Looks like Sid from Toy Story was here
A boring episode. It's been a good but disappointing season which i'll explain soon. I thought maul was going to be this powerful person, someone in exile who was building his power for years and could not yet return because of both the sith and jedi, but now was the time after savage found him and maul would teach savage. Instead he's some wild beast. God what a disappointment. I thought it was going to be some mastermind. And this person doesn't really feel at all like the maul from episode 1, even though it should be even a little bit. Don't like the spider legs either, they seem like they wouldn't be good in lightsaber combat. Does my idea of maul off the top of my head sound better than what we were presented?. I really hate when writers pull this kind of garbage. They have years to come up with this, the concept, execution, events, characters involved, the stories. They teased him in season 3, and for the whole of season 4 except for the end, he comes in. What the hell is this. But really, since it's near the end of the season it's still just a tease, and we'll get the character "fully involved" in the next season.
So, think about this, they planned the tease in the 3rd season ready for the 4th season. So, you have all that time about planning for the tease in the 3rd season to refine loads of things about the darth maul character. Then you have nearly the whole of season 4 to refine everything about maul and for this tease near the end. And this is what we got. What rubbish. Even after what happened to him, him behaving like this doesn't make sense. I think andrew is very wrong about this, but to each their own.
Review by Andrew BloomVIP 9BlockedParent2016-07-17T23:48:43Z
9.4/10. Certain portions of this episode were pretty extraneous (like almost everything at the diner), but man, the parts that focused on Opress and his journey to find Maul were great. I love how it was basically a mirror of Luke's trip to Dagobah. Guided by his now-deceased master who was still giving him ghostly instructions from another realm, Opress ventured out to a distant world, where he met an odd, kind of playful creature who lived there and had to enter a somewhat mysterious cave to meet his destiny. Admittedly, I don't know if the parallel was intentional, but it works as an echo for the same reasons Luke's trip worked -- it immerses our protagonist in the unfamiliar and lets us see more of who they are by how they react to their strange surroundings and the people they meet.
Part of what made this one great was the atmosphere. I loved the aesthetics of the junk planet, with its towering infernos, firebreathing clanking mega-droids, and the feeling of peculiar desolation in everything that lived and moved around there. The scene where Opress takes out a horde of scavengers (who were another cool, somewhat unnerving design) had a Mad Max-like quality to it, with a lone warrior surrounded by ruins. The Genisis-esque snake, Morley who has the perfect voice for a treacherous serpent, was a nice touch as Opress's turncoat guide, giving off the right vibe of sliminess and helpfulness.
The pièce de résistance, however, was the sequence where Opress finds Maul. Having Opress stumbling through the catacombs and seeing the shadows or silhouettes of a creature scurrying around him was just the right kind of unnerving. Maul himself made a great impression that showed how messed up he was by the events of The Phantom Menace. I loved the body horror of his arachnotaur visage, which seemed very frankenstein in how he had been stitched to those mechanical spider legs that did not seem to move in sync and fed into the character's insanity. That's what really bowled me over about Maul here. If you're going to bring a character back from the dead, showing how he's been changed by those events, in this case, making him ax crazy, mumbling denials and nonsense and laughing in a creepy fashion, is a great way to make it feel like less of a cheat. Maul makes a great impression here, and while the fact that the one thing he can seize on here is revenge is a bit convenient, the rattled, feral former sith is the perfect cap to the creepy atmosphere of this episode. One of Clone Wars's finer hours.