Episode 2 – I Become Supreme Lord of the Bathroom
First of all, I’m loving the episode names coming from book chapters. Small detail but a nice touch.
Synopsis
The episode opens with Percy fading in and out of consciousness as he recovers from his fight with the minotaur at the end of episode 1. He wakes up properly and remembers what happened to his mother. Grover tries to comfort him but Percy doesn’t want to talk. He walks out to Camp hoping he’ll meet his father. He meets Mr D, or Dionysus, the god of wine. He’s the Camp Director and introduces himself as Percy’s father. Percy wants to talk but Mr D won’t until Percy brings him an old bottle of wine. Mr Bruner walks in, in his horse form, it turns out he is Chiron! The trainer of heroes! He explains that Mr D is not Percy’s father, Zeus has forbidden him from drinking alcohol and can’t touch the wine himself, he was tricking Percy. Chiron walks through camp with Percy, explaining the Camp and showing Percy the 12 halls for the children of the 12 Olympians. Each God’s children has their own hall but Percy doesn’t know his father, so he joins with Hermes’s hall, the God of Travellers harbours his own children and the unclaimed. Here Percy meets Luke.
That night Mr D. and Chiron are playing cards when they’re interrupted by Grover, he’s been worried about what he saw happen with Sally and the Minotaur, he saw Sally turn to ash the same way monsters do, he has spoken to the Cloven Council (what?) and they believe that Hades actually took her. Chiron and Mr D already knew about this, and tell Grover to make sure Percy doesn’t find out that his mother could be alive. During the night Percy dreams of a disembodied voice in the shadows who says some creepy stuff about Percy’s dad abandoning him and how he wants justice. Percy jolts awake to see Luke, who calms him and explains that every half-blood has bad dreams, ADHD, Dyslexia, all because they process the world differently to ordinary humans. Percy asks if Luke is also unclaimed, but Luke knows Hermes is his father. Luke explains that he doesn’t waste time trying to figure out why the Gods do things, he prefers to actually enjoy Camp for what it is. As Luke shows Percy around, Percy bumps into Clarisse, who, as a daughter of Ares, is angry and gives Percy a hard time. She leaves Luke alone because he’s the best swordsman at Camp, he has ‘glory’. Percy thinks that if he had ‘glory’ he would be left alone, and his father would have no choice but to claim him. So he and Luke try different camp activities to find what he’s good at. Turns out, he’s bad at archery, blacksmithing, and that’s all we see him try. While eating for the first time at Camp, Percy finds out that everyone has to burn the food they would miss the most as an offering to the Gods, they like the smell of begging. Percy burns a sweet left for him by his mother and tries to speak to Sally. He is happy that for once he’s telling her he’s made friends but frustrated that his father hasn’t shown himself.
After his meal Percy goes to the bathrooms, where Clarisse and her friends are waiting, they grab him and tell him to say he made up what happened with the minotaur for glory. As they try to push his head into the toilets the water flies up and explodes, missing Percy completely, but covering the others. They run off and Percy is left alone and confused. He turns to see the girl who he saw when he reached Camp, Annnabeth, she’s been keeping an eye on him because she wants to know if Pery can be helpful to her. She is the daughter of Athena and head of her house and she’s looking for help to win Capture the Flag, a camp wide game. Luke explains that he will always be on Annabeth’s side because before he reached camp he was travelling with a girl called Thalia, a daughter of Zeus, and they found Annabeth. They had a hard life because Thalia was “forbidden”, the 3 most powerful gods, Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades, agreed their Half-Blood children were becoming too strong, so agreed to never have any more, Zeus broke the pact with Thalia, and she was hunted by monsters. She didn’t survive the journey to Camp but Luke and Annabeth did and they’ll always back each other because of what they went through. Luke knows that Annabeth is testing Percy because she’s been promised someone new will come who will go on a quest and she’ll be a part of it. Luke is interrupted by the horn, signalling Capture the Flag has begun. They have 20 minutes to prepare, Luke directs a company with him but Annabeth takes Percy into the hills. Percy can barely move in his armour, and he talks to Annabeth who hardly talks back. The second horn blows and Annabeth puts on a baseball hat and vanishes. Leaving Percy alone and confused. We see a few seconds of Luke fighting before we go back to Percy, dancing and playing in the woods alone. He’s surprised by Clarisse who wants revenge for the bathroom incident. She has a scary spear and her silent friends to back her up. She beats him easily and gives him another chance to say he lied about beating the minotaur. Percy runs right into a shield and falls beside the river. He retreats but he’s surrounded, he has no choice but to retreat to the water. Percy suddenly fights well and as he defends himself he breaks Clarisse’s spear, she’s furious and to make matters worse, Luke runs by with her team’s flag, she loses the game. Clarisse storms off and Annabeth takes off her hat revealing herself. She pushes Percy into the water properly, and a trident appears above his head. Percy has been claimed by Poseidon.
Chiron takes Percy away to explain that Zeus and Poseidon are heading for war. Zeus is looking for who stole his master lightning bolt, and now his rival, his brother, has claimed a forbidden child. Zeus believes Percy was tasked by his father to steal the bolt but Chiron knows that Hades is the one who really stole it. Poseidon’s will is that his son goes on a quest to retrieve the bolt and prevent war. Percy has no interest but Grover intrudes to admit Hades stole Percy’s mother Sally, Mr D asks “Who’s Sally Jackson?”. But Percy has been left no choice but to travel to the Underworld and stop Hades.
Review
This episode is better than the first, not least because it has a longer runtime! The main thing I hoped for! The episode lasts 40 minutes, and that extra 10 minutes does a lot. It gives us time to meet all these new people. We meet Mr D, and quickly it’s clear that the god of wine is not a reliable leader. We spend more time with Mr Bruner, now Chiron, and see him be a compassionate mentor. We don’t spend a lot of time with Annabeth but she’s the leader of Athena’s hall, she’s clearly calculated and wise and a strong leader. She’s the first to figure out who Percy’s father is and when Luke so clearly has a lot of respect for her, that carries weight.
Now, that’s the character I want to talk about, Luke. Luke is shown to be a good leader, welcoming and kind. He’s respected by everyone at Camp and he loves being there. He doesn’t have a lot of time for the Gods, he doesn’t see any great value in trying to be noticed by them or doing what they want. That’s fine, we have a whole season to delve into why and really we already get it, the most powerful Gods have made a pact to have no more children because they’re too dangerous, and two of them have already broken it. All the Gods enjoy the smell of begging every night as their children burn their favourite foods just to have their prayers heard. The God that works at Camp lied the very first time we saw him and never even cares enough to get Percy’s name right. (In the moment he asks who Sally is, I was ready to go to war myself.) The Gods are awful and as far as we can tell so far Luke is right to have contempt for them. I am fine with that. My one issue is that Luke is supposed to your cool older brother. I remember sitting in the cinema at 10 years old and seeing the film version of Luke playing Call of Duty, he was immediately cool. This guy is nice, I like him, but he’s not cool. We’re told he’s the best swordsman, but the only time we cut to him during Capture the Flag is when he’s defeated a squad from the other team. If I’d seen him win that fight easily or if he had secretly saved his favourite food and shared it with Percy later instead of burning it for the Gods he doesn’t like he would’ve been cool. So far I’m not seeing Luke, I’m just seeing a nice helpful guy at camp, but he’s doing a lot right because I want to see him as Luke. So that’s a good thing and I hope he gets enough time to shine because Luke is one of the most compelling characters in the books and I want to see that here.
Clarisse is a perfectly fine Clarisse, she’s a bully, a child of Ares who wants to be the best and get there through unscrupulous means. She wants to fight and she’s not particularly bright. The idea that the Camp could be convinced Percy lied about beating the minotaur when he still has the horn he took from it’s head is beyond headstrong it’s just dumb. She’s playing her role well and although I think the show overall has great casting, Dior Goodjohn has so far embodied her character better than anyone else in my eyes.
The one shortcoming is I didn’t see her fighting well, the fights are full of cuts and edited so that there’s no violence shown. There’s supposed to an epic tone to this story and if we don’t see the fighting it’s just not there. This is not just an issue in the show, most shows will cut between every hit in a fight scene now in an attempt to add impact, and in the case of this show, I have to wonder if it’s also done to meet an age rating of 12+. I can’t see that a few swords connecting properly would have done anything to affect a 12 year old but it could have allowed us to feel Clarisse was a bigger threat, to see Luke’s fighting prowess that was mentioned but not shown, and to get a better sense of Percy’s bravery standing up and fighting back. In the case of the minotaur fight last episode, the cutting works because it’s night, you get that sense that you can’t see everything, but Capture the Flag takes place in broad daylight so the constant cuts are jarring and detract from an otherwise very powerful episode.
I’m pleased that Luke mentioned Half-Bloods having Dyslexia and ADHD and that it is just a difference in how they see the world. But I have a feeling it’s not going to come up again. I was starting to worry that I should just cast out the fact that Half-Bloods have disabilities because it wasn’t going to be relevant to this version so I am glad that it’s been acknowledged I would have liked to see Percy try a few more camp activities than just archery and blacksmithing, failing at a few more activities would have spoke to that all too familiar feeling of disabled people, that they’re just not good at anything. I also felt it was good that when Percy tried to speak to his mother through his offering he spoke about his absent father. He was angry because he felt that his mother was being disrespected, not because he wasn’t spending time with his dad. I imagine for people living in single-parent households or any other manner of challenging home life could relate to this moment a lot, and if Percy Jackson is showing real life problems using the Greek Gods as allegory, then it’s Percy Jackson for me. That is a central part of why I found these stories so engaging so I am happy to see the representation of these issues and how they’re affecting the child at the heart of them in this story.
Finally, Percy has been claimed, his father is Poseidon. Which you either knew because you’ve seen this story before or read about it before, or you knew because the show is steeped in thinly veiled Poseidon references. (The opening title has a trident through the Y, it wasn’t exactly a secret) It’s a good thing that this ‘mystery’ didn’t last any longer than episode 2, it’s a struggle he has to go through but it’s not a compelling one when the audience all know the answer, so it was unpacked in a good way as Percy is shown to be brave, fighting even when he’s outnumbered and outmatched, breaking Clarisse’s spear using the power the water is giving him even though he doesn’t know that, and ultimately Annabeth’s intelligence when she pushes him in the water, forcing Poseidon to come forth, claim his son, and lead him toward the quest to return the lightning bolt.
8/10, A great introduction to Camp Half-Blood and the myriad of characters that live there. Those that are already familiar with the story can enjoy this rediscovery of camp in the same way new viewers can and through Percy’s eyes we learn about the place and the people together. An underwhelming big fight scene and is the only big drawback. There are a few underdeveloped characters, but I trust that to come together in the episodes to come.
