As a lover of the great majority of Lucasfilm Animation’s Star Wars content — you’ll be hard-pressed to find a bigger Rebels fan than me — my excitement for the Maul: Shadow Lord series is pretty high. Yet while I’m eager to find out more about the new characters teased in the show’s first teaser trailer, such as the hotly-anticipated Devon Izara (who may or may not be Darth Talon), there is a Star Wars cameo that feels absolutely essential to what’s being set up for Darth Maul’s latest criminal romp in a galaxy far, far away.

In this animated adventure, coming to Disney Plus in April, Maul (Sam Witwer) is fixated on rebuilding his criminal syndicate on Janix, “a planet untouched by the Empire.” Previously, in Lucasfilm’s 2008-2020 animated series The Clone Wars, Maul had allied with criminal groups such as the Pyke Syndicate, Death Watch, the Hutts, and Black Sun, all under the Shadow Collective, an organization that sought to undermine and defeat both the Galactic Republic and the Confederacy of Independent Systems.

But shortly before Ahsoka Tano defeated Darth Maul on Mandalore in The Clone Wars' final season, the Shadow Collective disbanded. The period immediately after Maul's escape from Tano's imprisonment is murky, but we........

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