PT Darth Maul

That's not my point. When we said 'pawns' we meant 'expendable'. And everyone is expendable to Sidious, some more than others. Maul, Tyranus and Vader are the least expedable.

No. We don't know how the original plan would have played out, but it wasn't how it ended up being. Maul wasn't supposed to be killed. Sidious wouldn't waste his time training someone for so many years only to dispose of him. Tyranus was chosen as a replacement for Maul because he was already a fully trained Jedi Master and had influence and wealth that could be useful later on. Ten years later, it was. Vader replaced Tyranus because not only he had greater potential but because he was able to defeat Tyranus.

 

I think Maul is a classic example of style over substance, but I wouldn't look at him as just a mere pawn, and I like that he got a bit more fleshed out in the EU. Overall he is actually one of my favourite villains, but mainly because my inner 11 year old admires how much a badass he is and how cool he looks, so I'm willing to overlook his lack of character nuance.

 

Darth Maul was the perfect character to introduce us to the Sith.

He has the motifs that just screams evil...



Red and Black skin, the classic motif of bad, evil, blood, darkness, the devil.
Dressed in black.
Horns, hits on the motif that he is devil like.
Decaying teeth, because it is gross looking, the decaying nature of evil, of the Dark Side.
His facial expressions lead one to believe he is consumed with anger, a rabid attack dog that serves his master...

Just a classic bad guy.

However, he is a very superficial bad guy, that Sidious uses for a specific reason. To be his attack dog and to reveal the existence of the Sith to the Jedi.

These details lead me to believe that Maul's days as a Sith were numbered, even if he had survived his fight with Obi Wan and Qui-Gon on Naboo.

I feel this way because if you look at Sidious's plan, the events of TPM were only stage 1 and were only meant to get him into the Chancellor's seat. However, if you look at AOTC then we realize that in order for Sidious's plan to work, that being to start the Clone Wars, then Sidious had to have put that plan in motion about the same exact time as Maul died. We can come to that conclusion because it takes 10 years to grow a Clone, and AOTC is 10 years after the events of TPM. So Sidious obviously had the 2nd stage of his plan thought out and ready to roll.

So if Maul had survived Naboo, where does that leave him? He is ruled out as being any kind of political face for the Separatists, as he has been clearly seen on Naboo by many. So if he were to be the political face of the Seps, then the Jedi would obviously pick up right from the beginning that he is a Sith, and that the whole Seps thing was nothing but shenanigans.

Would Sidious keep maul and trust someone else, a non-sith with the details of his plan? Or would he get rid of Maul, to bring in Count Dooku anyway down the line?

I feel it would be the latter. Even though Sidious may not have planned for Maul to die when he did, I think Maul's usefulness was coming to an end anyway. I don't think Sidious cared much for how much time he put into Maul. If he felt Maul had surpassed his usefulness, I believe Sidious would have ditched Maul in less than a blackened heart beat.

Evidence? Look at Darth Vader. Sidious was mentoring, and teaching Anakin since he was a little boy. Sidious put a lot of time into Anakin, and once Anakin turns, Sidious continues to use him. So by the time of ESB/ROTJ Sidious has put approx 30 years into Anakin? Only to be willing to throw Anakin to the side in favor of replacing him with Luke.

So Sidious's loyalty to his apprentices is only based on how useful they are, and if something better comes along.

So I believe Maul's days were numbered either way post TPM.

 

One Of The Darth. And Proud (not to be a stuck-up Jedi)

 

I think Darth Maul should have remained dead. His appearance or "resurrection" in TCW was a big mistake in my eyes.

Dooku was a superb swordsman with the lightsaber. So in reality, both he and Anakin had a lot in common, aside from age and maybe temper.

 

I think they wanted say both Vader and Maul are physical forces that superior to even Jedi knights, while Dooku is not.

Even though, I disagree with that anyway, Maul is also master at the Force, that's how he survived the bisection, due to his mastery of the Force, Dooku probably couldn't do that.

''Darth Maul's first set of cybernetic legs were built on blind instinct and an all consuming rage. They were a terrifying creation, and horrifically effective, but were held together as much by Maul's mastery of the dark side of the Force as by his technical ability during their construction.''
Source: The Official Star Wars Fact File Remake #024 (2014)

 

Maul simply used the dark side of the Force, as he was trained to do. His rage and fear, that's what made him able to survive an otherwise deadly blow. Just like Vader on Mustafar.

 

I have always thought it would be better if Darth Maul was the main Sith apprentice thru the whole PT, and he would've escaped in TPM and AOTC and would've been the one Anakin would've killed in the beginning of ROTS. Then I would have had the leader of the CIS be some other politician that was privy to Sidious' plans, someone secretly loyal to the Sith.

I've always been iffy about the whole 'resurrection' concept in the TCW series-but I will admit I like what they did with the character after bringing him back.

 

He is one of my favourite Star Wars baddies. While he does look cool and Ray Park's choreography is amazing, I admit he is a little underdeveloped and uterlised in TPM. But TCW turns him into a truly fleshed out character. His arc in TCW and Rebels is one of the best in the franchise; it totally justifies the decision to bring him back.

 

I am absolutely 100% convinced that the reason Lucas brought Maul back was to set him up as the “big bad” in Lucas’ then-in-the-works sequel trilogy. Anyway.

 

I've long felt that George should not have killed off Maul in TPM. He should have been the Sith Apprentice throughout the PT until Anakin kills him in ROTS. I would have had Dooku remain a Jedi who left the order due to disillusionment with the direction, and the Separatist leader, etc, but not a Sith Lord.

 

I agree. I'm not sure if I would necessarily call it a mistake, but I never liked his return either. Even if some of the further content with him isn't half bad in itself.

It almost feels like Lucas second-guessed himself on that matter. After what happened with Boba Fett, it felt like Maul was cut in half on purpose, to make sure that he would be considered dead and gone with no chance of ever returning. No "he was wearing armor, so maybe he survived the Sarlacc", just straight up cut in half with no real space for any other outcome but death. Only to do a 180 and bringing him back in the animated shows. You can obviously change your mind on things, but I don't think this was needed in any way.

Maul had just the right role in TPM. The great fighter who takes down the Jedi Master, and who is then bested by Obi Wan on his path to knighthood. He was entirely unsuitable as Leader of the Seperatists, and lacked everything to be anything more than an enforcer-type to the cunning master. Granted, you could make a case that Palpatine having raised him the entire time only to stab him in the back to gain Anakin could have been an interesting story as well, but he doesn't really fit to anything else that was going on. You also can't have the same Sith run around unconstested, as it makes the Sith seem too infallible, and the Jedi too incompetent, cheapening the rise of the Sith once it actually happens. Needing Palpatine to adapt to the circumstances and still pulling everything off smoothly, while the Jedi have some temporary successes against the Sith, works much better than them constantly being a few steps behind. TPM was to give the impression that the good guys prevailed and evil faced a setback. That doesn't happen when a Jedi Master dies and the Sith Apprentice lives.

 

Maul was great in TPM and I wish he didn't die in 'TPM and emerge in clone wars (even I have not seen the full seasons of TCW ) I would like him to be alive till the AOTC and be with Count Dooku in AOTC.

 

Yes - more scenes in TPM but I agree that he wouldnt have made a good "top" villain. He looks cool, probably cooler than any other Sith ever. But, there was no development of the character at all. He was just a damned cool looking dude with a dual saber that added to already big pile of coolness. He's like Boba Fett: A few quick scenes but the guy became like a huge "hit" with fans.

As for Mauls TCW comeback? Sorry, didnt work for me. Star Wars is going to the "regurgitation" well far too often. Fett, Maul & of course Palpatine in my most hated Star Wars film, Rise of Skywalker. Meh! I hate it.

 

I don't know why you think the Sith apprentice should've been the leader of the Seperatist movement, the first Sith apprentice we've seen; Vader wasn't a political leader, he was a military leader and that was the core of Star Wars. As we've seen in TCW, Maul appointed a puppet ruler (Almec) for the planet Mandalore. It could've been the same for the Seperatist movement, Maul could've appointed a politician as the leader of separatist movement and do his own thing behind closed doors.

On the contrary, the Sith apprentice is openly being the face of the Separatist movement was a bad idea. The Sith should've worked in secrecy, and the Sith apprentice should've been more than just a politician, it should've been a scheming mastermind, who plans behind closed doors, if the things goes bad, the Sith can blame the puppet ruler for the failures and start over again with a new puppet ruler.

If the point was to show the Jedi wasn't that incompetent, then making a former Jedi Master, as the leader of Seperatist movement and the new Sith apprentice heavily contradicts with this idea. That's even worse than having the same villain in the next movie, at least you could make a case that the Sith can't seduce other Jedi Knights, and the Sith are limited, and they needed Anakin to win, other Jedi wouldn't do it, but they did, it's even worse.

If the idea was that if Maul survived and appeared in AotC, the Jedi would look incompetent, then I would ask this; did they not look even more incompetent when a Jedi Master that they trusted (perhaps not only Dooku, Sifo-Dyas as well, a member of the Jedi Council, two Jedi) working for the Sith?

So I think they didn't care about this.

I think the idea was ''hyping'' Obi-Wan Kenobi, since why Kenobi should be special in comparison with other Jedi? Anakin was the ''chosen one'', has highest midichlorian number, how can you make Obi-Wan special when there are hundreds of other Jedi Knights available, and why we were watching Obi-Wan's story?

Because Obi-Wan defeated a Sith Lord (even though it was a cheap-shot when Maul lowered his guard and toying with Kenobi after disarming him in the pit), that's what made Obi-Wan special. So why Maul could return after some point? Because Obi-Wan didn't need that win anymore, he already defeated Grievous, and Vader in Episode III (2005), thus they see no problem with Maul's return in TCW TV Show (2012) after that point. Then the producer Dave Filoni even decided to give that win back to Obi-Wan in the Rebels TV Show, still he wasn't satisfied about it, and he probably considered that Maul defeated Obi-Wan in the TCW TV Show, so obviously they cared about this ''win'' thing, thus they go far enough to make Maul find Obi-Wan on Tatooine desert, and made them fight again after almost 30 years later.

That was the thing that they cared about, and I think that was the perspective of the producers on why they killed Maul, then brought him back later.

I don't think Maul's return in Episode II would jeopardize Obi-Wan's ''hype'', Obi-Wan already won in Episode I, and we know how he won; via cheap-shot, Maul was clearly a better fighter, he even fought both Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon at the same time and nearly-killed both. I don't think Maul's return would damage Obi-Wan in Episode II, Obi-Wan again lost against another Sith lord, but this time that Sith Lord was a former Jedi, a Jedi that they trusted, which make Jedi Order look like even more incompetent in my opinion.

 

I think Maul surviving wouldn’t have worked as well. Maul being defeated shows Palpatine replacing one apprentice with another. This sets up Palpatine replacing Dooku with Vader, and later him trying to replace Vader with Luke.

 

Vader got defeated twice (Episode III and Episode IV), he wasn't replaced by anyone.

Dooku got defeated and got captured several times in the TCW TV show, and still wasn't replaced by anyone until Episode III.

I don't know why being defeated means should be replaced immediately, when we already know other apprentices wasn't replaced when they were also defeated.

If Obi-Wan was a replacement for Maul after defeating him, then yes, Obi-Wan might have replaced Maul as the new Sith apprentice, but we know that would never happen since Obi-Wan would never join the Sith. Anakin replaced Dooku after defeating him, or Luke might have replaced Vader after defeating him. But Dooku never defeated Maul and never replaced him like that, so even that never happened.

Traditionally, Anakin should've killed Maul and replace him, or at least Dooku should've killed Maul replaced him. Which is why Obi-Wan killing Maul doesn't even work for the story about how Anakin or Dooku replaced their predecessors, that was unusual for the story. Even Sidious tells us that he killed Plagueis and become the master. Luke was going to replace Vader if he killed him, when Luke refused, Vader again went to being Sidious's apprentice like nothing happened until he decided to betray Sidious and turn to the light side.

This could be another reason why they felt they didn't kill Maul with the right way, and gave him more screen time in TV Shows, and made him challenge Sidious by being a rival Sith and having his own Sith apprentice Savage.

 

Why do people always underestimate or try to underestimate Count Dooku? Because he was old? Because he was a former Jedi Master?

Never say never. Obi-Wan was capable of becoming a Sith Lord, like any other member of the Jedi Order. And like any other sentient being, Obi-Wan was capable of giving in to evil.

 

If Sidious found himself without Vader, or if Vader was deemed dead (which is what happened in TPM with Maul), he would replace him. That's the point Yubnub is making.

 

Not underestimating him, it's just Maul is a different breed, more like Sidious, from his young age he is perfectly trained in the arts of the Sith, not only in the arts of the Jedi.

Maul took a sedative that is powerful enough to make a Rancor to go sleep, and he resisted the side effects of the sedative and shattered his chains by using the Dark Side of the Force.

Never in a context that is almost impossible, of course it's possible, but we know it's not going to happen. Because Obi-Wan was perfectly trained by Qui-Gon Jinn and Yoda, and he never showed any signs to have a potential in the dark side, his potential was in the light side.

I thought we were talking about a different scenario where Maul appears in Episode II (like he appeared in TCW TV Show), without changing anything from Episode I.

 

In The Star Wars Archives: 1999 - 2005, quotes attributed to George Lucas reveal big plans for Darth Maul in George’s vision for the Sequel Trilogy.

 

Um, because that is the actual story?
None of this has anything to do with what I think the story should be, it is about what the story is. And what it requires is for a Sith Apprentice to lead the Seperatists so that Palpatine can have his fake civil war that grands him all the powers and the army he needs. For that you need a cunning person with the necessary standing to rally people, and that is Dooku, not Maul or some sort of politician.

What one person thinks is or isn't a bad idea isn't relevant either.
A Sith wasn't openly being the face of the Seperatists. Dooku being a darksider only came out when things were already rolling, not right from the get go. And even then it wasn't clear yet whether he was actually a Sith or simply someone who had fallen on his own. You also need this possible threat of a Sith maybe being behind the Seperatists, because the entire point of the war is to get the Jedi involved. A prolonged war makes their numbers dwindle, and exposes them to the clone army, which can then proceed to kill them at the right time. This doesn't happen if they don't draw a connection between the Seperatists and the darkside.

I'm not sure why you say that Dooku wasn't the right choice, and that Maul should have been kept, only to proceed to suggest that the apprentice should have been a scheming mastermind. That is everything Dooku is and Maul isn't. Dooku was a schemer, Maul was a fighter. As a Sith Master, you also don't want your apprentice to be too much of a schemer, because you don't want him to put his own plans above yours. Else you risk end up being dead. Therefore, a schemer like Dooku, who is still a few steps behind Palpatine, is just the right way to go.

A Jedi Master leaving the order doesn't make the Jedi look incompetent. It just shows that there are always differences in opinion, even among the Jedi.

None of that even matters though, because this is about TPM. What happens afterwards has no bearing whatsoever, because it hasn't happened yet. Future events that Lucas hadn't even thought of yet couldn't possibly be used to judge TPM at the time it came out. TPM itself needs to represent what it is supposed to represent. You cannot have TPM, the movie that is supposed to end on a positive note and everything going mostly fine, with the good guys having failed in almost every way. Maul is a disposable villain, someone threatening who could also be used to give the heroes some form of success. He played that role in TPM and it worked exactly like it was supposed to. There was nothing more to be gained from that, just like you didn't need to bring back Tarkin after ANH.

Moving beyond that, not being able to bring down even a single Sith does make one look far more incompetent than not exactly knowing what a former Jedi Master who had left the Order some time ago was up to.

 

If you look at starwars . com, it specifically says Maul is a scheming mastermind.

https://www.starwars.com/databank/darth-maul

Even in Episode I, he demonstrated that in a very short time, he was trained by Sidious after all.

''Maul knew the power of ambush and of theatre. He predicted the route Amidala and her Jedi guardians would take, patiently waited to ambush them. His sudden appearance had the desired effect, unsettling the Queen, distrupting her plans, and drawing off the two Jedi.''
Source: The Official Star Wars Fact File Remake #061 (2015)

Differences in opinion is like Qui-Gon having one, disagreeing with the Jedi Council's decisions openly most of the time,

Leaving the Jedi Order can be also accepted as one,

However, secretly working for the Sith, trying to sabotage Jedi Order's library by deleting information, trying to get another Jedi Master (Sifo-Dyas) get killed, is beyond that.

 

Maul is beyond Dooku, its not even debatable at this stage in the game.





Adolescent Maul was already remarkable and naturally strong in the Force and even without professional training, had already on his own began to control and use his powers. Without training he Force choked his enemies to death like a Sith Lord. Sidious would choose Maul over Talzin, because he was stronger and more powerful than her. He saw in the child, what even his mother could not at the time as she was blinded by her own greed and lust for power, and so Sidious found his Sith Apprentice. Maul was also naturally Light-Side aligned before Sidious found him in Talzin's home.


"I see that you have taken to your lessons well. A most promising start. The force is strong in you, and so, too, is the fire of hate. You, child, shall serve as my apprentice.”

(...)

"the boy has inherited your talents… and so much more. You have done well to provide me with such a remarkable candidate."- Darth Sidious



- An Unwilling Apprentice Written by George Mann

 

Which stage is that and what game?