea is that the Sith master is going to make the apprentice come to them, make the apprentice want them.
Matthew
This is now the third time we’ve watched Maul try to recruit someone. We watched him try to recruit Ahsoka. We’ll later watch him try to recruit Ezra.
Erin
Yeah, he’s coming off kind of desperate. It’s interesting that he’s trying hard to make her come to him instead of holding back and letting her go through the ordeal and eventually decide to come to him on her own.
Matthew
What do you think is going on there?
Erin
I think part of it is he’s really trying to expedite the timeline. He really needs another Force user at this point. And maybe to some extent he’s like, well, the other approach wasn’t working, so let me try to be a little more proactive and really play some mind games rather than just stepping back and letting the dark side do its work.
Matthew
Right. And I think part of it is he really needs this. You know, it’s hard to be dating when you’re needy. He doesn’t have his master anymore. He needs a partner, an apprentice, or something. He’s never successfully recruited anyone the way he was recruited — he was found as a baby and raised. He was not brought in as an adult the way recruits often are. I think he kind of doesn’t know how to do it. That’s probably why he doesn’t have success with Ahsoka, doesn’t have success with Ezra. And I think he’s going to have more success with her based on what we know about the story. But we’ll see — this is showing that part of what makes recruiting hard is the need he carries into it.
Erin
TBD. I’m very excited to see what happens.
Matthew
Speaking of not having overthrown your masters yet — my parents are here. I’m going to have to run. Keep talking, though. I’ll come back and make some comments at the end.
Erin
Sounds good. All right, y’all. It’s just me, so I’m going to keep talking about this episode. One of the things I wrote down from episode one was Spybot. I think he’s so fun — or she or they, I don’t really know what pronouns a being like that would use. They just seem to have this attitude that is a love of destruction, and I really love that. I love a good assassin droid or spy droid, something like that. We got a lot of cool assassin droids and bounty hunters throughout The Clone Wars, which everyone knows is my favorite Clone Wars era. So yeah, I’m really excited for this character. Obviously the Shadow Collective seems to be operating at a level that is higher than a typical bounty hunter — that is Maul’s goal. He’s not really trying to have a bounty hunter group. He’s trying to have an underworld empire. I really like Spybot. I love how diverse Spybot’s abilities are — there seems to be a built-in gun, it can do disguising, it obviously does a lot of spying, it’s really good at computer hacking. And we got a scene in — I think that was episode one, if not the start of episode two — where Two-Bots and Spybot are warring it out on the computer system, just trying to see who’s going to be able to control the police station. And eventually Two-Bots wins, and Spybot just throws a fit — no, no, no, no, no — and smashes everything up. And I’m like, girl, that’s so real. So I’m excited to see that character developed further and see where that goes.
I’m also very intrigued by our female Mandalorian. I need to do some research — I’ve been very busy — but I don’t know if she is one of the Mandalorians from season seven of The Clone Wars or if this is a new character. That’s something I would look into because I’m quite curious.
One thing I found interesting from episode one, at the very end: when Maul appears and finds who we’re assuming is Talon — he finds this young Jedi in the prison cell and opens it to speak with her, because he’s been looking for an apprentice. He feels the power of the Force and he’s like, I can work with this. I can manipulate this. I think that’s what’s happening in Maul’s head. But I found it very interesting that she knew who he was when the door opened. The last word of the first episode is her saying, “Maul.” And I thought that was interesting given how anonymous he was at the end of The Clone Wars. The Jedi Council specifically knew about him, but even the conflict on Mandalore — the actual Jedi Council and the Republic itself did not participate in that conflict. So I found it very interesting that she was familiar with him when the character has been fairly mysterious. It didn’t seem clear to me that all the Jedi would know who Maul is. So I’m curious to see how that pans out — if it’s like she found this during research, or if she and her master somehow have a connection to the Mandalore conflict or to something else that Maul did during his time in The Clone Wars. Because it didn’t seem like common knowledge that all the Jedi would know who Maul is. So I’m curious to see if she had some sort of further experience or insight leading her to recognize Maul so quickly.
One thing that became very clear in the second episode is that Maul is a broken record. He is still, at the end of the day, after Darth Sidious. He wants his revenge on everyone who left the Shadow Collective and abandoned him, including Marg Krim, who is the leader of the Pykes Syndicate. Maul decides to spare Vario’s life and take him as a prisoner because he claims that he can get them to Marg Krim. And apparently Maul hates Krim a little more than he hates Vario right now, so that takes priority. So I’m very excited to see some sort of raid on the Pykes or something like that. We already saw them take over a Pyke shipment to stir up some trouble.
Now, y’all know me — I love quotes. So I’m going to come back to one of the lines that Matthew brought up briefly earlier in this episode, where Talon is saying something like, Maul, I would never join you, I still believe in the Jedi principles. And he says to her, “You’re operating under the premise that I am somehow the villain here, but it is not as simple as good and evil.” And he proceeds to talk about how the world has changed. The Jedi have fallen. Clearly what they were doing was not working. The Republic has fallen. Things are changing, times are changing. And he keeps telling her, you need to adapt, you need to grow, you need to change the ways you were taught as a child — that isn’t going to work anymore. And I need you to see this is basically his thought process. Except — he obviously wants to use her. He literally says, and I think she could hear him when he said this, but he says to the Mandalorian that works with him: I will mold her into something so powerful that will help us destroy my enemies. So obviously he does not have good intentions. But I think this character — Talon or whoever she is — may be a little idealistic, as anyone is who just follows the Jedi code blindly, especially after Order 66.
And I think, as we mentioned early in the first episode, we see her try to steal something after her master tells her not to. But she specifically told her master: you need to eat. So I take it as she wasn’t just stealing for herself, but also for her master and their survival. So clearly she’s willing to bend the Jedi rules to survive — she’s done some adapting. And I think Maul kind of recognizes that. He’s like, okay, if you’re a Jedi, why are you in prison? You clearly did something wrong to some extent. So I think he’s grasped onto that — something within this person’s core is already shaken if they ended up here. And he can probably sense through the Force that she has some uncertainty in her, which is exactly what he would be looking for.
So I’m very curious to see whether she turns, whether this character is Darth Talon, whether maybe she will join and have a redemption arc at the end of the series. But I’m very curious to see where this is going. The character is shaping up to be quite interesting. So I’m really excited for this show.
On that note, I have got to get going. Thanks for being here, y’all. Thanks for listening to the Star Wars Generations Podcast. And it is not as simple as good and evil. Guys, just go watch the episode yourself — I can’t do a Sam Witwer impression. Anyways, bye.
