Ever since his debut in The Phantom Menace, Darth Maul has become one of Star Wars' most
iconic villains, but his tale stretches far beyond that one movie. From his sinister origins
to his final duel, this is the story of Darth Maul.
The child who would eventually become Darth Maul was born on the planet Dathomir, a world
controlled by a matriarchal order of dark side Force users known as the Nightsisters.
Maul grew up in a tribe ruled by the ferocious Mother Talzin. Talzin planned for her three
sons to become Nightbrothers, the all-male warriors who protect and serve the Nightsisters.
But all that changed on the day that Darth Sidious came to Dathomir.
As part of his plan for galactic domination, Sidious wished to learn more of the dark side
from the Nightsisters. After working with Mother Talzin for a time, Sidious was impressed
by her abilities and offered to take her on as his new apprentice. But he never did.
Instead, Sidious kidnapped one of Talzin's sons and vanished from Dathomir. He not only
sensed great potential in the boy, but also wanted an apprentice that he could control
completely. Whatever this child's birth name was, it's now lost to history, as Sidious
renamed him Maul.
Sidious' brainwashing of Darth Maul was successful, and he grew up to be a formidable Sith warrior.
Due to his tremendous skill, Maul was also impatient for the time when he would finally
get the chance to fight a Jedi. But because Sidious didn't want to reveal the Sith Order's
reemergence until the last possible moment, he forbade Maul from doing so.
Despite this, Maul soon learns of a Jedi Padawan named Eldra Kaitis who has been captured by
a criminal cartel. Maul decides to ignore his master's orders to remain hidden, and
travels to the auction where Kaitis is being sold as a slave. After a series of misadventures,
Maul manages to rescue Kaitis from captivity, only to then challenge her to a duel. In the
end, even though Kaitis fights valiantly, Maul defeats and kills her.
After Darth Maul returns to his master, he suspects that Sidious will be upset with him
for his disobedience. But Sidious congratulates him, telling him that the Sith were born in
defiance, and that Maul has embraced the very nature of their order. Darth Sidious asks
his apprentice if his bloodlust has been sated by this, and Maul tells him that it has not.
Sidious replies: "Good."
After years of planning, Darth Sidious finally sets in motion his plan for galactic domination.
Unfortunately, Queen Amidala of Naboo and two troublesome Jedi begin mucking up Sidious'
carefully laid plans. Sidious dispatches Maul to track them down, and, after a brief encounter
on Tatooine, they finally come to blows in the royal palace on Naboo.
Since Maul is outnumbered, he decides to separate his two foes, knocking Obi-Wan off a ledge
so that he can fight Qui-Gon uninterrupted. By the time Obi-Wan manages to reunite with
them, Darth Maul has stabbed Qui-Gon through the chest, killing him. Filled with rage,
Obi-Wan fights more fiercely than ever, and through some tricky, Force-assisted acrobatics,
manages to chop Maul in half, and send him tumbling down a seemingly bottomless shaft.
Kept alive by the sheer force of his hatred for Kenobi, Maul survives his defeat on Naboo,
crawls through the underbelly of the palace, and finally makes his escape.
Maul's upper half ends up getting shipped off with the trash to Lotho Minor, a planet
that is covered in an endless junkyard. There, he manages to replace his lower body with
some scavenged robotic legs, but he's forced to live in dire circumstances, with little
food or water and no way off the planet.
Years later, back on Dathomir, a Nightbrother named Savage Opress learns from his mother
Talzin that he has a long-lost brother who was taken from them by Darth Sidious. With
the help of Talzin's Force sensitivity, Savage ends up tracking down Maul, but the man he
finds is so consumed with rage, and so damaged by isolation, that he is practically an animal.
Worse still, vast swathes of his memory are totally missing.
Savage decides to bring him back to Dathomir. Once there, Mother Talzin uses her mysterious
dark side magic to begin restoring Maul's fragmented mind.
Finally reunited for the first time in decades, Savage Opress and Darth Maul decide to join
forces and travel the galaxy together, in search of power and revenge. Along the way,
Maul starts referring to Savage as his apprentice, teaching him the ways of the dark side. They
also start recruiting allies, such as the criminal organization Black Sun, the radical
Mandalorian revolutionary group Death Watch, and the forces of Jabba the Hutt. Maul and
Savage decide to name their new criminal network the Shadow Collective.
As Maul is building the Shadow Collective, he gets a few opportunities to cross lightsabers
with Obi-Wan Kenobi. The first occurs when Maul sets a trap for the Jedi Master on the
planet Raydonia, but Kenobi manages to escape before Maul can land a killing blow. Later,
Kenobi tracks Maul and Savage to the planet Florrum, but this time it's Maul who flees
after Kenobi cuts off one of Savage's actual arms.
During this time, the Shadow Collective accomplishes a great deal. They even manage to organize
a coup on the planet Mandalore, allowing the Collective to seize control of the planet's
government. During his time on Mandalore, Maul also manages to obtain a new weapon:
an ancient lightsaber with a black blade, known as the Darksaber.
Soon after taking control of Mandalore, Maul lures Obi-Wan Kenobi into a trap and captures
him. Although he fails to hold his sworn enemy for long, he does strike down and kill Satine
Kryze, Kenobi's close friend and romantic interest.
Maul's time as the ruler of Mandalore is short lived. Soon after he takes over the planet,
Maul's doorway is once again darkened by his old master, Darth Sidious. Sidious had learned
of Maul's survival from Obi-Wan Kenobi, and had now come to put down his former apprentice,
once and for all. At first, Maul tries to convince his old master that he conquered
Mandalore as a gift, with the hope of becoming Sidious' apprentice once more, but the Sith
Lord quickly sees through Maul's lies.
Maul and Savage Opress then fight Sidious together, but the two are separated, and Opress
proves no match for Sidious by himself. He is quickly struck down by the Sith Lord. Maul
then returns to the fight, but fails to muster the rage he needs to defeat Sidious. Instead,
all he feels is grief. As a result, Maul is distracted and unfocused, and Darth Sidious
is able to easily overpower him and take him captive.
Soon after, Maul finds himself in prison, face-to-face with Sidious' new apprentice,
Count Dooku. Dooku subjects Maul to torture, attempting to extract information about the
Shadow Collective. Of course, Maul doesn't offer up much.
Shortly thereafter, Shadow Collective forces are able to rescue Maul from prison. Unfortunately,
by this point in time, the Collective's days are numbered. Being an enemy to both the Jedi
and the Sith has really left Maul stuck between a rock and a hard place, and he finds his
allies abandoning him left and right.
Maul does achieve one brief victory when his forces capture Count Dooku and hold him prisoner.
However, despite Maul's attempts to contact Sidious and use his new hostage as leverage,
his old master claims he has no use for either of them anymore. He tells Maul he is free
to kill Dooku.
Undeterred, Maul then pivots strategies. He and Mother Talzin attempt to convince Dooku
into forming an alliance with him against Sidious. But Dooku refuses, stating that he
just doesn't believe an alliance against Darth Sidious could ever succeed.
Maul and Dooku are then interrupted by an attack on their supply outpost. It seems that
a group of Republic soldiers, led by Obi-Wan Kenobi and Mace Windu, have found them. Given
this new development, Dooku feigns an alliance with Maul, and the two Sith lords are able
to fight their way through the Jedi and escape.
Maul then returns with Dooku to his homeworld of Dathomir, in order to lay low and seek
the council of his mother. While he is there, however, Dathomir is attacked by Darth Sidious'
forces, led by Darth Sidious and General Grievous.
Maul manages to rally his Shadow Collective forces to fight back against the invasion,
but it doesn't make much of a difference. During the battle, Mother Talzin and Maul
duel Grievous, Dooku and Sidious. Talzin then uses her powers to push Maul away from the
fight in an attempt to save him. Moments later, she is killed by Grievous. Maul briefly tries
to charge back into the fray, but is dragged away by his Shadow Collective warriors and
convinced to flee the planet.
Eventually, Maul and those loyal to him return to Mandalore, where they remain in hiding.
Driven into the shadows, Maul and the Shadow Collective reestablish ties with the Pyke
Syndicate, Black Sun and a criminal syndicate named Crimson Dawn.
Around this time, Maul begins experiencing visions of the future, specifically, of the
rise of Darth Sidious, the fall of Anakin Skywalker and the coming of Order 66. Hoping
to prevent this by killing Skywalker, Maul engineers the Siege of Mandalore as a trap
for the Jedi.
Unfortunately for Maul, it's Ahsoka Tano who leads the Republic forces on Mandalore. When
they first encounter each other, Maul warns Ahsoka of the imminent rise of Darth Sidious,
but he's quickly forced to flee.
On his second meeting with Ahsoka, Maul once more forewarns the rise of Darth Sidious and
the Empire. Ahsoka offers to work with Maul to stop Sidious once and for all, but Maul
refuses, due to his belief that the Republic and Jedi are too weak and corrupt to be saved.
Maul then asks Ahsoka to join him to defeat Sidious, which she seriously considers, until
Maul reveals that he has seen visions of Sidious making Anakin Skywalker his new apprentice.
Ahsoka accuses Maul of lying, lashes out, and the two come to blows.
After a hard-fought duel, Maul is defeated by Ahsoka. Rather than let him die, however,
she takes Maul into captivity, and prepares to return him to Coruscant for judgement by
the Jedi Council.
With Maul in confinement and the Clone Wars entering its final stages, Ahsoka and her
clone army begin the journey back to Coruscant, where Maul is to be kept prisoner. They never
make it. As Ahsoka's ship hurtles through lightspeed, Sidious issues Order 66, making
the clones turn on the Jedi and solidifying the transformation of the Republic into the
Galactic Empire.
Ahsoka isn't part of the Jedi order anymore, but she's still a hero with a lightsaber;
two of them, actually, making her a big target. Thankfully, Ahsoka has Maul around. In need
of a distraction to get the clones off her tail, Ahsoka frees Maul from his restraining
device and sets him loose to cause havoc.
"You don't understand; I'm not here to team up with you. I need a diversion, and you're
it." He more than delivers: As Ahsoka and her friend
Captain Rex work on their escape, Maul takes the fight to the clone army and sabotages
the ship's hyperdrive generators, sending the vessel careening towards the surface of
a nearby moon.
With a big crash imminent, Maul flees to the hangar bay, where he crosses paths with Ahsoka
again. A brief struggle ensues, but Maul is able to commandeer a ship and escape, leaving
him free to regroup elsewhere in the galaxy and forcing Ahsoka and Rex to fend for themselves.
During the reign of the Galactic Empire, Maul continues to rule the Shadow Collective, exerting
his control over a number of criminal organizations across the galaxy. Many years after the end
of the Clone Wars, he makes his final reappearance.
While the young rebel Ezra Bridger is exploring some old Sith ruins on the lifeless planet
of Malachor, he encounters a stranger in a cloak. The stranger explains that he came
seeking a Sith holocron in a nearby temple. But it takes two Force users working together
to open the doors to the temple, so he can't do it alone.
In order to help lift the extremely heavy stone doors, the stranger teaches Ezra how
to make his Force powers stronger by tapping into his emotions, something that Ezra's own
mentors have forbidden. Under the stranger's guidance, Ezra is able to retrieve the holocron.
The two then reunite with Ezra's teacher, the former Jedi Padawan Kanan Jarrus, who
immediately recognizes the stranger as Darth Maul. As you might imagine, it isn't long
before Maul betrays them. And even though Maul is defeated and forced to flee, Ezra
finds that his time spent with Maul has forever changed him, giving him a taste of the power
the dark side can bring.
Maul later reappears to make Ezra an offer. Maul seeks the answer to a question, and to
get it, he needs another Force user to operate a pair of holocrons with him. Doing so will
grant the pair a shared vision, giving each participant the answer to any question they
ask. Ezra asks for the key to destroying the Sith, and Maul asks where "he" is. They get
the same answer: a desert planet with twin suns.
Eventually, Ezra is able to put together that Maul is seeking the legendary Jedi Obi-Wan
Kenobi, who is living in hiding on the planet Tatooine. Ezra travels there to warn Kenobi
and persuade him to join the Rebellion, but Kenobi refuses.
"The rebellion needs you. We need you to defeat the Empire."
"What you need you already have. Unfortunately, you seem to be letting it all go."
Maul then arrives, and he and Kenobi duel one last time. Their battle is quick, and
Kenobi wins by slicing his enemy through the chest. As Maul lays dying, the two old foes
talk one last time, and Kenobi reveals that he is on Tatooine to guard the Chosen One.
Safe in the knowledge that he would one day be avenged, and Sidious would be destroyed,
Maul dies in Kenobi's arms.
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