My relationship with Percy Jackson and the Olympians is complex, because I love the books, and I wanted to love the TV show, but I didn’t.
In fact, after watching a few episodes I would find myself walking into rooms after my partner saying “And actually another thing” before venting the latest frustration that crossed my mind.
But catharsis is important. And I do believe in the show’s potential. I want to believe in the show’s potential.
So let’s get into what Season 1 did well and what I hope the rest of the seasons will do better:
Percy Jackson incarnated
I really do think the main three kids are amazing. Walker Scobell, Leah Jeffries and Aryan Simhadri understand the spirit of their characters. And when they are given the chance — they shine.
Some stand-out moments for me:
Walker Scobell’s understanding of Percy’s distrust, his ‘impertinence’ and his playfulness. He holds a lot of comedic potential and I want the writer’s to let him unleash it.
Leah Jeffries has some brilliant moments as Annabeth — my favourite was when she was choosing the sweets from the shop. Jeffries really lets us see that Annabeth is in some sense… a sheltered child. She hasn’t been outside of camp since she was seven! And she always wants to make the right choice. For Annabeth — the stakes are high even when it’s buying sweets.
Aryan Simhadri is a perfect Grover. He has a kind energy and shines a new light on Grover — not just as Percy’s best friend, but also the initial lynchpin of the group that holds Annabeth and Percy together.
Sword Fighting — Choreography
Now this — this was great! I am only disappointed we didn’t see more of it. Or that, sometimes, it felt like it was cut short. The Ares fight could have gone on slightly longer. I would have loved to see Luke teaching Percy technique as well as godly strategy. It felt like by rushing through the Camp Half-Blood scenes we were left without an understanding of just how much time the demi-gods spend training. And part of that forms our understanding of characters like Luke and Annabeth who have spent their entire lives training.
Luke trained for years and then failed a quest that had already been completed. Luke was the best sword fighter at camp. In the book he is called: “the best swordsman in the last 300 years” — and while I think they showed that Luke is a leader at camp, it would have been good to see his abilities. In the Sea of Monsters, we see Luke beat Percy easily at hand to hand combat and, actually, throughout the book series (even beyond Percy Jackson and the Olympians), we feel the impact that Luke had on Percy’s sword fighting. Percy always comes back to him — Luke was his trainer. His mentor. And while I’m glad we got these in the Episode Eight flashbacks, I’d have liked their training sessions to have more space to breathe for the way they set these two characters up for the rest of the series.
Luke & Percy — Two Sides of the Same Coin
As I’ll get into, there were a lot of changes from the book that had me head in hands (or pacing in rage around my flat as I’ve said), but what I did appreciate was the time we spent with Percy and Luke before the quest begun. Again, the only thing I’d have liked was… well, more. But that is more a problem with how few episodes the show had — I think it could have done with ten.
The show really expanded on Percy’s troubled feelings about the gods and their relationship with their children. We saw Percy grapple with what it was to be a god’s child — and to refuse to accept the gods failings as just ‘this is how things are’. Because of this, I thought it did make sense that Luke tried to recruit Percy at the end of the season so explicitly. Why wouldn’t he? He really saw himself in Percy.
Young boys who lost their mothers because of their fathers’ world. A natural sword fighter. A fighter, full stop. And then that spark, that burning ember of rage that Percy carries that Luke would have known. Of course he’d look at show-Percy and think ‘I see you. And if you survive, then I’ll help you’.
And to Percy, we felt the way that he saw Luke as one of his first real friends (remember at the start of Camp Half Blood, he’s just had the rug pulled out from his friendship with Grover who has betrayed him and revealed that he was there as Percy’s ‘protector’). Luke is not only his friend, but also the big brother figure he never had. It makes Luke’s betrayal all the more gut-wrenching.
Show don’t tell
Rule number one of writing: Show don’t tell. The Percy Jackson TV show has a problem with telling, not showing. The characters will announce to the audience the monster of the episode and how they entrap people. We watched it with Medusa, The Lotus Casino, and the most painful one of all… Our confrontation with Procrustes at ‘Crusty’s Water Bed Palace’. I watched, in shock (and some horror), as Percy walked in and announced — “You are Procrustes and you trap travellers here.” I am SORRY. How did you know that little boy? Who warned you of this?
When short on time because of the limited episode problem., I don’t know why they even bothered to include the scene at this point. What the scene offers in the book is an example of Percy’s street smarts. He thinks on his feet and outsmarts Crusty that way. And the clock is ticking — Annabeth and Grover are being stretched while Percy tries to find a way to free them. This tension doesn’t exist in the show.
Percy walks into the shop with a plan and then they carry it out perfectly. I simply don’t understand the point. Perhaps it was to sow the seeds for the possibility for godly children to be monstrous — but seeing as the book series later on explores this idea of god’s children being literal monsters repeatedly, I didn’t think it was needed.
(I am not even going to touch on the cruelty of Disney teasing the fact Percy cuts off Crusty’s head in the book by having it be a threat it in the episode. (When I catch you, Micky Mouse!!))
A strong woman isn’t just a woman who shouts back
I am going to be brave. I am going to dip my toe in the tempestuous waters that are: sharing an opinion on Sally Jackson’s character. Ultimately, I think the show wrote a very different character to the books for Percy’s mum… Is that a good thing? Urm…
A lot of the conversation I have seen around the changes for Sally is that she was made ‘human’ in the show. And I think the show did have a great chance to expand on Sally’s character.
But I don’t think we should forget that she was human in the books too. She was flawed — and she explicitly states this. She loved Percy too much. She was selfish and put his life in danger because she couldn’t let him go. But she also put herself in danger (see dating Gabe because he kept monsters away) to keep him close. And this is an extremely interesting angle! It is a real shame we lost all of this — because it was such fertile ground.
The show’s treatment of Sally and Posideon’s relationship is interesting — the fact he came when she called (or didn’t call). We saw the struggles of Sally being a single mother. But I feel we also lost some of the love and fun that Percy and Sally shared. He may have got his distaste for being told what to do from the sea (THE SEA DOESN’T LIKE TO BE RESTRAINED!!) but he also very much got it from his mother too. She rebels against Gabe where she can. She will not live a life where she depends on either Poseidon or her son. She is her own person in the books — and I think it does a disservice to kind women to pretend that their kindness negates everything else strong about them.
I am also gutted about the loss of Annabeth’s crush on Luke.
I think Annabeth may have also suffered from the media worrying about writing ‘strong’ female characters. And not understanding that we want real female characters. I mean who hasn’t had a crush on the cool older boy (even when they do turn out to be a bit of a terrible person?!)? The crush keeps her blinded to some of Luke’s true faults. And puts pressure on her relationship with Percy — as he knows she is slightly blind when it comes to Luke, and it drives him mad. You can be smart and have crushes.
And I think it is realistic for a young girl to have a crush on an older boy. And to have it represented in TV. It isn’t a puritanical sin. Sorry not sorry.
Where are my stakes?
As I touched on in the last section… There were pacing choices that were made for sure when adapting scenes for the show. Were they good choices? Debatable. But they were certainly choices.
I know Rick Riordan hates the Percy Jackson movies. And I get it. If I wrote a book series and felt that a film adaptation took everything good about my series and left it as a husk… I’d probably feel the same. But I am not the author. I am a fan.
And I have a confession.
After watching the Lotus Casino episode of the show… I went and watched the Lotus Casino montage of the film… And it is better. There is no denying that it is better! And not just because of the choice to play ‘Poker Face’ by Lady Gaga.
In the TV show the kids walk into the casino and announce: this place is bad. They tell us what is wrong with the Lotus Casino and then go searching for Hemes.
It just wasn’t… fun! It wasn’t fun and we knew exactly what was going to happen before it happened. I don’t get it. I am trying to rationalise this choice and I simply don’t get it. Are we supposed to believe camp / Chiron (or Ares?!) warned them about the Lotus Casino? If so, again they have done nothing to set this up. We didn’t see them learning about different monsters and were they might exist out in the real world. And you cannot make viewers fill in every gap. There is a balance to strike between over-telling and not telling us enough.
I think where we really felt the stakes (or lack of) though was in the choice to have the trio miss the Summer Solstice deadline. I presume that this choice was made so that when we see Poseidon and Zeus face off on Olympus, Poseidon is able to sacrifice something to save Percy. He sacrifices his pride and surrenders in the war. And it was a good line. But… I didn’t feel the emotional sacrifice from Poseidon because I forgot there was a supposed ‘war’ going on.
In the book, Riordan built up the stakes not just through stating the risks of the gods at war, but showing how it was brewing and impacting the world before the war even started.
The weather is unsettling even when we’re in the human world — as if the sea and the sky are fighting each other.
I just didn’t feel the pay off was enough to justify the choice to change the solstice deadline.
I also saw someone pointing out that … What was Percy going to do other than return the lightning bolt? They make it this big choice that Percy chooses to return it even though the deadline has passed.
I thought the moment between Percy and his father was great. And I get that by setting Percy up as almost anti-god from the start… They needed Poseidon to pull out a big gesture so that it would make sense that Percy wouldn’t side with Luke; and Poseidon surrounding to Zeus was supposed to be this. But there wasn’t a build up. The acting was great in the moment, but even good acting can’t hold up to the fact I didn’t care about the gods war. I just didn’t believe it really mattered.
The loss of the absurd
One of the real strengths of Riordan’s books is the twists he adds to the classic myths — and often this is where a lot of the comedy of the books comes from. Because the stakes are high, our trio’s lives are at risk, but the monsters and the situations are interesting. They are unique. And they are often absurd in brilliant ways.
In the run up to the show, I saw a lot of talk about how they would manage Percy’s sense of humour because Percy is sarcastic and witty — but not always out loud. We, the reader, know this about him because he is our narrator. But as he often notes — to the rest of his world — he comes across as angry, reserved and a trouble maker. If Disney was braver, perhaps we’d have had a Fleabag, Enola Holmes style show — but RIP to the potential this held.
However, I think this balance could have been struck better if the writers hadn’t stripped the show of the absurd. It’s a strange balance they’ve struck. They Disney-fied a lot of monster deaths, showing them in in the most Disney-Mouse-friendly way you can imagine (Percy Jackson, monster beheader, I will always miss you), and they removed a lot of the books’ humour as if to make the show more serious…
The pink poodle scene in the woods. The actual joy of the Lotus Casino being a place from a child’s dreams. Charon wearing Italian silk suits. All of these moments would have brought in that humour that was missing. All of these moments would have showed the brilliant way Riordan originally blended the old and the new. All of these would have kept the book’s heart.
In conclusion (as they say)
I could go on. I am trying not to go on. I haven’t even really touched on Gabe. Or the lack of the godly in the gods (other than Zeus; Lance Reddick did a brilliant job of making him seem other, and the spark in his eyes is something I’d have liked to see with all the gods).
I haven’t wanted to just rant about the show. I wanted to reflect on what they did well and what wasn’t so strong. I think all of these weaknesses are things that can be fixed, though — I believe in letting shows grow and not cutting them off at the ankles. I am cautious for season two, but I will remain optimistic. I think I have to. Otherwise, the show is a waste of a great cast. And probably Percy Jackson’s last chance at a live-action adaptation.
Thanks for reading Wistful Writing Diaries! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
