Solo: A Star Wars Story has much more intriguing connections to Star Wars’ recent past beyond just telling the tale of a younger Han Solo. But the upcoming novelization of the movie, just like other recent Star Wars adaptations, is adding more—including an intriguing wrinkle left unstated by the film.
In the last act of the movie, Qi’ra, Han’s former paramour and current operative for Crimson Dawn, makes the decision not to flee with Han after the death of her boss, Dryden Vos. Instead, she contacts the Dawn’s leader and works her way up the criminal underworld’s career ladder, leading to a frosty holo-call with none other than [Darth] Maul himself. He snarls a bit, twirls his double-bladed lightsaber (just so you really know it’s Maul), and tells her to meet him on the planet Dathomir, promising that they’ll be working very closely going forward.
Maul’s name isn’t mentioned in the scene, and while he makes it clear that he knows Qi’ra well enough, the encounter is shrouded in enough mystery that you might assume Qi’ra herself already knew who Maul was, and was just making a shrewd move in contacting him, like the many other decisions she’d made throughout the film. But according to a StarWars.com interview with Mur Lafferty, the writer of the Solo novelization, the book will make it clear that Qi’ra had no idea who was on the end of that call when she made it.
Read more at io9.