STAR WARS: Order 66, Form 88B
A cloaked Sith marches unannounced into the Emperor’s chamber. “Darth Sidious!” He pulls back his hood, revealing a bald tattooed head with short horns. “I would speak with you.”
“Darth Maul.” Palpatine sneers. “My favorite Hot Topic bargain-bin Cenobite. I’m surprised to see you alive.”
“Of course I’m alive!”
“And you can talk.”
“Of course, I can talk!”
Palpatine furrows his brow. “Since when?”
“Since I was a youngling on Dathomir!”
“Really?” Palpatine shifts on his throne. “You worked for me for years and all you ever did was leer and nod your head every time I gave an order.”
“That’s notโ”
“Kill that Jedi: you’d leer and nod your head. Stalk a ten-year-old boy and an underage teen: you’d leer and nod your head. Take pictures of a young, virile Obi-Wan stripped to his skivvies in the Varykino Hot Springs: you’d leer and nod your head.”
Maul grits his teeth. “Don’t speak that name.”
“I took you for a mute!”
“I wasn’t a mute!” Maul shouts. “I got tongue-tied on our first meeting and…” He lowers his head, turning away. “…after that, it was just too embarrassing to admit.”
“Maul.” Palpatine puts a withered hand to his heart. “I had no idea.”
“…”
“So all this time, you said ๐๐๐กโ๐๐๐…”
Darth Maul nods.
“…for ๐ก๐ค๐๐๐ก๐ฆ ๐ฆ๐๐๐๐ .”
“Yes.” Darth Maul clenches his fist. “Until the day Obi-Wan cut me in half.”
“You are taller than I remember.”
“Tch.”
“I heard rumors from our intelligence officers that you’d been resurrected as some sort of cyborg.” Palpatine twirls his hand. “Dismissed them as pure fancy.”
“Yes.” Maul nods. “For a time, I was even a half robot scorpion.”
Palpatine scoffs. “That’s preposterous.”
“Tch.”
“This is why I never watched the TV shows. All nonsense.” He flicks his hand. “Anyway, you’re here now with budget-friendly bipedal legs. What business do you have with the Emperor of the Galaxy?”
Maul squares his shoulders and lifts his chin. “I take umbrage with the Empire itself.”
Palpatine smirks. “You and everyone else.”
“Sidious!” Maul cries. “You trained me in combat. In cruelty. You taught me to bend the Dark Side to my will, to feed my hatred in pursuit of absolute power!”
“Yes, yes, all good fun.”
“And now?” Maul points out the window, into space. “I look at ๐๐๐๐ Empire. And what do I see?”
“Do tell.”
A word of pure disgust slips from the Dathomirian Zabrak’s obsidian lips. “Bureaucracy.”
“Oh?”
“Logistics. Trade routes. Blockades. Tariffs. Interplanetary affairs and insipid regional politics.”
Palpatine nods. “Business is business.”
“Mountains upon mountains of paperwork.” Maul’s twitching lip curls. “And ๐จ๐ฅ๐ง๐๐๐๐จ๐๐๐๐ฉ๐จ.”
Palpatine sighs. “Is there a point to all this, Maul? I’ve got a Harkonnen mud bath with an alabaster twink at five.”
Maul raises his fist. “What happened to power, Sidious? To conquest?!”
Palpatine gestures to the ship around them. “This is power and conquest.”
“Yes butโ”
“And it doesn’t run on death and slaughter. Well, not all of it anyway…”
“Is this the extent of your ambition, Sidious? Did you issue Order 66 and purge the Jedi to the last so we could sit on our asses at screen terminals all day, developing scoliosis while running VLOOKUPs?”
Palpatine shakes his head. “You apprentices are all the same. You come to me burning with rage and resentment, but you lack the discipline to channel that vital energy into a proper soul-sucking, authoritarian nightmare.”
“It’s boring!” Maul protests. “Everywhere I go, it’s ‘Paper please’ this or ‘You don’t have the proper form’ that. I have to get everything in triplicate just to annihilate a small, remote village and half the time they tell me ‘No no, that’s the blue form, you need the pink form.’”
“Yes, yes.” Palpatine rolls his eyes. “Vader whines about this all the time, too. And I’ll tell you the same thing I told him.”
“What’s that?”
Palpatine leans forward. “You can’t wipe out a kindergarten every time you get double booked for Teams meetings during your lunch hour. Shut up and do your job, you dickless asthmatic gimp!”
In a meeting room at LucasFilm’s San Francisco headquarters, the lead screenwriter sits back. “And that’s the opening scene of Maul: Shadow Lord.”
Another screenwriter raises her hand. “Uh, was Maul mute? Didn’t he speak in the Phantom Menace?”
“Huh?”
“Yeah, I’m pretty sure he talks directly ๐ต๐ฐ Sidious. Like it’s his only line but…”
“Did he?” The lead screenwriter looks around the table. “I’m gonna be honest: last time I watched that movie, I was 5. Maybe 6.”
The other screenwriters glance at each other, mumbling and shrugging.
“I don’t know.”
“I’m more of a Trek fan.”
“Phantom Menace? Is that the one with the Cylons?”
“Ah, whatever.” The lead screenwriter stands. “We’ll just retcon it.”
“Um.”
“We’re Disney+, bitch.” He claps. “Alright, people, let’s make Star Wars magic!”