Star Wars Rebels Producer Dave Filoni Talks Darth Maul
One of the biggest surprises from the Season 2B trailer for Star Wars Rebels, was the mysterious appearance of a tattooed male that looked an awful lot like Darth Maul, who told Ezra to call him “Old Master.” Star Wars Rebels producer Dave Filoni talked about that…
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New York Daily News sat down with Star Wars Rebels producer Dave Filoni and tried their best Jedi mind-tricks in order to get him to give up the goods on the identity of the mysterious Old Master from the Rebels Season 2B trailer. Obviously, Filoni ducked and dodged the question like the consummate professional that he is, but he did go into some detail about Darth Maul and what he means to Filoni’s storytelling and the Star Wars universe as a whole.
"“It would be great to tell more stories with him. We had more in ‘Clone Wars’ and some of them we put out in a comic book form (2014’s ‘Darth Maul: Son of Dathomir’). You never know, he is a great character; we’re just very careful which ones we bring in.”"
Filoni goes on to speculate how difficult it might be for the group to deal with a cyborg version of Darth Maul, and even if they would be able to handle him. The last time Maul was on-screen was in The Clone Wars, and he was being destroyed and subdued by his former master Darth Sidious (Emperor Palpatine) for use in some later nefarious plot, which was carried out in Dark Horse’s comic storyline, Son of Dathomir. We would have seen that story-arc on-screen, but when Disney acquired the rights to Lucasfilm, all those active story-boards were put on hold.
Filoni does talk about how The Force Awakens has made things easier for meshing story-lines together. J.J. Abrams really opened the door for the other directors at Lucasfilm to use the vast wealth of knowledge to share amongst the other directors and storytellers, to come together for one complete story.
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"“It’s interesting because you have to be aware of it and you don’t want to repeat beats that they’re doing storywise,” he says. “We all want to be different and tell different stories, but to me it’s fun because they’re other creatives. We’ve now got JJ (Abrams) working on stories, Rian Johnston telling stories, Gareth Edwards telling stories.”"
As to the identity of Old Master, Filoni is keeping hush-hush on the topic. I guess we will have to wait and watch to see if he really is Darth Maul in secret. If Old Master is in fact Darth Maul in secret, then this would be another The Clone Wars story-arc connected to Rebels, and it just cements Filoni’s masterful storytelling. As to what it would mean for our group of Rebels: Could Ezra be tempted by the Dark Side of the Force? Old Master still has the yellow eyes of the Sith. Where are Kanan and Ahsoka when Ezra meets Old Master? There are many unanswered questions, to which I hope we get answered soon. Star Wars Rebels airs every Wednesday night.