SPOILER ALERT! This post contains details from the season finale of Percy Jackson and the Olympians.
Percy Jackson has restored some order to Mount Olympus — for now.
The Season 1 finale of Disney+‘s Percy Jackson and the Olympians uncovered the truth about who stole the Master Bolt, as well as their motive. After their run-in with Ares (Adam Copeland) that resulted in the trio stealing back his shield in order to make it to Los Angeles before the solstice, a trip to the Underworld reveals that Ares was never their benevolent savior in the first place. In fact, he definitely had something to do with Percy being framed for stealing the Master Bolt.
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Once Percy, Annabeth and Grover manage to escape Hades without Percy’s mom, they confront Ares about conspiring with Clarisse (or so they think) to wreak havoc on Mount Olympus. Walker Scobell, who plays Percy, went head-to-head with WWE Hall of Famer Copeland in the scene, which he said turned him into a fan of wrestling.
“You couldn’t have found a better person to do that fight with…It was just so easy to do the fight with him. It’s always scary, because you have just like an even though they’re wooden the sword can still hurt you, but I never ever felt like I could get hit by him,” Scobell told Deadline. “Even when I was about to get hit, he would stop an inch away from my face. He was super careful about that. And he made sure I was okay with it, which I always was because he’s the coolest guy ever.”
A normal 12-year-old probably didn’t stand a chance against a Greek god, this is Percy Jackson we’re talking about. As Percy tries to defeat Ares, he gets some help from his dad Poseidon in the form of a giant wave that crashes on the beach in Santa Monica. It disables Ares long enough for Percy to slash his heel. While they may have made a pretty terrifying enemy, they’re safe for now.
While Scobell and Copeland were adversaries on screen, the young actor said that off-screen he got some much-needed encouragement from the wrestler to make that a momentous scene.
“Him, me and Aryan, the whole time we were talking about the Rocky movies. We just talked about how much we love them,” he said. “That scene, we filmed it a few times, and he was standing there. What I love about Adam is that he doesn’t have to be there for that, but he was always there just to get me in that mood, which is really professional. I kept doing it and getting up and it felt alright but it just wasn’t where we wanted it to be. And he came up and he just hyped me up and he’s like, hands on my shoulders, ‘This is you rocky moment.’ They ended up using that take.”
Once he returns the Master Bolt and gets back to Camp Half-Blood, though, Percy finds that he has his work cut out for him. As it turns out, Luke is actually the demigod who stole the Master Bolt, but he wasn’t working for Ares. No, he was taking orders from Kronos, who is supposed to be buried at the bottom of Tartarus. When his conversation with Percy goes south, Luke escapes from Camp Half-Blood.
The events unfold similarly but not exactly how they do in the The Lightning Thief novel, keeping even the series’ readers on their toes. And for those viewers who are new to Percy’s world, Scobell and his co-stars, Aryan Simhadri and Leah Sava Jeffries, have enjoyed all the theories about how this could end. Some were more inventive than others.
“It’s even funnier when they’re not right…They’re like, ‘I think I know who stole the Master Bolt. It might be Grover,” Jeffries said, which Simhadri thought was a “solid guess.”
They’re ready to keep audiences on their toes and jump into Sea of Monsters, which is the second book in Riordan’s series. The show hasn’t been officially renewed yet, but based on its performance for Disney+ so far, an announcement seems imminent.
As Deadline previously reported, the premiere episode reached more than 26M views in its first three weeks on the streamer. The first five episodes all managed to surpass 10M in their first week. Disney has not released updated numbers on the performance for the final episodes — though it’s likely not far off.
“I am really happy [with] the outcome of this,” Jeffries said. “It took almost a year to film this…even though it went by so fast. Just the way people are taking it in and creating so many different edits and making plots of their own is just really cool to see.”
Should they get a Season 2, the trio told Deadline they’re looking forward to settling into their characters and taking on a more mature tone.
“I’m just looking forward to Grover’s development in Season 2 because he grows a lot. That’s kind of when his arc kicks in in the most because he finally has a searchers license,” Simhadri said.
Added Scobell: “It just gets to a darker tone after Sea of Monsters. That’s pretty cool.” (For the record, he’s looking ahead to Titan’s Curse, which “is a little bit underrated.”
Percy Jackson and the Olympians is now streaming on Disney+.
