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George Lucas' Sequels Would Have Featured Darth Maul And Darth Talon

What Could Have Been

By Culture SlatePublished 3 years ago 6 min read
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The Star Wars sequel trilogy has stirred a lot of discourse. After seeing the events that played out on the screen, fans were left wondering how George Lucas would have executed the sequel trilogy. We heard recently that Lucas had intended to have Luke be in exile and die in Episode VIII. He also came up with the idea of having the sequels focus on a female Jedi. And a while back, Lucas had said that the films would have included a micro-biotic world, whatever that would have looked like. Now, we have more info that sounds familiar and somewhat surprising, but also not too surprising.

In December 2018, Paul Duncan released a coffee table book titled The Star Wars Archives: 1977-1983. The follow-up to that book, The Star Wars Archives: 1999-2005, is set to come out this December. Already, however, some info from the book has made its way online, including ideas that George Lucas had for the sequel trilogy that were related to the prequels and even took inspiration from Legends (though it seems that it would have retconned aspects of Legends).

Lucas describes the aftermath of Return of the Jedi and what would have happened, mentioning the Imperial remnant and the underworld:

“They want to be stormtroopers forever, so they go to a far corner of the galaxy, start their own country, and their own rebellion. There’s a power vacuum so gangsters, like the Hutts, are taking advantage of the situation, and there is chaos. The key person is Darth Maul, who had been resurrected in the Clone Wars cartoons—he brings all the gangs together. [Maul]’s very old, and we have two versions of him. One is with a set of cybernetic legs like a spider, and then later on he has metal legs and he was a little bit bigger, more of a superhero. We did all this in the animated series, he was in a bunch of episodes.”

That's right. At some point, George Lucas was thinking of having Darth Maul as a villain for the sequel trilogy. The character was originally killed off in 1999's The Phantom Menace, but Lucas later decided to retcon that. In 2011, The Clone Wars season 3 hinted that Maul was still out there, and he returned on the show at the end of season 4 in 2012. He was featured again in season 5, which was developed before the Disney buyout that took place October 2012. Before the buyout, it was common knowledge among fans that Lucas had said, especially around the time Revenge of the Sith came out, that there would be no sequel trilogy, and that he was done. With this new knowledge, however, it sounds like Lucas revived Maul not just to play more into the prequel era, but also to carry over in a possible sequel trilogy. With simply the first six films and The Clone Wars in mind, having the threat of the final trilogy be the villain who was tossed aside in the first chronological film makes some sense thematically. It helps that Maul's underworld storyline was told so well in The Clone Wars.

But that is not the only familiar character that Lucas would have been included:

“Darth Maul trained a girl, Darth Talon, who was in the comic books, as his apprentice. She was the new Darth Vader, and most of the action was with her. So these were the two main villains of the trilogy. Maul eventually becomes the godfather of crime in the universe because, as the Empire falls, he takes over. The movies are about how Leia—I mean, who else is going to be the leader?—trying to build the Republic. They still have the apparatus of the Republic but they have to get it under control from the gangsters. That was the main story.”

Darth Talon is a Twi'lek Sith who originally appeared in the Star Wars: Legacy comics, which took place in the future of the Expanded Universe over a century after the films. She trained under Darth Krayt and went up against Luke Skywalker's descendent Cade Skywalker. Maul and Talon have some visual similarities. We also know that a Maul video game was in development around the time that he was being revived in The Clone Wars. During one of the meetings with Red Fly Studio representatives, George Lucas expressed his desire to have Maul work with Darth Talon. When told that Talon's story took place a century and a half after the Clone Wars, Lucas suggested that they use a clone or descendent of Maul. There were attempts to have the game retrofitted for this idea, even going so far as to include Darth Krayt's Sith army. Ultimately, the game was canceled in 2011.

Personally, the Legacy comic series is my favorite Expanded Universe story. I am sure that the inclusion of Talon a century earlier in the timeline would have retconned that, similar to how the Disney buyout led to a reboot of sorts, or how even earlier The Clone Wars TV show overwrote aspects of the Clone Wars from books, comics, and video games. Lucas had ideas for Luke and Leia that would have differed from what happened in the Expanded Universe. Luke would have tried rebuilding the Jedi Order, but there may have been fewer Jedi. Leia would have become the Supreme Chancellor as well as the Chosen One, more of the focus of the trilogy. The story that George had in mind would have had some EU inspiration, but it would not have fit with the EU.

All that being said, I think Maul became a more interesting character the way that he was developed in the TV shows. In The Phantom Menace, he was one-dimensional. In The Clone Wars, he was more fleshed out. We even got to see this version in Solo: A Star Wars Story, where he was still involved with the underworld. If this characterization had been maintained for a sequel trilogy, it might have been amazing to see. It certainly would have connected better to the prequels, thus making everything feel more like a united saga. But it is hard for me to know for sure whether I would trade the sequel trilogy that we got for this particular idea. As flawed as the sequels are at times, they have ideas that I rather liked, and we only have the bare bones of some of what Lucas was considering. In canon as it has become, I feel that Maul's fate in Star Wars Rebels is a poignant end.

If I had the chance to visit a universe where I could see the version of the sequel trilogy with Maul and Talon as the villains, though, I would definitely like to watch and see how things would play out.

Written By Steven Shinder

Syndicated From Culture Slate

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