review
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Maul – Shadow Lord season 1 review: Episodes 9-10
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21 min read
One of the prequel trilogy’s biggest problems was that, however compelling the depiction of Anakin Skywalker’s traumatic life story was, viewers could never really root for him to stay on the right path, because we knew he didn’t. In Maul – Shadow Lord, on the other hand, we met a Jedi who faced similar anxieties…
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Maul – Shadow Lord season 1 review: Episodes 7-8
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14 min read
Star Wars television has a habit of uneven storytelling, and the seventh and eighth episodes of Maul – Shadow Lord are a good example of that. Some characters benefitted from solid writing that left me excited to see what happens to them next. Other characters — well, really just one very important one — got…
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Maul – Shadow Lord season 1 review: Episodes 5-6
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15 min read
As Maul – Shadow Lord’s first season passes its halfway mark, the show is firing on all cylinders. Episodes 5 and 6 do a fantastic job of showing the desperation of Jedi on the run, the difficult choices facing civilians living under tyranny, and the ruin that the Empire brings everywhere it goes. With stellar…
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Maul – Shadow Lord season 1 review: Episodes 3-4
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13 min read
With exciting showdowns and rich moral dilemmas, Maul – Shadow Lord episodes 3 and 4 took a strong premise and carried it forward in satisfying ways. I really like how this show is dealing with the wrenching tradeoffs that people face in difficult times. I’m invested enough in the characters to cheer when one of…
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Maul – Shadow Lord season 1 review: Episodes 1-2
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10 min read
Lucasfilm has an interesting habit of producing Star Wars TV shows whose main characters are far less interesting than the worlds they inhabit and the people they encounter. We saw this with The Mandalorian, we saw it with The Bad Batch, and now we’re seeing it with Maul – Shadow Lord. Once again, the title…
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Star Wars Rebels review: "Twilight of the Apprentice"
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23 min read
Lucasfilm Every season finale is supposed to be epic. This is a given in serialized television. But “Twilight of the Apprentice” redefined epic in the context of Star Wars. The Rebels season 2 finale brought back and dramatically enhanced the stature of a villain once discarded as a broken tool; delivered on the promise and…
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Lucasfilm Given what we know is coming in the highly anticipated finale of Star Wars Rebels Season Two, the penultimate episode of the season was refreshingly unique. Our rebels simply had to deal with a spider infestation at their secret base, and despite Zeb’s amusing jitters, this proved to be a relatively straightforward task. The…
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Star Wars Rebels review: "The Forgotten Droid"
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11 min read
Lucasfilm If C1-10P is the cat to R2-D2’s dog, then “The Forgotten Droid” was about that cat meeting a stray and guiding it home. But what happens when the cat remembers that it’s a loner for a reason? That’s the question I was left with at the end of this episode. Yes, Chopper made a…
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Star Wars Rebels review: "Shroud of Darkness"
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15 min read
Lucasfilm Two of my favorite things about Star Wars are the political conflict and the spiritual conflict. The political conflict was Zeb and Agent Kallus sparring over competing ideologies, with one perhaps convincing the other to reconsider his allegiance. But the deeper conflict, the spiritual one, is a war for the “soul” of the Force…
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Star Wars Rebels review: "The Honorable Ones"
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14 min read
Lucasfilm “The Honorable Ones” will be remembered as one of Star Wars Rebels‘s greatest achievements of character development. It took an underexplored but fascinating relationship between two mortal enemies and transformed them, both in each other’s eyes and in the viewers’, by forcing them to work together. Freezing temperatures, a serious injury, and a pair…