Lawson works the case, Maul makes his next move and Devon makes a choice.

It’s lazy to describe this as ‘Star Wars does The Wire’ but that’s the first thought I had as this excellent second episode closed. Wagner Moura’s Lawson is every inch the sort of fundamentally decent, fundamentally compromised cop that The Wire, Homicide and their ilk explore. He’s exhausted, working to hold his home life together and has one foot in the underworld even as the situation escalates around him. He’s a familiar, instantly likable lead which means a lot of time and effort was poured into him. It’s all paid off.

The world of Janix really pops this episode too. The show’s made a stylistic choice to have an almost oil painting like feel to the backgrounds and it’s one of the most beautifully animated shows I’ve seen in years as a result. It balances that beauty with escalating tension, reflected in the actions of the characters.

From the opening, ugly escape from the police station to the closing moments where Maul and Eeko-Dio Daki face off around a near mass casualty event, this feels like a story made of time bombs. Sam Witwer’s gentle, kind voiced Maul is plausible precisely because he’s a believer, and his sympathy for Devon and what was done for her is as  real as it is curdled. In the light of that anyone would take a step forward, that’s how the Dark Side gets you.

That confrontation, one that surely will recur and finish with the calm Jedi Master’s death, tells us so much about the two characters and a lot about the world. Lawson, present when Maul tears a pedestrian walkway apart as a distraction, doesn’t recognise Force users. He refers to Maul using a ‘laser sword’. It’s as if Janix is shielded from the recent past, or more likely that it’s a world that doesn’t matter in a galaxy far, far away. This ignorance leads Lawson to meet with Rheena Sul (Pamela Adlon), an informant and perhaps something more, who fills him in on just how dangerous Maul is. But again, somehow, not on the Jedi or Sith. It’s a refreshing move, given how overexposed the two warring clans of space knights have been in recent years and it grounds the story in a way we’ve rarely seen in this world before. That’s helped more by the introduction of Rylee (Charlie Bushnell), Lawson’s increasingly estranged son and the embodiment of a life he’s choosing to ignore. Increasingly, the show looks like it’s about one man’s search for the Good Fight and how much trouble he’s in when he finds it.

Verdict: Rounded out by a couple of great action sequences, and tempered with Ayoade’s disappointing, off the peg voice work, this is a very good episode of what’s shaping up to be a terrible day on Janix but a great day for us. 9/10

Alasdair Stuart

 

Maul-Shadow Lord releases two episodes a week on Disney +