‘Percy Jackson and the Olympians’ Season 2 Episode 4 Review: A Gray Mess

We are three weeks into Percy Jackson and the Olympians Season 2, The Sea of Monsters, which brings us to the half way point of the season, Episode 4. By now, we get a real sense of how the show is playing out and I think many of my criticisms of the previous adaptation and the book are making themselves more obvious.

Percy Jackson and the Olympians Season 2 Episode 4 picks up where we left off, with Percy and Annabeth fleeing Luke’s cruise ship, the Princess Andromeda. The episode largely focuses on the duo reuniting with Clarisse (Dior Goodjohn) as well as passing Scylla and Charybdis.

Read the episode synopsis below:

“Quests collide as our crew voyages into the perilous Sea of Monsters”

I think most obviously where this episode fails is the visuals. The show, which is what is essentially an adaptation of The Odyssey, looks really awful, especially with the scenes at sea. Everything is filtered under this ugly gray fog, which is definitely a stylistic choice, but definitely a bad one. This is made to look a thousand times worse when the other recent Odyssey adaptation, Chris Nolan’s The Odyssey, just debuted its first trailer and proves that a storm ridden sea can look amazing. Some might call that a bad comparison, but I think the visuals aren’t the only things wrong with this episode, but really is the tip of the iceberg.

Whilst the acting remains the highlight of the season, the dialogue is hitting new lows, with each new conversation inducing eyerolls. I can’t exactly blame this one on the series though, as they are only translating the book, which suffers from its monotonous story. The story does edge on the side of good towards the end, which we are graciously heading towards following this episode’s cliffhanger.

Thus far in this season, there has been a clear under utilization of Aryan Simhadri’s acting abilities, having only appeared in like two scenes and a flashback. And whilst I think everyone is good in this show this season, excluding Timothy Simons, but the truly great actors they have like Lin Manuel Miranda or Jason Mantzoukas are criminally underutilized. I think the modernized fantasy genre of the series is really quite underutilized as well, as most of this episode is them plodding along the ocean.

Percy Jackson and the Olympians Season 2 Episode 4 stars Walker Scobell as Percy Jackson, Leah Sava Jeffries as Annabeth Chase, Daniel Diemer as Tyson, Aryan Simhadri as Grover Underwood, Charlie Bushnell as Luke Castellan, Tamara Smart as Thalia Grace, and Dior Goodjohn as Clarisse La Rue. Watch the season now on Disney+ below:

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