Will Darth Maul Appear In The Mandalorian Season 2?

As Star Wars: The Clone Wars continues to run its final episodes on Disney+, it appears creator Dave Filoni is showing interest in lacing several disparate pieces of Star Wars lore together. 

The eighth episode of the series' final season, "Alone Together," includes little tendrils of narrative that tie its story directly into the events of Solo: A Star Wars Story by referencing Crimson Dawn, the spice smuggling organization at the heart of that movie, as being run by Darth Maul as part of his multifaceted criminal enterprise, the Shadow Collective. To thicken the plot even more, he ran all of these operations from Mandalore, which is of course the capital of the Mandalorian society that the protagonist of The Mandalorian pledged to as a child.

Now that we know that the inimitable Ahsoka Tano herself will have some kind of role in season 2 of The Mandalorian, the possibilities have never seemed wider or grander for the series to really put its unique imprint on Star Wars canon as a whole, and that could mean bringing in a big-time canonical character. Here are the complicated realities surrounding the likelihood of seeing Darth Maul in The Mandalorian's second season.

Ray Park is still on Lucasfilm's rolodex, and not just for simple stuff like his tiny cameo in Solo. In 2019, during that year's Star Wars Celebration, Filoni appeared on a panel to talk about both the final season of Clone Wars and The Mandalorian — both of which he serves as an executive producer on, and which were still in post-production at the time. Longtime fans of Clone Wars would anticipate Ahsoka and Maul, after being bitter enemies for seven seasons, to have a climactic final battle, and Filoni was ready to hook them up. As part of that, he decided to go the extra mile and call on Ray Park — who portrayed Darth Maul in Star Wars: The Phantom Menace — to perform acrobatic combat once again, this time in a motion capture capacity to assist in animating the fight (via io9).

That's an interesting development; it means that Filoni has access to and interest in Ray Park as suits him for his creative purposes, and that Park is willing to make himself available. Sam Witwer, who has been the voice of Maul for the past decade, including the Solo cameo (Park has a very thick Scottish accent, so he has always been dubbed over), has also gone on record with the old never-say-never for reprising his role as Maul.

It's important to note that, in The Mandalorian's era, Darth Maul is very dead. No, really this time, no half-cyborg-spider escapes from certain death or anything. What's more, he died before the Empire fell — before the Battle of Yavin in A New Hope. He had a whole climactic lightsaber duel with his ultimate nemesis, Obi-Wan Kenobi, on Tatooine (as seen in Star Wars Rebels). Kenobi held Maul as he was dying, and they had a whole empathetic exchange about the future that Luke Skywalker symbolized. That kind of dead. This also occurred approximately six years before our beloved chromedome Mando ever stumbled upon Baby Yoda. It may be Star Wars, but even Darth Maul probably won't come back from the dead twice.

Now, that doesn't mean that Maul couldn't appear in a flashback; The Mandalorian has already employed splintered flashbacks as a narrative device for its protagonist, and there's certainly no reason that couldn't happen again. In the past decade, Maul (technically no longer Darth, it's a long story) has become a much more complex and important character to mid- and post-Clone Wars history, and more importantly, he is a direct historical tie to The Mandalorian's season finale plot twist. Heads up: spoilers for The Mandalorian season 1 finale follow.

That tricky Darksaber. You saw Moff Gideon (Giancarlo Esposito) use it like a Swiss Army knife to get out of his crashed TIE Fighter at the end of The Mandalorian's season 1 finale. It's changed hands a whole bunch of times, but it's a potentially big deal that Darth Maul did have it for a while, and when he was in possession of it, he was on Mandalore. If you haven't brushed up on your revamped Star Wars lore: the Darksaber is an ancient lightsaber crafted by the first Mandalorian inducted into the Jedi Order (we're talking millennia old here), which has been used as a generational symbol of right to power among the constant warring clans of Mandalore. Think of it as a Space Excalibur: if you've got it, you're the boss of Mandalore.

It's not like Moff Gideon wrested it from Maul's black-gloved hands, however — Mandalorian clan leader Bo-Katan Kryze was the last (currently known) person to wield it before we saw Gideon with it. But Maul is part of the (very complicated) provenance of the Darksaber during the civil war that gripped Mandalore, as seen in both Clone Wars and Rebels. As such, any flashback relating to the weapon's history would almost certainly need to include Maul in some way. That could mean a simple name drop in dialogue all the way up to seeing Ray Park himself in makeup onscreen, dueling Darth Sidious with it (yes, that happened).

Whatever this all means, it almost has to lead back to Mandalore. It may surprise you to learn that the frequently-mentioned Great Purge of Mandalore discussed in The Mandalorian is brand-new lore exclusive to the show. At the moment there's no way to know exactly how Moff Gideon was involved, but we do know that he was in the chain of command executing the Purge, and that he likely got hold of the Darksaber in the wake of the genocide.

A big reason the Purge would have been possible at all was because Mandalore as a planet and a society was already very weak from the Clone Wars and the Mandalorian civil war; that is a direct result of Maul's plan to politically destabilize the strongest fighting force in the galaxy as part of his vendetta against Kenobi, the Jedi, and Darth Sidious. By the end of his life, Maul basically kind of hated everyone and everything, and took that unquenchable rage out on whatever he could, to the ruin of an ancient and proud civilization.

All of this is a long form way to say: it's quite possible that Maul will appear in season 2 of The Mandalorian. He is deeply interwoven into the history of the series' protagonist, which Mando may only partially understand, and may yet come to learn.