Complain about the Star Wars prequel trilogy to your heart’s discontent, but even the most feral of its detractors have to admit that not everything in The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones, and Revenge of the Sith was irredeemably squandered. The final battle in Phantom Menace, for instance, could have been infinitely more anticlimactic if Darth Maul had whipped out some Force lightning at any point.
Maul, of course, is unaware that he’s a character in a movie, so the question remains: why didn’t Darth Maul use any Force lightning during his battle against Qui-Gon Jinn and Obi-Wan Kenobi? Taking the question about as seriously as George Lucas does the Star Wars canon, the comedians at r/StarWars have graciously obliged with some answers.
A couple of users pointed out that Maul was very deliberate in how he allocated his experience points. Evidently, Maul is the type of person to select Warrior when he happens upon The Guardian Stones (located southwest of Riverwood), as well as treating Wisdom as his dump stat, squeezing Force lightning into his build, then, becomes impractical at best and impossible at worst.
Another user chalked up Maul’s Force lightning neglect to the fact that the Star Wars Legends stories aren’t part of the official canon, while also offering a relatively serious, if thin, answer
Another user drowned out the nonsensical noise around them, suggesting that it was simply a matter of Maul being a rash youth who fought to his more tenacious strengths.
But one responder rolled in with the simplest, most succinct answer in the thread; one that explains Maul’s reasoning with all the airtight logic of the world’s most indestructible calculator.
Indeed, we won’t be seeing Force lightning from Maul any time soon, but perhaps this is for the best, lest the Star Wars fandom is granted yet another nuance to complain about.