‘Percy Jackson’: Sally & Poseidon Flashback Details Revealed by Rick Riordan
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Toby Stephens‘ Poseidon will make his series debut in Percy Jackson and the Olympians Season 1 Episode 7 on Tuesday, January 23, on Disney+. Viewers will finally meet the sea god in a flashback scene with Sally Jackson (Virginia Kull), a moment specially created for this series.
Readers meet Percy Jackson’s father when the demigod does in The Lightning Thief book. The creators’ desire to improve upon the original story in the TV adaptation led to the creation of the Sally and Poseidon flashback we’ll see in Episode 7, “We Find Out the Truth, Sort Of.”
Rick Riordan, the author of the Percy Jackson franchise and series co-creator/writer/executive producer, tells TV Insider that “it’s so important to us to use this new format to its best advantage, which means getting to see things that happen in the story, but not from Percy’s point of view.”
“In the books, there’s a lot of advantages to having a first-person narrator. You’re in Percy’s head; his voice is always with you. So we tried our best to recreate that, but at the same time, we have multiple viewpoints,” Riordan shares. “We are able to give you a flashback with Sally and Poseidon talking about how their son is doing and how he is struggling. It brought tears to my eyes, and it’s one of Becky [Riordan, also an executive producer], my wife’s, favorite scenes.”
Prior to Poseidon’s arrival, Sally struggles with young Percy (Azriel Dalman), who desperately does not want to change schools again. As Riordan explains above, Sally and Poseidon will discuss the struggles of providing Percy the help that children with ADHD (and this special demigod) need.
“Seeing Sally struggling to raise this little boy who’s been kicked out of school at this tender age of 8 or 9, and he’s gone through so many schools. She has to take him to another one; he doesn’t want to go. Every parent can relate to that,” Riordan reveals about the flashback scene. “It’s so heartbreaking when you have to try to help your child and figure out what the best thing is for them, but then also kind of be the authority figure and say, ‘You may not see why this is important for you to do now, but you’re going to have to trust me on this. This is just something that you need to do.'”
The Riordans know this experience well. The story of Percy Jackson was “originally a story for my son who’s ADHD and dyslexic,” the author says. “The whole rationale of creating Percy Jackson was about that. It was about letting him see that learning differences were not a weakness; they were a difference. And they simply meant that you see the world in a different way, and that can be a huge advantage.”
“I could tell him that when you are an adult with learning differences, you can be a very successful person, but that’s a little abstract when he was 9 years old. So instead, I used mythology for what mythology is good for, which is explaining things that are hard to explain,” Riordan goes on. “I created Percy Jackson, who finds out that those are indicators that you’re a demigod. And something about that just clicked for him. He immediately intuitively understood what I was saying, and that became a badge of honor. And it’s so great to hear from other readers who felt the same way. I even get people writing me saying, ‘Oh, I wish I had ADHD.”
The adult guest stars of Percy Jackson and the Olympians have been used to great effect to establish the future of the series. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s scene with Percy and Annabeth (Leah Sava Jeffries) in Episode 6 was another created for the show, as were the Ares (Adam Copeland) and Grover (Aryan Simhadri) and Hephaestus (Timothy Omundson) scenes in Episode 5. All of these moments work to introduce the Olympians that will continue to play major roles in the series moving forward, should it be renewed, as well as provide quality entertainment for viewers of all ages.
“When we talk about the four-quadrant approach to TV, that’s what we have in mind,” Riordan says. “That just because it’s about children does not mean it’s a children’s show. This is a human show. It’s about coming of age, yes. It’s about parenting, sure. It’s about becoming a hero. It’s about learning who you are in the world. All of us can remember how awkward and terrible those years were when we were 12 and 13. I mean, that is formative, and it’s important that that’s the focus of the show, but it is done, I hope, in a way that anyone will enjoy watching it and say, ‘Oh gosh, I relate to that.'”
Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Tuesdays, 9/8c, Disney+
