Let’s Talk About Season Two of ‘Percy Jackson and the Olympians’
‘If I had to choose between saving you or saving Olympus… Annabeth, I’d burn it all down.’
- Percy Jackson and the Olympians, season 2 episode 5, 2025
What about the second season of Percy Jackson and the Olympians isn’t bigger, better and more entertaining than the first? Despite most of the child actors looking like they’ve aged about five years since the making of the first season, everything about this adaption of Sea of Monsters shows the audience that they have really upped their game. It seems they’ve even learnt their lesson about the length of time between season releases, as the third season of the show is set to release towards the end of this year.
As a fan of the books, I was really happy with the show’s first season, an adaptation of Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief, which of course got a movie adaptation in 2010, starring Logan Lerman and Alexandra Daddario. Putting the nostalgia for this film aside, it has a reputation for being quite terrible, and having a loose grasp on the book at best. It did what most YA book adaptations were doing in the 2010s: taking the general idea of the book and running with it, with barely any input from the author.
(Defeating Medusa with an iPod is still one of my favourite movie moments of all time, though.)
Disney’s Percy Jackson and the Olympians once again proves that having the author of your source material on board and in the writing room is only ever a good thing for the project. (I’m looking at the House of the Dragon producers when I say that…).
So, yes, I was very happy with the direction and atmosphere they were beginning to build throughout the first season of Percy Jackson, and that they were so faithful to the book. Even the embellishments or newly introduced plot points felt like they were adding something rather than taking away. I think The Lightning Thief, as the most typically children’s book of them all, is quite strangely paced and formulated anyway, and to adapt it for either film or TV, changes have to be made for it to work. Really it’s a sequence of events that Percy and his friends get caught up in. They are swept from one thing to the next by the Gods and their quest, and I do think that lends itself to an episodic TV format rather than film.
The Sea of Monsters isn’t dissimilar, but I do think it’s where the books take on a slightly more serious tone, delving deeper into the overarching plot as we discover what place Percy will take in the war between the Gods.
Ultimately, the increase of scale also makes it a harder book to adapt. You have absolute titans of Greek mythology introduced in this book: Scylla and Charybdis, Circe’s island, Polyphemus and the Golden Fleece. I was slightly worried about what shape these events were going to take, but there was such an obvious increase in budget for this season that I shouldn’t have worried at all. The Scylla and Charybdis sequences, and really anything action-packed taking place on Clarisse’s warship, looked fantastic, and really heightened my expectations of what the production team are going to be able to do in later seasons.
Even though I have my reservations about the battle at Camp Halfblood, I also have to acknowledge that they were great action scenes that felt like a step up from the first season – the chariot race compared to capture the flag, for example, is no real comparison at all.
Not being a standout favourite of mine in the books, I thought the amount of focus on Clarisse as a character and her relationship with Percy, Annabeth and Grover was an interesting choice. Although she plays a bigger part in the second book, we get a lot of her point of view this season that we don’t see in Percy’s narration. I definitely think they’re trying to establish her character more so that there’s bigger payoff further down the line, but as a fan of the books I’m not sure whether they’re developing this dynamic with Percy and her own internal conflict – the loyalty to her father, Ares, versus her loyalty to the camp and her friends – too quickly. I was also sad that the focus on Clarisse took a little bit away from the time we spend with Percy and Annabeth.
I won’t wax poetic about Percy and Annabeth for too long, but I do just have to say that Walker Scobell and Leah Sava-Jeffries are biblically accurate. I am totally obsessed with the dynamic they are building for the pair: giving us just enough to really care and become invested in their relationship without going overboard. As they seem to keep having to remind their audience: it’s a slow burn!
I also enjoyed how well this season balanced its playfulness with a more serious tone. Yes, there are Mariah Carey needle drops and guinea pig pirates, but we also get to see Percy’s reckoning with the Great Prophecy, and how his relationship with his father shapes how he feels about Luke’s argument, the war between the Gods and Kronos, and where he fits into it all. It carries over into his relationships with both Annabeth and Grover, and of course the new dynamic hinted at between him and Thalia, another child of the Big Three.
Personally, I think Percy’s character is a bit too sure of himself and confident about being placed in such a steadfast, leadership role this season. His quests are their own beast, but to really command the attention and respect of the entire camp this early on, by the end of this season, I feel like we’re getting ahead of ourselves. He’s supposed to be thirteen in Sea of Monsters, so I can only feel like his big, rapturous speech about how the camp must rally together and defend their home, especially when so many in the room seem even younger than him, was slightly tokenistic, and set him up as a leader and hero too quickly. For me, that Percy only fully shows himself in The Last Olympian.
To be honest, I think a lot of the final episode felt like something they supposed had to be tacked on to the end of the book’s storyline in order to be more impactful for a TV adaptation. The book’s action concludes on Luke’s cruise ship, which is the penultimate episode of the show. I understand why they needed something else impactful: a bigger head-to-head between the Camp and Luke’s group. However I do worry this means that upcoming conflict is going to be less impactful – they’re still young children here, not at all near the height of their power or confidence. It means that the scale and stakes are going to have to be continually increased to keep up the momentum they’ve built.
And then there’s the introduction of Thalia. This is the point to turn back if you don’t want any explicit spoilers for the season, because I need to talk about Thalia’s character in detail - for my own sanity, because Rick Riordan, we need to have a chat.
Thalia saved Camp Halfblood, and Luke and Annabeth, by defending the camp from cyclopes and being turned into a tree by her father, Zeus, in a bid to save her life. This tree then forms the protective barrier around Camp. At least, this is how it goes in the book. It’s how it goes in the show too, until a very interesting reveal in the finale. We find out that Zeus did not save Thalia’s life by turning her into a tree, but instead was threatened by her defiance of him, and what her survival might mean for the Great Prophecy (in which it is told that a child of the Big Three, once sixteen, will either save or destroy Olympus), and so turned her into a tree as punishment, and out of fear.
The season ends with Thalia’s tree transformed back into herself, and reunited with Annabeth and Grover, but tension is already brewing between her and Percy. This change to the plot might initially seem minor, but I think it might completely change Thalia’s role in the entire series. Her hatred for her father, especially since what he has done to her, might make her more sympathetic to Luke’s cause. Percy (and Annabeth, albeit reluctantly) have already toyed with worries that Thalia would agree with Luke and want to work with him, and this simply gives her another reason to take his side. I also worry that this begets more divergences from the book in the upcoming season, which although I am not completely against, adaptations are of course only adapted from a text, there was a promise made to fans of Percy Jackson that the show would be faithful to the books. I think it would be unwise to turn their main audience against the show.
However, this was a conscious choice that the writers must have made for a reason, and I will continue to have faith that they are confident in the direction they are going. They have, after all, provided us with two great seasons so far.
It is also exciting that with the upcoming season, probably in Winter of this year, is delving for the first time into material that has not previously been adapted. It will be fun to see what they will do, and how it may be received, now that there is nothing to compare it to. I can’t wait to see what Percy is going to be like without Annabeth by his side, and without doubt I’m excited for the introduction of one new character in particular…