Supervising director Dave Filoni talks about The Clone Wars ' fifth season, while Simon Pegg guest stars as bounty hunter Dengar in a clip from the season four DVD/Blu-ray (on sale now).
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It looks like there'll be plenty of Darth Maul in the new season...
Yeah, he was in the season premiere of season five and then we’ll see him later on in the season as well. I think that he was one of those things that fans were really curious about when we mentioned we were going to bring him back. Its one of those "Wow, ow are they going to do that?" moments. Once you do it, I think you have to really utilise the character so we’ve got a fairly significant story this year.
Well, it would be cruel to bring Maul back and then never see him!
Right, if he was back and then just dead again, that would be a real downer [laughs]. Once you glue someone back together, you got to get the most out of them you can.
Now that he has a new apprentice in Count Dooku, will Darth Sidious see Darth Maul as a loose end to be tied up?
I think you always wonder with Palpatine and Sidious, because we see a lot in the prequel films as things work out the way he wants it, it makes you question if everything happened the way he predicted. Does he have that much of a control on the future? So you wonder if Maul’s one of these things he didn’t really first see, and then he has to decide "How I am going to manipulate this, will it work for me or will it work against me?" Maul certainly wouldn’t have any love for the Jedi and sometimes there’s characters that could be seen as destructive, like Ventress, that Sidious will seemingly tolerate for a while as long as its working to his purpose. But if someone gets too powerful he’ll take them out because its all about controlling and protecting his power. We’ll have to see how that goes this season.
From Darth Sidious's point of view, is it a question of which Sith is better?
Well that’s always the question, right? When you are in the seat of power, as he is, you get to ask those questions. As long as he’s on top of it, alliances are always dangerous for Sith. We’ve shown that in the past. Vader tries to make alliances with his son, Luke, to take out the Emperor. Tyranus tries to make one with Obi-Wan. Treachery abounds. It's hard to say with Maul where his loyalties are, or what he wants. We showed that he immediately wanted revenge against Obi-Wan but then at the beginning of season five we show that he is slowing down a bit and being a lot more calculated about how he is going to fit into the hierarchy of power that exists.
You’ve mentioned before that this isn’t just a brutish Darth Maul – he’s a tactician and a thinker.
Yeah, we wanted to show that Maul is actually far more tactical that we might have thought. That he, being trained by Sidious, would be pretty knowledgeable about how to build a power base. He knows that’s a valuable thing as a Sith – being hidden, but while being hidden manipulating and coercing things to your advantage, so that you slowly start to build your power. Palpatine did it by becoming a senator and then building relationships with different senators, all the while being a Sith lord, constructing his Empire from within. We have to see. Maul is an excellent fighter, but how good is he at all that?
From what we've heard so far, it seems that Sidious is going to be getting his hands dirty this year...
Well I guess that was in the trailer ! It's always fun when you guys bring stuff up and I’m like "Oh right, I showed you that or hey we haven’t seen that yet!" I have to be careful. But one of the things the fans have been saying for a couple of years on The Clone Wars is "When will we see Darth Sidious?" We haven’t really shown actually on screen. He was a hologram, he was more the phantom menace, the manipulator. But there came a point, especially now we feel we’re in the latter stages of the war, where it's more fun to ask how much control he had over everything, did he have to step in to ensure that his plans actually worked? I think that’s a lot more exciting and it makes him more interesting because to know he had challenges while he was taking over, that it didn’t just go A-B-C smoothly, makes him a bigger threat, and smarter, because he was able to overcome that, evidently, in Revenge Of The Sith .
Star Wars: The Clone Wars: Season Four is out now on DVD and Blu-ray.
