The Rare Star Wars Force Power That’s Suddenly Everywhere

Star Wars has never been shy about inventing new Force party tricks. We started with the basics in the original trilogy (mind trick, choke), and over the decades the toolbox has ballooned. Some of it was legitimately new and wild (Rey and Kylo Ren/Ben Solo’s Force dyad), some of it felt more like personality quirks turned into lore (Anakin’s natural feel for tech in the prequels). But there’s one ability that used to sit in the rarest-of-rare tier: psychometry. And thanks to a new use of it in Maul - Shadow Lord, that exclusivity just took another hit.

Quick refresher: What psychometry actually is

Psychometry is a Force skill where you touch an object and read its past. Sometimes that means full-on visions; sometimes it’s more like sensory echoes. It first showed up in new-canon on Star Wars: The Clone Wars with Jedi Quinlan Vos, then popped up on the big screen in The Force Awakens when Rey grabbed Anakin Skywalker’s lightsaber and got slammed with a reel of the blade ’s history.

Who has used it, and where

• Quinlan Vos (The Clone Wars) — first canon instance in the current continuity.
• Rey (The Force Awakens) — holds Anakin’s lightsaber, experiences a cascade of connected memories.
• Cal Kestis (Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order and Star Wars Jedi: Survivor) — not in film or TV yet, but canon via the games and a frequent user.
• Ahsoka Tano (Ahsoka) — reads the Star Map’s history by handling it, essentially reliving what it went through.
• Marrok (Maul - Shadow Lord, episode 5) — touches fresh lightsaber burns from a duel between Maul, Devon, and Jedi Master Eeko-Dio Daki and hears the sounds of the fight. Not a full vision like Rey’s, but clearly the same lane.

Marrok’s moment in Shadow Lord

In episode 5, Imperial Inquisitor Marrok inspects lightsaber scorch marks left after a clash involving Maul, Devon, and Jedi Master Eeko-Dio Daki. When he lays a hand on the burns, he picks up the audio of the battle. It’s not the IMAX version of Rey’s lightsaber vision, but it’s unmistakably psychometry in practice, even if it’s the lite edition.

So is psychometry still rare? Not really

Marrok using it matters for two reasons:

First, the numbers. We’ve now got multiple characters across animation, film, games, and live-action TV pulling this trick, so it’s already trending from exotic to familiar.

Second, the type of user. Vos, Rey, Ahsoka, and Cal are all Jedi or very Jedi-adjacent, and they’re portrayed as heavy hitters. Rey technically wasn’t a card-carrying Jedi yet in The Force Awakens, but she was set up as off-the-charts powerful from the jump. Marrok is an Inquisitor. Having someone like him feel out battle echoes lowers the ceiling on how rare or demanding this ability seems. It no longer reads like a skill reserved for the elite few.

The bigger question: Are we cycling the same ideas?

Shadow Lord is a crowd-pleaser for good reason, but it does hang on a character who’s been around since 1999. That’s not a sin, it’s just a data point in a franchise that sometimes struggles to commit to new swings. Palpatine’s return in The Rise of Skywalker is the easy example of reaching back to the well instead of building something fresh.

All that said, Shadow Lord mostly feels like the kind of win Star Wars needed right now. It’s energized, specific, and fun. But the psychometry beat is another case of something that used to be special edging toward standard-issue. Not a dealbreaker — just worth noting as the Force moves further from mystical and rare and closer to, well, an expanding feature set.