Fine, I Will Review The Percy Jackson Show (again)

    I have wondered if I was the only one who thought that "Sea of Monsters" was the weakest of the Percy Jackson and the Olympians pentalogy, but I have seen my reading echoed by other book loyalists. 

    This second installment is perhaps penalized partially because it marks several major junctions in the larger series. This is, for example, the part of the series where the scope of the adventure really starts to enlarge. We know going in that there's an angry, deceased titan out to destroy Olympus, and that he's amassing an army, and so we need a sense that this threat is growing stronger. But this also marks a turning point in how series author, Rick Riordan, chooses to develop his main character. And so, season 2 of the Disney+ television adaptation faces similar crossroads.

    Season 3 of this show is already filming as we speak, so its immediate future is already spoken for, as far as production goes. But stylistically, this second season is where we really get to see whether this show knows itself and what the patterns in the remaining seasons are going to be. I still don't think the show has completely found its groove. This is owing in part to wrinkles in the source material, and also to unique obstacles that this production faces. But the adventure remains fresh and rich enough that you're desperate to sign on for one more quest anyways.

    We'll start again by examining the show's strongest point: the casting and performances.

    It took all of one season for the Stranger Things effect to hit Walker Scobell. But maturity suits him well. He feels like a more natural analogue to the likes of Hercules or Theseus. He was probably cast for his levity or his comedic timing, but it's his natural gravity that emerges during the height of conflict that helps steer the show. 

    I had felt in the last season that the writers and directors missed their chance to underline the very real vulnerability Annabeth has for Luke, setting up the injury of his fateful betrayal. In trying to make her seem impervious, they missed the opportunity to really set up that fall and also display more Leah Sava Jeffries' spectacular acting. They didn't make the same mistake twice though. 

    In the past, I've written that Aryan Simhadri's greatest contribution as Grover was that he was "surprisingly not annoying." This isn't really fair to him or his character, because I do think that he does quite good in the role. Though his character is definitively the least tenacious of the main trio, Simhadri allows the quiet courage and ingenuity of the character to show itself within highly volatile circumstances, giving visibility to a specific kind of bravery. 

    I knew I was going to like Dior Goodjohn as Clarisse all the way back from the last season. That was when we got to see her fire and whether she had it in her to hold a scene. This season is where we got to see that she had the range to hold an entire character arc. 

     Tyson here is less of a baby. Daniel Deimer imagines Tyson as hiding behind politeness to avoid the many awkward situations he finds himself in, and he does a good job at making him feel endearing. Still, Tyson as an entity was always one of the more clunky ingredients in the Percy Jackson story. I think they made a valid choice in playing him as more mentally slow than an actual giant toddler, but this adaptation also jettisons a lot of his most compelling arcs. Percy learning to accept Tyson as his literal brother doesn't get any more closure than Annabeth overcoming her own racism against all cyclops-kind. 

    After operating as something of a shadow agent for most of last season, Charlie Bushnell is in full operation as a genuine bad guy this round. And he makes the leap to villainy without losing that human piece that keeps him sympathetic. 

    This season also introduced us to some entertaining guest stars and future series leads. Tamara Smart makes a promising Thalia, and I look forward to seeing her take the reins next season. Timothy Simmons plays Tantalus at just the right amount of annoying. This round also saw victory laps for some of the best guest stars from last season including Toby Stephens, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Virginia Kull, and Adam Copeland, among others.

    Overall, the show's method appears to be earning the loyalty of the Percy Jackson fanbase frontloading it with entertaining actors who are as happy that this show is being made as the fans are. We can be grateful for a cast where everyone is clearly excited to be here. Even so, we can still ask for certain niceties from the show's writing and production. 

    I generally had some notes about the way the series continues to have problems with dropping curtains or revealing plot information. Many of the same notes I made with the last season were applicable here as well--and will honestly probably continue as the show goes forward. 

    But we're also approaching a point in the series where it's becoming painfully obvious that Disney is skimming on the budget for this show. We saw a bit of it last season in things they chose not to adapt--like the hell hound attack during "capture the flag." But then, how much money were they going to drop on a first season of a show that wasn't "Star Wars" branded? Such fledgling material, even material based on a hit book series, would probably have to wait for follow-up seasons for a promotion.

    Yet as the scale of the story starts to expand, while the scale of the production remains flat, you can feel the show start to press against the glass. 

    Book 2 marks a turning point where the full scope of the opposing forces starts to come into view. The villains' floating fortress in the books is described as harboring not only wayward demigods, but such menaces as dragon ladies and bear people. It's supposed to be overrun with monsters. But in adaptation, "overrun by monsters" amounts to exactly three Laistrygonians and a photograph of a hell hound. (I think we were also justifiably upset that we didn't get the hydra this round, though I'm still holding out hope that we see it next season, which is more inspired by the trials of Hercules anyways.) 

    My optimistic read of this, I guess, is that the lack of razzle-dazzle forces the tension of the show to remain in the character interactions themselves. And this is intermittently true. I'd be remiss not to acknowledge that I loved how articulated the character arcs were allowed to be for someone like Clarisse. In particular, I loved her aiding Annabeth in episode 7 after firmly establishing how she was not about putting anyone else's needs ahead of the quest--and this in turn having a pay-off in the final episode with Annabeth and Grover rescuing her in a moment of need.

    But I won't forget that the show's most dialogue-heavy episode, episode 4, also winds up being their most epic in scale. Most of the chapter is carried by Annabeth's recollection of her time with Thalia and Luke, or else by Percy providing an emotional support to her, yet the episode culminates with the most colossal monster fight we've seen yet. This says to me that these two things, character and spectacle, can coexist. And indeed, they ought to in a show so entrenched in mythology. 

    And it's also not just that we were on a budget this year so we didn't get as many presents this Christmas. This season especially felt skim on essential ingredients for visual storytelling. We go straight from the massive scale of the Scylla/Charybdis attack only to randomly pop into some random location that we've never been in before, and the spa ladies informing our characters that, "Our fishermen found you floating on a raft and just dropped you on set, so wowie, we didn't even need an establishing shot of this place." 

The Wizard of Oz (1939)

    Even if we choose to start the scene purely from the perspective of Percy not knowing where he is, it's just polite to eventually pan out and let the audience see the perimeter of where they are. That's just basic filmmaking and imparting information to your audience.

    I don't know whether this show requires the budget of something like The Mandalorian. And I also don't know what the behind-the-scenes situation is with this show. The streaming game being what it is in the mid 2020s, it may just be that the only way this show can continue at this time is if they add some water to the soup. So for that, I guess we can thank Disney+ mismanaging the funds for Secret Invasion. 

    Moving away from the filmmaking techniques to the general writing ... 

    I've theorized that a major part of why book 2 tends to fall to the bottom of the totem pole is because this is the segment that marks the series in transition. This is, for example, when Percy's character arcs start to become rather static. 

Spiderman: Into the Spider-verse (2018)

    In the books, Percy's development is the strongest in that first go. He believes things at the start, about himself or about the world, that he does not by the end. Or you could say, he has gained perspectives by the end of the story. These kinds of stories always have some arc where the hero is going to feel unqualified to save the world, but through perseverance and ingenuity, they manage to save the world anyways, and that's the nucleus of Percy's story in that first book.

    But "The Lightning Thief" also has Percy make some major pivots as he gains real-world experience and expands his worldview. Percy discovering his own heroism is buttressed him by making the selfless choice and choosing not to rescue his mother from Hades so that he can fulfill his quest, and also by making peace with his dad after resenting him for most of his life.

Fanart by Baaozhe

    In the last four books, though, Percy's internal conflict is never as strong as it is in that first story. His arcs exist almost entirely in the service of the needs of each specific chapter. His little errands may contain incidental life lessons, but his overall trajectory is fairly level. He never has to venture that far out of his comfort zone or have his core beliefs challenged. He may voice some revelations during each story's curtain call, but he isn't really making choices that never would at the start of the story. 

    His role is more like that of a moral constant than an active investigator of good and evil. And there's scarcely any unity between the takeaways of any specific chapter. Percy's encounter with the Sphinx in book 4 makes some vague comment about the state of the public school system, but the responsibility of linking that to Percy and The Great Prophecy is left entirely up to the reader.

    We've had over fifteen years since the release of "The Last Olympian" in 2009 to search the text for branches to nurture. My biggest question was always whether or not these adaptations were going to make the necessary modifications to give Percy this same kind of characterization across the remainder of the series. And the show's big response to this has been to explore Percy's fatal flaw, to make it a part of the action, and the success was overall mixed. 

    As I said, Percy's story arc of learning to not be ashamed of his connection to Tyson gets gutted. He doesn't act more than moderately embarrassed by his awkwardness, and neither does he face a specific crossroad where he embraces Tyson as his brother for the first time. But this was also never more than a tertiary concern to his larger growth across the series. It does appear that the show's priority vision is to see each of the five seasons as moving toward a specific objective in Percy's trajectory. And this is part of the reason why his overall arc across a season can feel stronger than any of the specific checkpoints that got him there. 

    The last season did an overall good job at adding some necessary interstitial material between Percy's sidequests. Each monster he confronts or dungeon he escapes teaches him something about, in that case, his responsibility as a hero. The steppingstones in this season, meanwhile, were a little more eclectic--as they were in the books. 

    Some of the threads surveyed in this season did not receive proper closure by the season finale. Despite Hermes' plea that Percy go easy on Luke because they are family, Percy's feelings about Luke have not changed at all by the time they are fighting on Half-Blood Hill. This is, in part, because most of Percy's growth concerning the tangled Olympian family tree was couched in his evolving feelings toward Tyson as his half-brother, and that plotline was severely underfed. There were a couple of dangling points like this that I might be willing to forgive because perhaps the writers have designed for them to pay-off in a later season. In the meantime, there are much tighter circuits that connect awkwardly to the main line. 

    The episode with Circe shows her as wanting to keep her guests stuck on the island with her because she's just that lonely. After all, she's been betrayed and abandoned by heroes for centuries. But the episode does very little to showcase any kind of connection with Percy or Annabeth and their situation. These are not flaws we have observed with Percy or Annabeth, and so they are not being confronted with any harsh truths about their history or behavior. 

    As with a lot of the obstacles in Riordan's universe, Circe's whole treatise on "heroes are only kind to you so long you help them" gives lip service to relevant ideas, but it does very little to explore how they fit into a real ecosystem. Neither us nor the characters wind up learning anything about, in this case, not taking allies for granted. This is the same basic thing we talked about in the Finding Nemo essay--forcing your hero to interrogate their own beliefs and behavior by couching relevant ethical questions in the puzzles they are forced to solve.

    A part of it is also the show's refusal to commit to whether or not said character is a bad guy. The show takes a hard stance that "nobody's born a villain, ya' know," but it gives minimal thought to what would move a person to do villainous things and how that connects to a larger ecosystem. This was my main gripe with the last season and the way it tried to fit a sympathetic Medusa alongside a sympathetic Poseidon. 

    That's why, with the exception of Luke, the "human monsters" generally wind up being way less compelling than the creature monsters. Annabeth's actual Siren encounter was way more interesting than anything that happened on Circe's island leading up to it. And this has very little to do with actors like Rosemarie DeWitt and almost everything to do with the direction of the writers. 

    And this also ties into both the show's larger problems with reveals and plot information--and also its obstacles with representing power dynamics and holding them to account. We'll get to that in just a sec ... 

    The idea of Percy having a "fatal flaw" is teased in that second book, but not linked to anything specifically, perhaps because Riordan didn't want to name it then, perhaps because he hadn't decided on what it ought to be. Here, we do know what Percy's flaw is, and it is allowed to participate in the decisions he makes and the stakes of the mission at hand. Percy's great weakness is that he will supposedly always choose to prioritize the safety of his friends over the preservation of the world (even though the first book has him overcome that exact character flaw when he chooses to leave his mother in the Underworld so he can stop the Olympian war, but whatever we'll go with it). 

    And this factors into the directions the plot makes and the decisions Percy makes. A major addition to the show was giving the story that plot point where Percy hands over the macguffin to the bad guy in order to save Annabeth's life, and then has to prove that his conviction and principles are in fact more powerful than the forces that would abuse his good heart. But the main thing that challenges Percy this season is in having to share the burden of responsibility with someone who might be even more dangerous than he is.

    Thalia's return at the end of the second book is arguably the biggest twist of the entire series, and this was another surprise that announced itself very early on in this adaptation. See, in the time since these books premiered, it's almost as though Mr. Riordan has grown remarkably self-conscious at how obvious some of these plot developments can be. That's how it felt through all of last season with the heroes immediately spotting Medusa before she'd even appeared onscreen, and that inclination appears to have only buried itself deeper into the writers' program. And in fairness, a lot of these plot developments were painfully obvious. 

    But the show's impulse is to overcorrect. Instead of finding more organic ways to tease out major reveals, the show just jettisons any and all tension and calls out the obvious thing at the first available opportunity. I initially assumed that giving away the Thalia twist was more of the same, like Annabeth figuring out they were in the lair of the Lotus Eaters the moment they walked into the casino. 

    But Thalia's return here builds to a new revelation that is at least as shocking. Zeus did not spare Thalia's life after all. He imprisoned her in that tree because she would not fall in line with him. This reveal is unique to the show, but it's also perfectly on brand for both the Zeus of the novels and as a mythological figure. Producer, Craig Silverstein described, "It's a binary flip on what was told — the story that Zeus spared Thalia's life — when it was really a punishment. Maybe Zeus could argue that by giving her this time out, he was indeed sparing her life, but it goes to the messy stakes we were just talking about. It makes those stakes operable. It turns what is talked about in the books into something that's real. It also creates a more sympathetic situation [between Percy and Thalia]."

    My valid concern remains whether or not the series is biting off more than it can chew. As with a lot of contemporary media targeting young adults, this show wants so desperately to capture the temperature of a generation taking the powers that be to task. Series author and executive producer, Rick Riordan, explained, "And Luke, even though he’s our antagonist, he’s not wrong. He has a point: The gods can be really, really terrible parents, and not the greatest leaders. So that does underscore sympathy for the enemy here. Who’s on the right side? I think it’s OK that viewers may have some very mixed feelings about who’s the hero here."

    The very real danger is, of course, that the series' ultimate solution manages to be very protective of the status quo. The same powerholders remain in place, they just promise to do better. The gods weren't bad, they just needed someone to give them a good talking to. And if we stop for a moment and try to project that template over the landscape offscreen, we could maybe start to see how that's not always true ...

    By now, it's clear that there are issues in the methods of storytelling that are basically canonized. There are recurring issues with how the film chooses to impart information in a way that makes sense in a visual, time-bound medium like film.

    And yet, this show still grips me. And I don't know what that means. 

    Perhaps that's just the nostalgia factor doing its work. But that wasn't enough for something like the Fantastic Beasts films. And so I have to imagine it's not just that the show translates the nostalgic drapings of the "Percy Jackson" franchise. The show does understand what drew us all to this story about a middle-schooler discovering he was a demigod hero in the first place. 

    Because this show does remind me, mostly, of what I loved about the books through my middle school years. But more than that, it displays how rich this adventure always was. And I don't just mean that it dictates every detail from the books. The show actually dares to try outpacing its source material. It's more successful in some areas than others--the books tended to have stronger syntax and structure while the show has stronger stakes and richer pay-offs. 

    But if they can manage to hold both values at once--if, like Percy, they can be the best of both worlds--the writers might really have something special on their hands. 

                --The Professor