With the release of Maul - Shadow Lord on Disney+, Lucasfilm has carved a new path for Star Wars media and has opened new doors that the franchise has never stepped through. Maul - Shadow Lord just released its two-part finale on Disney+ on Monday, May 4 (Star Wars Day), and it was met with an incredible reception from fans and critics. Maul actor Sam Witwer revealed that Lucasfilm president Dave Filoni demanded that the creative team behind Shadow Lord raise the bar for Star Wars animation and storytelling, and the final product absolutely succeeded in doing that.
Star Wars animation has been a major part of the franchise since The Clone Wars began airing in 2008. However, it has become an even larger part of the galaxy far, far away since Disney acquired Lucasfilm from George Lucas in 2012. For the most part, the animated Star Wars stories have been largely the same in terms of tone, art style, acting, etc., and they seemingly have all been primarily geared towards children.
However, Maul - Shadow Lord flipped the script in every aspect. It took risks that no other animated series has ever taken and made home run level swings that could have easily missed the mark. Luckily for Lucasfilm, Disney, and Star Wars fans, Shadow Lord made pure contact and hit that home run. In more ways than one, though, it actually knocked the ball out of the park and rewrote the rules for Star Wars.
Maul - Shadow Lord Proved Serialized Storytelling Works Best in Star Wars Animation
Many Star Wars fans will tell anyone that a lot of the animated content is great. The Clone Wars was a huge success and did a great job at improving the prequel trilogy. Star Wars Rebels helped bridge the gap between the prequel trilogy and the original trilogy while getting fans familiar with new characters. The Tales stories have been fun shorts that give certain characters a bit more substance. Also, no one can forget The Bad Batch, which continued to humanize clones while exploring the horrors of war that real military members and veterans face.
However, if fans were to come up with one negative that all of those shows have in common, it would likely be that they had a mission-of-the-week structure where each episode or small arc was mostly comprised of an unimportant side quest with a bit of overarching plot mixed in. Maul - Shadow Lord does not follow that mold whatsoever.
The recent Disney+ series picked one narrative strand for each group of characters and slowly wove them together throughout the ten episodes. There was no filler, no downtime, and nothing insignificant happened throughout the show.
Even live-action Star Wars shows, such as The Mandalorian, felt almost like an anthology at certain points, but Shadow Lord took an approach more similar to Andor. Everything connected and was building toward the same climax.
This style of storytelling is not something Star Wars animation has really ever done, and that is absolutely a good thing. It was time for that mold to be broken, and Shadow Lord did it with flying colors.
Maul - Shadow Lord Is Not a Kid's Show
George Lucas always made it perfectly clear that Star Wars was a franchise mostly geared toward children. Yes, adults could still enjoy the content, but the target demographic was always kids. Disney has been going away from that, especially as time has gone on. For example, Andor is absolutely not a show for the younger generation because of its themes, complex writing, and mature content. Now, Shadow Lord has followed in its footsteps.
Shadow Lord is definitely more accessible for kids than Andor because it doesn't have that same mature content, and since its writing is a bit simpler. However, Shadow Lord still conveys some extremely heavy themes that children likely would not understand.
For example, a lot of Maul's character arc in his self-titled series centers around his own personal trauma, and how that trauma continues to show its teeth to him years after he has experienced it. The show's main plotline has also revolved around its protagonist (Maul) trying to psychologically coax a literal child (Devon) into giving in to the worst parts of herself and turn evil.
On top of that, Shadow Lord is simply much darker than 90% of Star Wars projects, and leaves some horrifying moments to the viewers' imagination (such as the scratch marks on the table after Marrok "interrogates" Chief Klyce. A lot of the trademarked Star Wars humor that is often all throughout the animated shows was stripped away.
Other animated Star Wars titles dipped their toes into mature territory. The later seasons of The Clone Wars were definitely a bit more extreme than the earlier ones, but it never stopped being a kids' show. Shadow Lord is an adult show through and through, and because of its success, fans could see more mature animated projects in the future.
Maul - Shadow Lord's "Hero" Is a Murderous Villain
Shadow Lord doesn't necessarily paint its titular character as a good guy, but the majority of the series presents him as the protagonist. Everything is seen through his, Devon's, or Captain Lawson's point of view. The latter two would be more traditional protagonists in a story where good is going up against evil, but that is not what Maul - Shadow Lord is doing.
So, the majority of the focus, for the first time in Star Wars history, is on a proven villain. As mentioned, it doesn't try to make him seem like a hero deep down, but it does make the audience feel sympathetic toward him, at least in certain circumstances.
While it is a big change for the villain to be the protagonist of a series, what makes Shadow Lord stand out even more is the fact that one of its other two main protagonists, Devon, ends up succumbing to her rage and anger at the end of the season and openly admitting she wants to be trained by Maul and learn the ways of the Dark Side to enact her revenge.
So, one protagonist is already a villain, the second protagonist essentially becomes a villain by the end of the series, and then the third protagonist (Lawson) gets killed. There is really no other way to put it than to say that Maul - Shadow Lord does not have the good guys win, and it is absolutely not a feel-good tale from the galaxy far, far away.
Star Wars has created stories where the heroes lose. The Empire Strikes Back saw Luke lose to Darth Vader, Han Solo get frozen in carbonite, and the Rebel Alliance be pushed back into a corner. However, at the end, when Luke and Leia look out toward the stars and Lando Calrissian says he and Chewbacca are going to get Han back, there is still a feeling of hope for the movie's heroes.
There is no feeling of hope at the end of Shadow Lord, and that was entirely intentional. The only Star Wars title that is comparable to Shadow Lord in those terms is Revenge of the Sith. The finaly act of that movie is extremely dark and the bad guys win. However, fans at least know where the story goes from there, and they did even when it was released in 2005. Since the original trilogy came out before the prequels, everyone was well aware that the Emperor would die, the light inside Vader would win out, and that there would be a happy ending.
No one knows how Shadow Lord is going to end. There isn't at least that reassurance of knowing that something good will happen in the end. For all fans know, since Maul doesn't have an apprentice in Rebels, Devon could die.
Maul - Shadow Lord has changed the nature of Star Wars in many different ways. Since it has been so successful and fans are viewing it as some of the best content to ever come from the franchise, it would not be surprising at all if some of the future projects try to model themselves after Shadow Lord.
