With the four-part finale to Clone Wars Season 4 kicking off this weekend, USA Today has brought us another video focusing on the biggest resurrection in Star Wars history: Darth Maul

The finale sees an attack by General Grievous and Count Dooku on the planet Dathomir to hunt down and kill Asajj Ventress and the Night Sisters – however Dooku and Grievous don’t count on last season’s main villain Savage Opress returning to stand with the sisters, and they certainly don’t count on him taking his brother Maul with him…

Maul seems to be flavour of the minute with Episode I 3D storming the cinemas and his face over toy boxes across the planet, so his return is no coincidence, but rather a well-timed attention grabber. And we’ve no complaints, we want to be, em, grabbed…

We brought you confirmation of Sam Witwer as Maul last week here and now it’s Clone Wars supervising director Dave Filoni who’s chatting about Maul. He tells USA Today:

“We saw the warrior, definitely. But what we weren’t as aware of was how trained Darth Maul was — not fighting using the ways of the Dark Side, but his intellect and his cunning as he learned from Darth Sidious.”

There will be some changes in store for the resurrected Sith lord, according to Filoni, beginning with how he survived. He says it’s pretty dark and dramatic, and in regard to facing off with Obi-Wan again, “there’s going to be a lot of want for revenge in his mind, what he’s been thinking about through what must have been a terrible trial.”

Filoni promises fans will find out the secret behind his new lower half and, instead of wielding his double-bladed lightsaber from Phantom Menace, Maul will have only a fragment of it left since it, too, was damaged in battle.

“That was another one of the tricky things,” Filoni says. “You want him to have a lightsaber, but there’s no Lightsaber Mart he can go to and buy himself a new one.”

“To go through all the trouble and believability to bring this character back, it would be a shame if it was once again a short-lived thing,” Filoni says. “A lot of effort went into the resurrection of Darth Maul, and I’m going to make it worthwhile for the fans, that’s for sure.”