By Clare Mckinley, Staff Writer

Look, I didn’t want to be obsessed with a series about 12-year-olds going on adventures intertwined with Greek mythology, but now I am. Percy Jackson and the Olympians released its final episode of its first season on Disney+ last week, and it still has me in a chokehold. My advice is this: read the books, and don’t expect much from this adaptation. 

In a nutshell, Percy Jackson and the Olympians follows the story of Rick Riordan’s book series of the same name. Season one, in particular, follows the plot of book one, The Lightning Thief. It tells the story of the demigods Percy (the son of Poseidon), Annabeth (the daughter of Athena) and Grover, a satyr protector (a half human-half goat) as they embark on a quest to recover Zeus’ stolen master lightning bolt from the underworld. Oh, and if they fail, a war between the gods will break out, and the world will end. It’s no biggie, just a couple of 12-year-olds tasked with saving the world. Should be fun, right? 

It actually is! 

The show does a good job sprinkling in some funny one liners here and there to avoid complete doom and gloom. But the overpowering serious tone of the episodes overshadows the light hearted moments and fails to capture the essence of Percy Jackson’s ridiculous internal monologues and funny moments. 

It feels like they cut a lot of moments that were actually super relevant to characterization and the characters’ relationships. How hard would it have been for them to spend two minutes talking to the poodle to lighten the mood? Do we ever get to see Grover eat a tin can, Percy talk to a zebra or Annabeth’s love of architecture (which is actually super important to who she is and is a recurring theme throughout the rest of the series)? No, we do not. 

It’s not just the small details that got lost in translation. Each episode was like a bullet pointed list. They covered the basic plot point of how things were supposed to go and then changed every other major detail and sequence of events. Until of course they decided to change arguably one of the most important defining moments of the series, making it no better than the wildly inaccurate movies in that regard. 

Infidelity to the original source material aside, the pacing of the show also fell flat. It felt rushed at times and painfully slow at others. Now, that could be because they were trying to fit a 400-page book into eight episodes, but they did not make very effective use of their limited time. If a monster is chasing you, you should be running. 

One of the biggest recurring problems with the show is that they tell you everything that is going to happen instead of showing you. They spent half of the series providing exposition through dialogue as opposed to action. By the last few episodes, it made the show predictable and sucked the mystery and suspense out of everything. 

I mean, any 12-year-old who walks into a waterbed emporium after not getting a good night’s rest in a week and isn’t tempted to hop from bed to bed and then take a nap should be up in Mount Olympus running things because that takes a lot of willpower. On multiple occasions when presented with a “trap,” the kids proceeded to explain exactly what was going to happen and tell us how they planned to avoid the trap, instead of showing us how resourceful and intelligent they were by escaping the dangerous situation. 

All that being said, do I still want them to make a season two? Yeah, actually I do. The actors did a great job getting the characters from the page to the screen and the imaginary world of Rick Riordan was brought to life. There’s a reason this show could be made 20 years after the books were written: because it’s good. Hopefully when they get a season two, they can stay true to what makes the Percy Jackson series so loved… and consult me before making any major changes.