As made obvious by the lack of Darth Maul in A New Hope, Maul is going to have to disappear from known existence somehow by the end of my new Revenge of the Sith. This is just as we knew the fate of Anakin going into the start of the prequels, because, in both cases, the fun part is seeing how and why the characters from Episode III are where they are by the beginning of Episode IV. To justify keeping him living for a while longer, though, the end of Maul’s story arc now has to have more of an impact on the overall saga than "just another evil casualty." And it does.
In the immediate wake of Mace Windu’s death, at the hands of Anakin, Darth Sidious tells Maul to hold on just a little longer on the killing-your-Sith-master-and-taking-his-place objective. He goes on to explain that there are three orders of business that they need to take care of first: renaming Anakin, executing Order 66 (which lets the Stormtroopers all around the galaxy know that it’s time to immediately put the nearest Jedi to death), and going down to where the Jedi younglings stay and killing them. He tells Maul to take Anakin with him and carry out the lattermost task, then head to the planet Mustafar. After the Jedi genocide gets underway, they (Sidious and Maul) will duel there.
Before he takes off and leaves Sidious to do as he was commanded, Darth Maul turns to Anakin and goes through the Sith naming ritual that we saw in the original RotS, choosing to call him the soon-to-be most feared name in the galaxy: Darth Vader. The following scene is the one that depicts the slaughtering of Jedi kids, but now, for the most part, it’s not at the hands of Vader. His own seasoned loyalty to evil makes Darth Maul capable of committing such a malicious act, but Vader, having been freshly turned to the dark side, is not yet able to bring himself to participate in that level of brutality. Or so he thought.
After allowing Vader to quietly observe the taking of the lives of all but one of the children in the room without getting involved, Maul turns to his new Sith apprentice and tells him he needs to initiate himself further into darkness by delivering this final death. Darth Vader, still clinging to his humanity, hesitates at first. Upon his master’s insistence, though, he slowly and ominously paces up to the last helpless child. He ignites his lightsaber. The scene cuts.
That most tragic montage of Stormtroopers taking out the Jedi ensues and the rest of the plot going on outside of my Maul-centered story takes its course. Eventually, we get back to Maul and Vader dutifully awaiting Sidious’s promised arrival on Mustafar. He doesn’t manage to appear, however, before Obi-Wan Kenobi and Princess Padmé show up.
Obi-Wan is shocked to see that Anakin has actually joined the Sith, and Anakin is furious at Padmé for betraying him and telling Obi-Wan where they’d be. Darth Maul tells Vader to make sure Padmé stays safe, then ignites his glorious double-sided saber. Without hesitation, Obi-Wan gets out his lightsaber too, and the two begin their epic, John Williams-scored battle on the molten terrain of Mustafar. Anakin angrily goes to his lover and begins to scorn her for her actions against him. She tries to explain that she’s just trying to do what’s best for him and herself and the soon-to-be-born child(ren). He counters this by saying that the way of the Sith is what’s best for them. The scene cuts back and forth between this heated emotional argument and the intense fight taking place between Anakin’s two masters.
After a hard-fought duel, Obi-Wan manages to get an upper-hand and delivers one final strike to Darth Maul. For Obi-Wan, Maul’s death means that the man who killed his master at the end of Episode I, and then escaped without so much as a scratch from the clash at the end of Episode II, has justly and finally gotten what was coming to him. But for Anakin, Maul being killed means losing the closest thing to a father-figure he’s ever had, bar Obi-Wan himself.
So, as he witnesses Maul’s fatally wounded body crumple to the ground, Anakin screams a drawn out "NOOOOOO!" ironically mirroring Obi-Wan’s own anguished scream from back in The Phantom Menace when he watched Maul stab Qui-Gon. Filled with rage, Anakin turns to Padmé and begins to choke her, screaming at her ("You did this!"). Obi-Wan steps in, Anakin turns from his hurt and heartbroken lover, the two begin their fight (with Anakin having a much stronger motive now than before), and the film concludes in the same way (minus James Earl Jones Vader screaming "NOOOOOO!" That’d be plain redundant).
Although it’s never explicitly stated, the tragic part about Maul, in this story, is that he was never going to rule the Empire if Sidious could help it. Anakin is more powerful than Maul and much easier to manipulate. As soon as Anakin killed Mace Windu, Sidious finally knew that Anakin would make for the worthy apprentice he had been hoping for. The master of manipulation knew how things would go down on Mustafar. He wanted Maul, now a useless piece of the equation, to die at the hands of Obi-Wan. He wanted Anakin to hurt Padmé. He wanted Anakin beaten and left to die by his former Jedi Master. Sidious wanted these things to happen so that he could go in when the smoke cleared and offer salvation and power to the now lost and hopeless Darth Vader while still maintaining his status as The Emperor. And he completely and totally gets his way.
Finally, and on an appropriately dour last note, Darth Maul has been given a much more impactful and interesting role in the overall Star Wars saga, as he and Anakin’s close relationship is now the penultimate factor in turning the fearful young Skywalker to the dark side from the very first episode through the third. I can at last put my sympathy for Darth Maul to rest.
(Part I: http://theodysseyonline.com/arkansas-state/feel-bad-for-darth-maul-part/190503)
(Part II: http://theodysseyonline.com/arkansas-state/feel-bad-darth-maul-part-ii/196723)
(Part III: http://theodysseyonline.com/arkansas-state/feel-bad-for-darth-maul/203753)
(Part IV: http://theodysseyonline.com/arkansas-state/feel-bad-for-darth-maul-part-iv/210516)
(Part V: http://theodysseyonline.com/arkansas-state/feel-bad-darth-maul-part/218110)
