More Like Percy Boring and the Bore-lympians, Am I Right?

Maybe I’m missing something but I’m really struggling to understand why Percy Jackson and the Olympians is such a beloved series. Now, granted this is based on the adaptations we’ve gotten and there’s no doubt that everyone hates the second film from the movie series, Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters. That movie was pretty terrible since it sidelined many of the characters that were interesting in the previous film, Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief (which, my god, that’s a mouthful) and also crafted one hell of a bland story. That’s a large reason why that film series ended after just two films despite there being five main books in the series and a whole host of spin-off novels and related works. That’s fine. One bad movie adaptation does not mean the source material is bad.

But here we are with a second attempt at adapting The Sea of Monsters, the second book of the novel series, this time in a television series that has original author Rick Riordan’s input and blessing, and what we have is another bland and boring version of this story. One bad adaptation is a fluke. Two, though, is a trendline, and it doesn’t spell good things for the television series, or the novels that they’re adapted from. There has to be some magic here, right? Because I just didn’t see it in the second season of Disney’s show.

Part of the issue, I think, is that it took two years for this season to come out, this despite the fact that the show was supposed to be using kid actors of the appropriate age so it could follow them year by year as they went on their annual journeys. It’s pretty hard to think of these kids as kids when they’ve very visibly aged so quickly in what’s supposed to have been a short year. Percy and his crew are supposed to be thirteen here but he looks like he could drive, maybe sneak into an R-rated movie. The balance of the series is already off because the production cycle takes so long and streaming services are just a bad place to tell tight, fast moving stories that should come out year after year.

This one flaw speaks volumes about this season, though. It’s both rushed in its approach and yet poorly balanced in its details. Where the first season of the show worked to get you invested as it presented a new (or newer version) of this world to audiences, this second season is plagued by jumps in logic, shorthand information we don’t understand, and the assumption that we’re deeply invested in characters that we haven’t seen in two years and barely remember after that. It takes a lot to keep people interested in stories like this and, frankly, this second season doesn’t have what it takes to really make us care about anything going on.

Watching this second season, the first thing that stood out to me is that for a show about demi-gods going to camp to learn about their powers and abilities, Percy Jackson (Walker Scobell) seems incapable of staying at camp. He left camp after a few days in the first season to go on a quest for the gods, and then here, less than a day after he arrives back at Camp Half-Blood with his newly bequeathed half-brother, the cyclops Tyson (Daniel Diemer), he’s off on another quest to save the magical tree that protects the camp after it’s been poisoned by the son of Hermes, Luke (Charlie Bushnell).

Luke, working for Chronos, the mad titan, wants to bring down Camp Half-Blood to start a war between the gods and end the dominion of Olympus. The tree was Zeus’s daughter, Thalia (Tamara Smart), and her magic has been protecting the camp from monsters. The only way to cure the tree is to find the Golden Fleece, which can heal all wounds, and bring it back. This will put the protection of the tree back up at full power and stop the monsters. But if Luke gets the fleece first he can use it to heal Chronos and bring the mad titan back. Percy and his friends – Leah Sava Jeffries as Annabeth, Aryan Simhadri as Grover, and Dior Goodjohn as Clarisse – will have to do whatever it takes to be heroes and save the gods from the old titans.

What that summary of the plot makes pretty clear is that Percy never hangs out at camp. It’s the central location for the stories insofar as Percy will show up at camp, get a quest, and then be forced out into the world to follow that quest, but as far as being a camper, learning things at camp (like arts, crafts, war, chariot racing, and the like) and bonding with other campers, that never seems to happen. The show talks about how camp is so important, how it’s needed to keep all the demi-gods safe, except we can’t really get a feel for camp when, especially in this second season, we never spend any time there.

Although I’m sure fans of the books would consider it reductive to make the comparison, Percy Jackson and the Olympians is effectively Harry PotterFirst released as a series of books (starting in the UK before moving worldwide), the Harry Potter series gained great acclaim before even becoming a series of successful movies. Now encompassing books, films, a prequel series, and a successful two-part play, the series even now shows no end in sight. but with Greek Mythology instead of wizards and magic. And the key difference between Percy’s and Harry’s stories is that Hogwarts feels like another character in the story, a living breathing place where anything can happen and magic is around every corner, while Camp Half-Blood is barely a footnote in Percy’s adventures. He shows up, grabs a snack, says “hi” to the counselors, and then bounces off to do something more important. Twice now that’s been the case and it’s hard to think that’s going to change any time soon.

Not that we really want to spend a lot of time at the camp. It’s a pretty half-baked location, all things considered. The sets are cheap, as is the action that takes place, and the kid actors the production team hired to fill out the ranks of half, demi-god campers can’t really act. It lacks the specific magic, that sense of wonder, that a central location like this needs. It was passable in the first season as we were just learning what was going on in Percy’s life, but now the place feels small and underwhelming, dotted with character actors as counselors that barely have any impact on the story. Frankly were it not for the fact that this season’s whole plotline is about saving the tree protecting camp, you could excise the camp from the season and it wouldn’t make any difference to the function of the story.

Not that the adventures Percy goes on throughout the season are much better. They’re all structured as little, simple segments that barely get going before they’ve already resolved themselves. Take, for instance, the episode that takes place on the island of Circe, a witch who has been cursed by the gods to be stuck on her island, presumably alone. The island is guarded by sirens and if anyone tries to leave, including Circe, they will die. Circe has built a spa on the island, one that keeps people trapped there for eternity on the premise that they can’t leave lest the sirens will kill them. But Percy figures out that Circe is manipulating people, keeping them there so that she’s never alone. Once he says this to Circe, she curses him, turning him into a guinea pig, so he can’t spill his secrets.

This is the kind of setup and story that could fuel a long plotline. There’s the initial mystery about the island, the secrets Circe is keeping, and what it all means. Is she good? Is she evil? Does she have magic? And then once she curses him, you figure that Annabeth will need to slowly figure out what’s going on, and that danger will follow her as she unravels all of Circe’s plans. This is an elaborate story, right?

Nope. Within seconds of the kids waking on the island they already realize who Circe is and tell us, the audience, very matter of factly that she’s a cursed witch and this is all a ruse. Then when Percy confronts her, stupidly, and she curses him, it takes Annabeth mere moments to figure out not only that he’s a guinea pig but also how to save him (via a bottle of vitamins that were given to him by the gods earlier, a deus ex machina item that exists only for this one, specific purpose). It’s blunt and stupid storytelling that barely invests in its characters, setting, or plot before resolving it all in the dumbest ways possible. And that’s every episode this season.

Which leads me back to wondering if this is a flaw in the television series or the books themselves. One has to assume, especially with the author having some input here, that this season of the show is based on the book and is an adaptation all involved are happy with. And if that’s the case, that would indicate to me that The Sea of Monsters isn’t a book worth adapting. We’ve gotten two bites at the apple, two attempts at making this work, and both have failed. Is this the fault of the people making it or is it just that Percy Jackson and the Olympians sucks?

I had some hopes for this show after this first season, but this second season is so awful I don’t know if I’ll even bother with this third. This season is poorly constructed, tedious in the way it’s written, and fails to build a world that I want to care about, all for a story that barely even needs to exist. I don’t know where this series is expecting to go but, considering the quality of this second season, I have to think most people aren’t going to stick around to find out.