The final season of Star Wars: The Clone Wars is heading into its home stretch, which means we’re finally going to see the much-anticipated Siege of Mandalore. To understand the importance of this event in the larger Star Wars timeline, you have to understand when the civil unrest on the planet first began, as well as get to know the major players on both sides.
The people of Mandalore have always been a warrior race — if you watched The Mandalorian on Disney+, you know they take combat seriously — but during the Clone Wars, the pacifist Duchess Satine Kryze led her people through an unprecedented time of peace, choosing to remain neutral when other planets and even entire solar systems were declaring for the Republic or the Separatists.
But that all changes when the leader of a Mandalorian mercenary group called Death Watch — led by the Darksaber-wielding Pre Vizsla — carries out a series of terrorist attacks in the hopes it will shock the people of Mandalore back into its old warring ways.
During this time, Death Watch comes into contact with the former Sith Lord Darth Maul. Maul, realizing the power he could gain through this group, uses Death Watch to make introductions with other underworld organizations like the Pyke Syndicate, Black Sun and the Hutt Clan. He calls this criminal consortium the Shadow Collective and rules it with an iron fist, hatching a plan to invade Mandalore and become its ruler.
After the Shadow Collective takes control of the planet, Pre Vizsla uses the Darksaber — an ancient black-bladed lightsaber created by the first-ever Mandalorian Jedi, the valued as a symbol of power among the Mandalorian people in later years — to claim the right to sit on the throne of Mandalore as its supreme ruler. He becomes power-hungry and has both Maul and Duchess Satine thrown in prison.
Maul easily escapes and challenges Pre Vizsla to a duel to the death for the right to rule Mandalore. He wins, taking the Darksaber as his prize. Seeing their leader defeated, a splinter group of Death Watch called the Nite Owls led by Bo-Katan Kryze (sister to Duchess Satine), breaks away and escapes so they can lick their wounds and form a plan to reinstate Satine as ruler once more.
After receiving reports of trouble on Mandalore, the Jedi Council sends Obi-Wan Kenobi to the planet to investigate. There he finds his old nemesis Maul alive and in control. Maul is also holding Satine — the only woman Kenobi ever loved — captive. The Jedi Master tries to free the Duchess, but Maul catches them in the act and murders Satine right in from of Obi-Wan. Knowing how much he cared for her sister, Bo-Katan and the Nite Owls help the Jedi escape the planet.
Elsewhere, Maul’s former Sith Master Darth Sidious, aka Chancellor Palpatine, hears the reports from the Jedi Council and travels to Mandalore to bring his former apprentice to heel. You see, Palpatine’s whole idea is that he’s lulling the Jedi into not taking the threat of the Sith too seriously, and Darth Maul taking over an entire planet is interfering with that. There’s also the fact that Maul had taken his own brother, Savage Opress as a Sith apprentice, drawing further attention to Palpatine’s secret plans.
So, once on the planet, Sidious kills Savage and brutally defeats Maul — all in secret — leaving the planet with his former apprentice as his prisoner and allowing the Jedi to believe they helped free Mandalore.
Eventually, Maul’s Mandalorian super-commandos from Death Watch free him from Sidious’ grasp and return him to the planet to rule once again, where he eventually come face to face with Ahsoka Tano and her clone soldiers along, with Bo-Katan and the Nite Owls.
Photo: Star Wars: The Clone Wars Episode 701 “The Bad Batch” .. Image Courtesy Disney+
The most recent episodes ends with Ahsoka preparing for battle with Maul. We know a lot of what happens afterward, thanks some stray bits of information picked up over the years. For example, in a 2016 episode of Star Wars: Rebels, Maul and Ahsoka meet back up, and he taunts her over a fight they had on Mandalore. We’re finally going to get to see that fight. There were also a bunch of Dark Horse comics about the siege published in 2014, and of course, we know that at some point during the conflict, Palpatine is going to execute Order 66, meaning the clone soldiers are going to turn on their Jedi masters and try to massacre them. How will Ahsoka get out of that one?
We’ve known about Order 66 since Revenge of the Sith hit theaters way back in 2005, so people have been looking forward to this event for a long time. And at long last, it’s happening!
New episodes of Star Wars: The Clone Wars drop every Friday on Disney+. We’ll be waiting and watching and writing it up:
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