*SPOILERS!*

I'm going to go into depth about the finale here, so if you wish to remain unspoiled, turn away now.

So at last we come to the season 4 finale, and it certainly does not disappoint. After returning in the last episode slightly unhinged to say the least, in this one Darth Maul finally comes into his own once more. His brother Savage returns him to Dathomiir to have his marbles rearranged and restored by the Nightsister's leader Mother Talzin. This mesmerising sequence also has Maul's spider-like lower cybernetic body reconfigured into the devil like cloven hoofed biped version familiar to those who've seen the comic book and action figure rendition of Darth Maul returned from the dead, this looks much more practical and is far cooler.

Restored to the potent force for evil we all know and love Maul sets his sights on revenge, hence the title, and travels with his brother to Iridonia (A nod to Maul's original back-story I suspect. Wasn't his race the Zabrak supposed to have originated on Iridonia, but then got ret conned to Dathomiir? Explained away as Zabrak colonisation? [Actually, just checking on Star Wars.com and the world was Raydonia, not Iridonia they went to, I misheard. Still with the name sounding so similar I suspect my theory of that being a nod to that Zabrak background holds water]) to slaughter a few innocents and get the Jedi's attention (once again, very dark for a supposedly kids show). He then sends a transmission and executes some of these civilians right in front of the Jedi Council members watching. He demands that Kenobi comes to that world alone to face him, and the Jedi Council and Obi-Wan agrees. It is strange that the Jedi don't commit more resources to the capture of such a significant target, and this is mentioned in the story, but Yoda agrees that Kenobi should go alone, stating that through the Force he can sense that he won't be alone.

This all dovetails nicely into a scene with Assajj Ventress, now a fully fledged bounty hunter discovering that there is a bounty on Savage Opress's head (One slight niggle here, how does Ventress know to find them on Raydonia? I assume the bounty didn't come complete with a current location of the target). The pieces are all on the board and the play is set in motion to lead to a cracking smack down between multiple foes, Nightsister vs. mutated Nightbrother, Jedi vs. Sith.

So Obi-Wan arrives to face Maul, only to find it is a trap as he gets caught between the rock and a hard place that is Maul and Savage, but I'm surprised he gets taken down so quickly. He is a master Jedi after all, and has taken on worse odds even in the movies. Basically this was clearly done to save time for the larger conflict to come, after all we only have 20 odd minutes to play with here, and I can forgive them for that, as when Assajj arrives (secreting herself onto the freighter that the brothers have been using since Savage stole it at the junk planet) and attempts to rescue the fallen Jedi, the lightsaber battle that kicks off is nothing short of fantastic. The result is a stalemate, but Kenobi and Assajj are starting to lose ground, so they retreat to the cockpit which doubles as an escape pod, and in a gripping scene that owes a lot to the final scenes of Alien, they escape just in the nick of time.

So we have one of the best season finales of The Clone Wars yet, and my greatest fears with the return of Darth Maul remain unrealised. They did the character justice, and didn't bring him back again only to kill him off just as quickly as they did originally. They're learning from their mistakes there clearly. So with Maul and Savage still at large, and all the interesting plot possibilities that raises, season 5 can't come soon enough.