I think it’s telling that both the Legends continuity and the Disney continuity of the Star Wars franchise both saw it fit to bring Darth Maul back from the dead. He was undoubtedly an imposing character. His lines were generic, sure, but Ray Park provided him with some great physical acting. He also got great makeup, great choreography, and a cool lightsaber. In the new canon, there’s a fair bit of him, but it’s spread among different shows and is difficult to track the whole way through. Now, though, he gets his own show to shine in, that being Maul: Shadow Lord on Disney Plus.
It’s only natural, I think, that the way Disney figured out how to let Darth Maul survive was to make him a crime lord. It’s a way of living that is both obviously cruel as well as opposing the power structure under which he lives. He can be cruel, raspy, imposing as he was in his appearance in The Phantom Menace, but with no need to follow pre-established rules on the nature of the Sith, nor any involving potential service to either side of the Clone Wars. This setup lets him be his own agent, beholden to only himself, free to be as ruthless as he can to entertain us.
One of this show’s strengths is its visual design. You are treated to a story set mostly in a single city on a single planet. The city has clear inspiration from Blade Runner with more obvious departures from reality. For an episode or two, I wondered if it were the same city planet as seen on a moon in The Mandalorian and Grogu but that turned out not to be the case. But as so many cities in science fiction are seen only at nighttime, advertisements glowing like gemstones against the dark, you also get to see the city in the day. It reminded me of some of the older parts of New York I’ve been to. Even better, you get a sense what it is like for the normal people of this city to live here. It seems to have a certain car (or speeder) dependence that makes commuting a chore, but it’s still a thing people not involved in high politics or crime experience - something that the Star Wars franchise historically has not been great about showing.
This is a crime show, and about half of it is a cop show. Other than Maul and his organization, the other major group of characters (barring an important duo) is this planet’s local constabulary. The investigator we follow, played by a suitably weary, suitably gruff Wagner Moura, is in some ways the platonic ideal of a cop show protagonist - divorced, teenage son, throws himself into his work in order to stay sane, but nevertheless with a moral core that will not let him take the easy way out of a morally difficult situation. Another character in the station is Two-Boots, a protocol droid adapted to police use whose programmed imperatives conflict with his own sense of duty.
In this section of the show, it will bring up inevitable comparisons to Andor. This isn’t Andor, and it was never going to be the deep dive into the nature of fascism that Tony Gilroy blessed us with. This show does, however, have its own element of commentary on the nature of imperialism that is hidden in the background, probably not intentional, and manifests itself in a way that may have simply been clumsy writing: whenever the Empire is mentioned, it is mentioned as a foreign entity, a thing that the characters very much do not identify themselves with. They don’t refer to the ISB, or any other named agency in the way that American cops in a mundane police drama may refer to the FBI, they refer to ‘the Empire’ as if they were not its own reluctant citizens.
This plotline, then, is an extended discussion of the nature of a political community. To play on an old Chinese saying: the galaxy is vast, and the Emperor is far away. The Empire, being a fundamentally personalist regime, cannot micromanage every city on every planet in every system in every sector. As such, it is easy for those who avoid attracting Coruscant’s attention to get away with a lot. The great mistake Two-Boots makes is assuming that the Empire exists to help people (and no I am not considering the Yuuzhan Vong here), and contacts Coruscant for assistance. The new Imperial presence spends its time terrorizing the city, caring far more about its sense of order rather than any actual care for the rights and livelihoods of its people. The commentary on the nature of fascism is rather blunt: these people are only using what ills you to gain power and to satisfy their own lust for domination. It is a lesson learned the hard way, both in this show and in our own world.
Maul’s operation and entourage, on the other hand, are not as rich. They are entertaining, certainly, pleasingly ruthless when dealing with other criminals who have crossed them. But just among them, and not their interactions with others, is rote: they are your typical space opera crime syndicate doing typical criminal things. This is where the connections to the broader franchise lore are the thickest, particularly near the end. It’s fun, yes, but it’s not particularly substantial. This segment of the story is the part most purely what people love Star Wars for, and it works on that level.
The other set of characters are two Jedi, master and apprentice, who happened to be on this world when Order 66 was issued and their comrades in the Order were duly felled. They are refugees, homeless, dispossessed by the change in regime and stranded on a world they barely know. To go on about their plight would spoil too much of what makes this story work as well as it does, but they are worth watching, too. They serve to reveal the nature of characters around them, for they elicit positive change in police characters and pure ruthlessness from Maul’s enterprise and from the Imperial forces that have come to impose their own will.
So, ultimately, no - Maul: Shadow Lord is not fundamentally another incisive commentary on the dangers of democratic backsliding. What it is is a fun space opera show with some thematic depth if you decide to dig in a bit. It is, satisfyingly, just a bit more than what we expected it to be, and I think, ultimately, that was enough. As a longtime Star Wars fan, I had fun with this show, and I think that other fans of this franchise will also have fun with it.
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POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy
