A single sentence by Dave Filoni set the internet on fire this week. Speaking at a Lucasfilm event tied to the finale of the new animated series Star Wars: Maul: Shadow Lord, Dave Filoni said something that stopped fans mid-scroll: “The key to Vader for me is that he’s not Anakin.” Within hours, corners of the Star Wars fanbase had turned the clip into a debate about whether Filoni actually understands the character he has spent two decades working with, or whether people simply failed to listen to the rest of what he said and both camps showed up in force.
Darth Vader appears in the final two episodes of Maul: Shadow Lord, deployed by Emperor Palpatine to help his Inquisitors track down rogue Jedi as well as Maul himself, a former apprentice of Darth Sidious. Vader shows up, says nothing, and dismantles every opponent in his path and it is precisely that silence that prompted Filoni to explain his thinking. He argued that anything reminding Vader of Anakin would become a target for destruction, whether that is a Jedi, a former friend, or anyone else who could force him to confront the magnitude of his own betrayal.
Fans who clipped just the opening line ran with it as evidence that Dave Filoni was contradicting six films worth of storytelling, but those who sat with the full comment got something far more unsettling.
His full comment read:
“The key to Vader for me is that he’s not Anakin. He doesn’t recognize that. He can’t. Anything that reminds him of Anakin, he’s going to destroy. So when he sees a Jedi, he’s going to destroy the Jedi, because the Jedi would remind him unconsciously or consciously that he betrayed all of his friends and everything he knew and the life he grew up with. For what? For nothing. He lost everything. He made a bad trade. He was lied to. He was deceived. He can’t accept that truth.”
So what did Dave Filoni actually mean?
Dave Filoni was clear that Anakin is still in there somewhere, trapped, and that Darth Vader simply will not allow him to surface. He described Vader as being devoid of character in the conventional sense, someone who does not have compassion, does not truly see other people, and approaches every situation as something to be destroyed rather than navigated.
His point was philosophical, as he drew a line between the Jedi from Star Wars: Clone Wars and the rage fueled machine Anakin chose to become. He also drew a sharp contrast between Maul and Vader, saying that while Maul is still caught in an active struggle with hate, Anakin was entirely consumed by it, and that if Vader were ever forced to truly reckon with what he had done, the weight of it would be enough to destroy him.
Edited by Nibir Konwar