Warning: The following contains spoilers from Star Wars: The Book of Boba Fett “Chapter 5: Return of the Mandalorian,” streaming now on Disney+.
Star Wars has always presented fans with some tragic stories. The tale of Darth Plagueis was literally called a tragedy, and it’s hard to get more heartbreaking than Anakin Skywalker’s becoming Darth Vader. Darth Maul’s story, however, is right up there with the worst of them. Despite his cunning, his physical prowess and his skill in the Force, he failed to defeat Obi-Wan on Naboo, and thus, Darth Sidious abandoned Maul and replaced him.
After his failure, Maul spent much of The Clone Wars trying to find a way to reclaim his place as Sidious’ apprentice. However, Sidious wanted no part of him. Being cast aside by his master defined Maul’s life and he never reached his powerful potential. Knowing all of that, it’s almost ironic that one of Maul’s key weapons also abandoned him.
Although Darth Maul has always been synonymous with a double-bladed, red lightsaber (After all, he had three of them over the course of his life.), there was a time when he wielded a much different weapon -- the Darksaber. In Season 5 of The Clone Wars, Darth Maul recruited the Mandalorian Death Watch to his power-hungry cause. The former Sith played nice for a while, but eventually, he killed the Pre Vizsla, took the Darksaber as his own and, in so doing, became the leader of Death Watch. Employing a Jar'Kai style, Maul combined the Darksaber with the functioning half of his old red saber and used them to take over all of Mandalore.
By the time he faced Ahsoka in Season 7, though, he had built his second double-bladed lightsaber, abandoning the Darksaber as his weapon. Years later, as Star Wars Rebels showed, he had again chosen to construct a new lightsaber, rather than simply using the Darksaber that was still in his possession. Why he did so was a mystery during Rebels, but the latest episodes of The Book of Boba Fett may have answered why Maul stopped using the Darksaber.
In a total change of story, Chapter 5 focused on Din Djarin and his bounty hunting after The Mandalorian’s Season 2 finale. Mando still had the Darksaber, but he was having trouble wielding the ancient weapon. While his emotional baggage prevented him from aligning his energy with the blade, the real reason that blade felt heavy was much deeper. Although Mando had won the blade by Creed, he had tried to give it away to Bo-Katan, and the Darksaber didn’t like that. Because the weapon’s sentience intertwined its fate with the rulers of Mandalore, there was no way that Mando could align his will with the blade. He had disgraced the responsibility of leadership, so the blade disapproved of him as a wielder and fought his every move.
It's likely that something very similar happened with Darth Maul. When he won the Darksaber from Pre Vizsla, he accepted leadership of Mandalore and ruled over its people for a time. He may not have been a Mandalorian, but he became one when he won the blade. That’s why the Darksaber accepted him as a master, just like it did with Moff Gideon years later. Eventually, though, Darth Maul stopped using the Darksaber. The most likely reason is that the Darksaber itself started disapproving of him as a master, thus becoming heavy and unwieldy.
One could theorize that the Darksaber started to disapprove of him after his loss to Sidious, but he successfully used it again in the Son of Dathomir comics. The answer seems to be much simpler: Maul stopped working for the good of Mandalore. He successfully ruled over the Mandalorians for a time, but when started enacting his plan to let the planet fall, the Darksaber could feel the selfish shift in his motives. That’s why Maul used a new, double-bladed saber in his fight with Ahsoka -- the Darksaber already knew that he was planning to abandon Mandalore and, thus, the Darksaber had abandoned him.
To see more of the Darksaber, watch The Book of Boba Fett’s Season 1 finale, which will stream February 9th on Disney+.