General Star Wars Animated Series

I loved that fight, because it actually does make sense with Dooku's advice. He's an unknown threat that the Jedi are unprepared for, and cannot hope to counter. He's a badass, and it's awesome to see.

So I've just reached the end of season four and Darth Maul's return. If I understand correctly, given what we've seen so far, he survived being cut in half ("how" is not really explained, possibly due to his dark side of the Force abilities? He says his hate kept him alive), ended up on the trash planet (I'm guessing Naboo dumps its trash there) and slowly lost his mind, becoming the "rabid animal" he describes himself as to Savage. Mother Talzin cures his insanity and restores his physical condition.

Apart from getting over the hurdle of believing someone can live through being sliced in half, I like it. The potential of the character was never fully realized in TPM, and I liked him quite a bit and was sorry to see him killed off, so I don't mind a chance to more fully explore who Maul is.

The idea that he was in on the plan for the Clone Wars is interesting too... what role would he have played? Would he have been in the place of Grievous, leading the droid armies? I can't see him leading the separatist political movement like Count Dooku. "A former apprentice to "the most powerful being in the galaxy" who was left for dead and replaced, watching all that he was supposed to be a part of going on without him" is an interesting hook for a character. I'm enthused.

The Dark Side of the Force is a pathway to many abilities some consider to be unnatural.

The Dark Side is powered by strong emotions (generally negative ones). Maul has never hated anything the way he hates Obi-Wan Kenobi after being cut in half. Losing the lower half of your body does not fall under the Chunky Salsa Rule. Ergo, Maul’s survival is unexpected, but explainable.

Also, after you watch Season 5, you’ll reconsider your thoughts on Dooku taking Maul’s role in the plan.

Also, Maul's situation of just being too angry to die parallels Darth Scion from Kotor 2. While he was never cut in half, he managed to smuggle himself onto a mining station because everyone assumed he was a corpse, medical scans showed him as having multiple lethal injuries, and the only way to finally defeat him is to calm him down and get him to accept his death.

So yeah. The Dark Side can totally do that.

I just finished season four too. I'm a bit less positive about Maul's return, though. Like, at first, I was all, "Huh. This seems like an interesting opportunity to flesh him out." And then...well....

• Drake: So this is it. We're finally going to see Maul's return. I am so ready for some flashbacks about how he survived and some interesting development of where he—
• Maul: I'M BACK AND I'M A CRAZY SPIDER PERSON RAAARGH EAT EAT KILL EAT MUNCH
• Drake: Okay. You know what, I'll take it. Feral spider monster person is a bit of a lateral move from stoic nonsense-person who exists just to fight, so it's not exactly disrespectful to the complete lack of character he had before.
• Night Mother: With my Space Magic, I have unmade the crazy spider person and turned you back into the exact person you were before!
• Drake: Wait, what? Then what was the point of the spider person bit? If we're just going to undo it five seconds later, why even put that in the show?
• Darth Maul: Hark and forsooth, I awaken as the exact person I was in Phantom Menace! I am super eloquent and will never stop talking for even two minutes in my soft and weirdly kinda sensitive voice! Hither and beware, Jedi, for it is from me that yon threat emerges!
• Drake: ...what is happening right now....
• Savage: So now we get down to the bad guy stuff, right?
• Drake: Oh, that's right! This is your chance to actually have a personality and show us what you're about. So, now that you're back, what are your motives and goals as a person after all?
• Darth Maul: I will have REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEVEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEENGE!!!
• Drake: ....
• Darth Maul: Come with me. We will do pointless generic bad guy shit for the sake of drawing out OBI-WAN KENOBI. Then, I will KILL OBI-WAN KENOBI. This will be my revenge against him for stopping me from KILLING OBI-WAN KENOBI!!!
• Drake: Oh, for f*ck's sake.
• Darth Maul: EVIL EVIL REVENGE EVIL FORSOOTH

They took a villain from the worst movie in the trilogy and actually made him stupider. This is a nonsense character. It's like somebody just mandated that Maul be put in the show and nobody really cared how or why.

He's a cartoon villain flying into the distance, shaking his fist and going "I'LL GET YOU, KENOBI!!!" No motive. No personality. Weirdly eloquent about his complete lack of actual goals or agenda. He's just The Revenge Villain.

I've often said that revenge against whoever defeated him is the lazy writer's motivation for bullshitting a villain into a story without giving them any actual reason to be there. Darth Maul's return has successfully lived down to that claim.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Aug 8th 2018 at 12:44:00 PM

He gets better, arguably. The Shadow Collective and Mandalore Arcs are pretty darn good Villain Protagonist stories.

He does not, however, ever shake the Obi-Wan vengeance obsession, even all the way into Rebels, though Rebels does make it clear that he's pursuing Obi-Wan mostly because he's become a pathetic shell who feels he has nothing worthwhile left but revenge.

Edited by KnownUnknown on Aug 8th 2018 at 11:45:33 AM

Do they ever explain how, after being cut in half, he managed to

• Turn into a ravenous crazy person.
• Build a spider robot body to serve as as a prosthetic lower half.
• Board a ship to fly to a distant world somewhere across the galaxy as either a torso or a spider-cyborg.

And in what order those things occurred? Like, I have to assume he built the robot spider prosthetic before he was a crazy man, but how he boarded a ship to leave Naboo and why he'd come here on purpose is beyond me.

Yes I was severely disappointed by series 4's Maul too. Its like they had no interest on building atop what existed in canon before, so they just created a wholly new character and just gave him Maul's skin.

I much prefer him in Rebels where its clear his enemy is (logically) the Sith who forced him into this path.

They don't, because they were an excuse plot to establish he is still alive, and thus cease to be relevant to his character going forward.

He was taken there with Naboo’s garbage, he attracted bits of junk to make the spider legs, and living like that for 12 years is why he was insane.

Easy.

So he was lucid and intelligent enough to build robot spider legs out of bits of junk, but not lucid and intelligent enough to ever try to escape the planet?

Or was he just like, "Meh. I guess this is just my life now."

The deal he had with the snake was that the snake was bringing him people to eat and then the snake ate the leftovers. So. He seems to have been pretty okay with settling into a hole in a trash world and living out the rest of his days as a spider zombie.

That seems weird to me. Like. If it's a trash planet, then presumably ships bring trash. You could make a plan to hitch a ride on one of those. And then not be a spider zombie for twelve years.

There are explicitly other people on the planet. Enough for the snake's deal to be reasonably profitable for the snake. You could talk to them. Figure out a way to get off the planet. And then not be a spider zombie for twelve years.

I don't know. It feels like Darth Maul had options that went unexplored in favor of spider zombie. If being a spider zombie was just what he wanted to do with his life, then sure. But the fact that he stops wanting to be a spider zombie as soon as the Night Mother fixes his brain makes that unlikely.

I really want to know how Darth Maul went from a bisected torso on Naboo to Trash World Spider Zombie.

EDIT: Watching the season five premiere and it's actually really funny how belligerently not the stoic violence-beast from Phantom Menace this character is.

"I have plans, Kenobi. And you will not stand in my way!" Dude can't stop talking for five seconds and just stab a f*cker. He is compelled to exposit his every thought and feeling. He's cunning and manipulative and just wants so badly to have a conversation with everyone he meets.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Aug 8th 2018 at 1:33:44 PM

I always figured some poor good Samaritan found him and repaired him, but got murdered by a berserk Maul who then escaped and went Gollum on junkworld.

Wookiepedia says he "had his legs replaced" (which could mean a lot of things) but couldn't escape junkworld (reasons not given), and so went mad with helpless rage, which does imply that what BadWolf had it right. Though given the ease they were able to get off of junkworld (it's called Lotho Minor, but junkworld is more fun) once Savage showed up, I dunno.

Based on what we see, with people literally pushing junk out of their cargo bays without landing to avoid the hostile inhabitants, I think it makes plenty of sense for it to be difficult for someone to get on a ship and escape-especially for an unstable rage monster who has not had a coherent thought in years. Enticing a ship to land, or accurately predicting where one will make planetfall and getting there in time to overpower the owner is a level of planning that would have been beyond Maul at that time.

I mean Maul’s obsession with Obi-Wan makes sense.

His hatred of the guy is the only thing that’s kept him going all this time, of course the thing he wants most is another shot at him.

Yep. It's not about him being justified. It's just that his last thought as he was getting cut in half was "kill Obi-Wan Kenobi," so he clung to that and used the pain and anger to survive. Note that he finally dies peacefully in Obi-Wan's arms, believing that Luke will avenge both of them.

Reflecting on it, that line about Obi-Wan getting in the way of his plans is actually kinda funny. At least at this point, the only thing Darth Maul cares about is killing Obi-Wan. His plan is explicitly to do Generic Bad Guy Things until Obi-Wan shows up to stop him, then kill Obi-Wan.

So in the middle of fighting Obi-Wan, he's ranting at Obi-Wan that Obi-Wan cannot thwart his evil plan of coercing Obi-Wan to come fight him and then killing Obi-Wan.

At this point, Darth Maul's just shouting random Bad Guy Lines in the hopes of sounding menacing. What a complete waste of a once-threatening Scary Bad Guy.

Anyway, I'm on to the Onderan arc and holy shit, that's Saw Gerrera. I had no idea he existed prior to Rogue One. Huh.

I'm on the third episode and I really like how hard they subverted what looked to be a straight forward love quadrangle. At first I'm like, "Ahsoka, don't even. You're not even allowed to have a boyfriend. Let the guy be." But then she didn't and everyone got on pretty well, so I'm like, "Cool!" And then the second episode's like, "By the way, those two are siblings," and I'm like, "Oh! Even better!"

So. Yeah. That's neat. More importantly, the Jedi Order is training insurgents for a proxy war. This is the part of the show I live for: the gritty depiction of the ugliness of wartime. The Order's like, "We can't train terrorists," and Anakin's like, "They're NOT terrorists," even though they kind of are. And I'm thinking, like, Saw Gerrera's fighters are going to go from fighting Separatists to Imperials at some point so...birth of the Rebel Alliance? In a way?

In conclusion, Proxy war: super interesting. Anakin's enthusiasm: super concerning. Love Quadrangle: super defanged. Darth Maul: super ridiculous.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Aug 8th 2018 at 3:02:27 AM

Saw and Cham Syndulla never really stopped fighting-they just switched targets, with the support of Bail Organa, who supported them almost immediately after the Declaration of a New Order.

Edited by ViperMagnum357 on Aug 8th 2018 at 5:24:38 AM

Eh he’s still pretty menacing & threatening.

He’s quite positively deranged & went on an absolute bloodbath throughout the galaxy murdering so many people.

One of the most unsettling moments is when he decapitated a line of people onscreen. All he wants to do is just keep killing people till Obi-Wan shows up. That’s pretty fucking scary.

Edited by slimcoder on Aug 8th 2018 at 2:55:46 AM

His voice really doesn't sell "deranged". He's way too chatty, to the point that he stops fights so that he can talk some more. He's shooting for the sort of "dangerous beast-man" unpredictability, but he presents himself like a cool and calculating villain with a master plan.

But he doesn't have a master plan. He's just bullying Obi-Wan.

And it is bullying. He's not even out to kill Obi-Wan necessarily. There's a point in season four's finale where he and Savage are pounding a helpless Obi-Wan and Ventress distracts them. So naturally they shove one of the lightsabers they are holding in their hands as this is happening through Obi-Wan's face, then pursue her run off after her and leave Obi-Wan completely unattended and just trust that he won't do anything.

Like. If you're not actually going to commit to killing Obi-Wan, Maul, then what are you even doing here? Your only motivation is the shallow and stupid "VENGEANCE AGAINST MY HERO" scheme and you won't even take it when it's right in front of you, so what even are you?

And then she, the very person they forgot about Maul's vengeance to chase, shows up five seconds later to free Obi-Wan. Like. She seriously defeated Darth Maul with the "WHAT'S THAT OVER THERE" trick.

Darth Maul talks like a Chessmaster who won't shut up about his brilliant scheme and acts like a 12-year-old troll who just wants to giggle to himself about how he totes owned Obi-Wan on Twitter. The juxtaposition makes it impossible to take him seriously. And when he's like, "BUT I MURDERED PEOPLE," that just makes him a 12-year-old edgelord troll.

Lots of villains in this franchise have killed people. It's not special. This is literally a show about a war.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Aug 8th 2018 at 5:26:57 AM

He actually just wants to make Obi-Wan suffer, killing him is not enough. It’s why he leaves him alive after killing Sabine, as payback for the decade of torture & suffering he went though.

Sure people are killed but at least theirs the pretense of being in a war. Maul just butchers civilians without reason, it’s more a fighting chaos.

Edited by slimcoder on Aug 8th 2018 at 4:33:00 AM

No, he butchers them for a reason. He's on a personal crusade and they're a means to that end. Same reason why everyone else kills people.

It's just that Maul's reason is relatively shallow and kinda dumb compared to the much more interesting agendas floating around the show. "I want him to SUFFER" is the shitty excuse that The Revenge Villain always breaks out in each and every one of the fifty million incarnations he's had across Fiction Land to justify never actually taking revenge despite the fact that he has literally no other character or purpose in the story.

It's a writing cheat to make a lazy character's utter lack of depth or motivation work while still letting him win second act fights every now and then so that he doesn't start to look helpless. That way, when he flies into the distance crying, "I'll get you next time, KENOOOOOBIIIIIIII!!!" he can at least claim some small credibility because he's actually won a fight or two.

What it comes down to is a bad guy who is motivated solely by wanting to kill a good guy and will never actually do it when the opportunity presents itself, and thus is self-defeating by the entire concept of his character. He has one job that he gave himself and then belligerently refuses to actually do.

And this is why "revenge against the hero" is the lamest agenda a villain can possibly have. The point at which a villain's character becomes defined by "I'LL GET YOU NEXT TIME" is the point at which any actual sense of threat or menace they ever possessed gets jettisoned. The villain is now a satellite, existing solely to react to the hero's existence, having no personality or goals or purpose of his own. He's a mere thorn that crops up every now and then to prick the hero and then skip away giggling to himself, waiting for his next chance to poke again.

Sometimes he'll massacre a bunch of people or stuff the hero's girlfriend in a fridge or team up with a much more sinister villain to try and make himself look mean. But all of that is just a Band-Aid on the much greater problem that the Revenge Villain doesn't want anything or have any purpose of his own; he can only ever be a recurring thorn, never to achieve the one and only thing around which his whole existence revolves.

He's not scary. He's a pathetic and hollow shell of a one-dimensional character, where once a personality may have lived.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Aug 8th 2018 at 5:51:47 AM

That's just like, your opinion, man.

Wait what personality did he have in The Phantom Menace or anywhere else for that matter?

That one sentence literally just ruined your entire post.

Edited by slimcoder on Aug 8th 2018 at 7:28:43 AM

He was stoic.

Yes, it's not much. In fact, it's ridiculously shallow. An extremely low bar to hit. Which makes it truly astonishing that, in his haste to become The Revenge Villain, Maul utterly failed to maintain the one and only thing we knew about him.

There's basically only one thing that's memorable about Darth Maul in "The Phantom Menace" and that's the shutter fight. Qui-Gon peacefully meditating, waiting for the shutters to open. Maul pacing back and forth like a restless animal waiting for his chance to devour his prey.

Clone Wars Maul would have spent that time standing still and delivering a two-minute Shakespearean monologue that just sort of awkwardly drifts from one Stock Villain Line to the next. "Soon, Qui-Gon, you will meet your doom. Your doom is at hand, and I will be the one to deliver it. I will savor your doom as I destroy you, avenging the Sith upon the Jedi Order as swiftly as my blade strikes your neck. Prepare to die as soon as these shutters open, and know that I, Darth Maul, have delivered your undoing."

As someone else noted, he's basically a brand new character dressed up to look like Darth Maul. Having only one character trait in the original should, by all rights, not be difficult to improve upon. And yet Zombie Spider Darth Maul is actually a truer depiction of his character than the Night Mother's "corrected" version.

So, in short, rather than build on what little we already had about him, they tossed out his character from the film entirely for the sake of replacing it with a boring Stock Villain that's appeared in every cartoon and comic book ever made - who happens to look like Darth Maul.