Comics A/V Darth Maul: Son of Dathomir #1-4

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Bla... Maul is still alive :/ I thought the only reason for this story was to finally get him killed again.

 

Well, I guess it's over now. No more SoD comics. (excluding the Trade Paperback coming in October)

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Overall I enjoyed the read. I was hoping to get closure on Maul's story, but wasn't expecting it. I liked how it shed more light on Mother Talzin, and made Maul's survival more believable. As others have said, Maul still has control over Mandalore, I'm curious as to how the rest of his story plays out and can't wait for whenever it will be concluded.

On a related note; I always felt that having Grievous's cough since the beginning was a wasted opportunity, and there could have been an episode which showed how he got it. That wasted opportunity was right here:

 

And the end matter of #4 seems to suggest the TPB may use a different cover than we've seen advertised elsewhere:

 

I noticed they used that image in the back as well. That's actually a variant cover for the first issue, exclusive to Wizard World Atlanta. It is my favorite cover out of them all, so I hope they use it for the TPB. But they probably wont.

 

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I like Maul, and glad to see him alive. Also, you do not have to kill off a character to end their story. Maul is still out there, and they probably will tell more stories with him, but like Ahsoka, he got a proper send off. (I want to note, you do NOT have to kill characters off to seal their fates.)

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Sad to see Talzin will no longer be around, I like her. Other then Ventress, they are all wiped out. They were interesting, but at least we still have Ventress.

 

So this is only a 4 issue arc?

Geez, talk about a small trade paperback.

 

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Not according to writer Jeremy Barlow...
http://jedinews.co.uk/news/news.aspx?newsID=18156

 

I was really disappointed in this issue.

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Am I the only one who thought there would be some kind of closure to the Jedi’s hunt of Maul? The Jedi only list Grievous and Sidious as the remaining threats after Dooku in the beginning of ROTS, so they need to at least believe that Maul is dead even if he actually survived. Even a page of Sidious chopping a random Nightbrother in half and attaching robotic legs to him, then proclaiming to the Jedi as Chancellor Palpatine that they have found “Maul’s” body, the chancellor’s office will handle the investigation, etc. would have been better than the non-ending we got here.

I also would have liked to see Anakin take on Maul in canon at least once. It's been hinted at in TCW and the microseries that Anakin takes Qui-Gon's loss very hard. If he saw Maul, he wouldn't hold back. Yet it seems Lucasfilm/Disney long since designated Maul as Obi-Wan's nemesis, and don't even see the story possibilities in Anakin facing him down. Even just including Anakin in issue 3's Jedi strike force would have been interesting to see, even if any actual battle between the two ends non-conclusively.

I think the writers also missed a very obvious chance to explain what many fans and myself have been wondering--why Maul does not out Sidious as Palpatine to the Jedi. At the end of 'The Lawless' and the beginning of 'Son of Dathomir' it seemed like, with Savage Opress dead, Maul had nothing to lose and wouldn't pull punches when it came to dealing with Sidious. And yet Maul continued to pull the obvious and most damaging punch of all by keeping the Palpatine=Sidious knowledge to himself.

It's shown in TCW's "The Disappeared" that Mace Windu is unfamiliar with Talzin, and it's implied that the Nightsisters are barely worthy of their notice (I don't recall the Jedi actively investigating them at all in TCW, but I could be wrong). It becomes apparent over the course of 'Son of Dathomir' that Maul does have something to lose, and that he is protective of Talzin, who is revealed to be his mother. A few lines by Maul stating that exposing Sidious to the Jedi would put his mother at risk (i.e. once the Jedi investigate Sidious after finding out his Palpatine identity, they would learn of Sidious' connection to Talzin and start hunting her) would go a long way to explaining why Maul doesn't put Sidious on the defensive by exposing his identity to the Jedi.

I appreciate what the writers were trying to do in this comic, but I just think these story points could have been handled better.

 

Very cool idea. I agree that would have been something really interesting, and been some nice character development for Maul.

 

Is the fate of Maul's Mandalorians mentioned?

 

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No resolution on that front whatsoever. Maul and Rook Kast escape Dathomir, while Gar Saxon's fate (and that of the rest of the Death Watch) is undetermined.

 

I knew the cockpit looked different.

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So, my understanding of Talzin's master plan is that she resurrected Maul in order to get back at Sidious for not sharing power (basically stealing her son to conquer the galaxy with instead of her). Maul is Talzin's pawn. But how literally? In issue #1 Sidious says, "The fact that Maul lives is proof enough that Grievous failed to destroy [Talzin]". Does this mean that Talzin resurrected Maul via her unnatural vampiric Force-stealing shtick, and he is dependent on her to survive? (I know that this is Legends now, but, you know, Nightsister zombies are canon.) Will Maul even survive Talzin's destruction? Will he go into a catatonic state to be used later? Am I reading too much into a bad script?

 

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Something Maul said was along the lines of Talzin sacrificing to revive him... so Obi Wan did kill him? I find it better to blame it on magicks than thirst for revenge or advanced medicine. That was good for me.

Now the gotta adapt Kenobi as a spinoff film, with Old Wounds as post-credits scene.

And as usual, Palpatine had foreseen it and everything is going according to his plan.

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it means more... diversity

 

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Talzin donated some of her own life energy to bring Maul back from the brink. That's why in The Disappeared Part II she periodically fades out of existence--because she needs Living Force from the Bardottans to keep herself together after expending so much of it. When she's robbed of that source of power she can't maintain her physical form and dissolves.

When Talzin steals enough life energy from Dooku, she is able to re-build her physical body. (This may explain why Dooku is so weak when he duels Anakin in RotS.) So the life energy that Talzin gave Maul is still inside of him--and he even offers to give it back to her during the battle. There's a different between being completely dead and temporarily reanimated with magic (like the zombies) and being half-dead and brought back to health with someone else's life energy, so I think Maul will be just fine.

It's too bad we didn't get these in animated form, because no doubt there would be some sort of clarification on the online episode guides.

 

Well I'm glad we got this and I wish it had been animated since it ties up the Talzin arc & clears up some things about her. But it also makes me appreciate that TCW was not going to wind up any time soon and there really wasn't a strong exit point so I'm less sad about it being pulled. I have to reread these before I judge them though there was a lot going on.

 

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We don't know how dead Maul was when Talzin found him. As long as she got his brain and body to work again, why couldn't he have been deader than dirt?

To repeat the Harry Potter analogy (acknowledging that it's getting a bit tired), if Maul is a Horcrux, Talzin can come back as long as he lives. I hope that's not true.

 

Interesting theories for why Maul and Dooku's power levels could have fluctuated so much... I like it.

And I agree that it's a shame this wasn't animated... it'd have made such a cool set of episodes. Alas, TCW reminds me of all the cartoons I never got endings for due to cancellations back when I was a kid...

 

Well, I for one am very glad that

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Grievous got to properly finish the job he started way back in "Massacre".



General Grievous: Witch Hunter

 

"Oh look, I've been impaled."

 

Guess there is some truth to the Legend.

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Silly Grievous, hadn't he learned you need to target the hat?

 

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So this is something Talzin is supposed to have done after TPM, before "Brothers"? Or is it somehow intended to work as a reference to what Talzin does in "Revenge"?

 

Still hate this but this explanation might work.

 

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It could be both, I guess. It hadn't crossed my mind that Maul could be referring to that absurd scene in Revenge because he said "resurrected" (and because I guess I've suppressed that scene in order to keep liking Star Wars). Besides that, Talzin was already acting like a ghost in Massacre.

 

I imagine that in a resigned monotone. And it's hilarious.