The Star Wars Rebels: Season 2 finale brought a big player back into the universe, as Darth Maul -- simply Maul now -- made his return.

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However, as Rebels co-creator/executive producer Dave Filoni revealed to me at Star Wars Celebration, Maul’s return was nearly a brief one, as the character was originally going to die in that huge finale - coming to his end after facing Darth Vader for the first time, no less.Said Filoni, “It’s interesting. This is a little bit inside, but Maul wasn’t meant to survive the Malachor episode. There was a lot of thought given to taking him out there because a lot of the Malachor arc, originally, was more about Vader confronting Maul and it was going to be a story about that. It became clear to me as the emotional story developed and we worked on it more that that was just going to be wrong, that if anything happened to Maul it needed to have its proper time and its proper space. That’s how he kind of got a pass and survived to this season.”Filoni said that as they looked at where Maul could go, “You learned more about the character and more things developed. His relationship with Ezra in last season’s finale was planned but also surprising because Sam [Witwer] is so good at being that coercive person and then Taylor [Gray] fed off of it. Because Taylor lives in a world where he’s not as knowledgeable about Star Wars as some of the more veteran fans like Sam and I and Freddie [Prinze Jr.]. The pull between Freddie’s knowledge of Star Wars and Sam’s knowledge of Star Wars is very real or Sam’s knowledge of the dark side or Kanan’s knowledge of the Light side - or Maul’s knowledge of the dark side. We wanted to play that more. You’re going to see this push and pull on Ezra and Maul is kind of that influencer that’s saying maybe power is a means to the end.”As for Maul’s allegiances, Filoni noted, “What’s interesting is it’s not necessarily the Empire’s side he’s fighting on. He’s just fighting straight on the side of the power and darkness and the dark side. So it’s a bit different than something we’ve seen before which makes Maul a different villain than we’ve ever seen before. He’s not straight out with the main bad guy group. If the main bad guys saw him, they’d probably go after him too so he has to be real shady and shadowy with everything he’s doing and he’s almost better off trying to hang with those Rebels because they have morality which he can work to his advantage.”When I asked Filoni if Maul taking on Vader was inevitable, he replied, “Not necessarily. It sounds like a great idea and then you start to develop it and you worry it’s a little more fan service-y. If it makes sense, it would happen but I’d say it’s a little unlikely.”For more on what Filoni told us at Star Wars Celebration, check out the full interview below:

Star Wars Rebels returns this fall.Eric Goldman is Executive Editor of IGN TV. You can follow him on Twitter at @TheEricGoldman , IGN at ericgoldman-ign and Facebook at Facebook.com/TheEricGoldman