TL;DR – We’re in Vegas baby, so surely everything is going to go well, and nothing will derail their plans at all.

Disclosure – I paid for the Disney+ service that viewed this series.

Post-Credit Scene – There is a mid-credit scene.

Percy Jackson and the Olympians Review –

Time is coming close to the end, and the quest does not have long to run, which makes things complicated when The Gang are stuck in the middle of America with everyone up to the FBI on the lookout for them, monsters on the hunt, and some pissed off gods. I mean, if there is time for a Hail Mary, this is it.

So to set the scene, since meeting Aries (Adam Copeland) in A God Buys Us Cheeseburgers, our gang of Percy (Walker Scobell), Annabeth (Leah Jeffries), and Grover (Aryan Simhadri) have taken a lorry smuggling animal to Las Vegas, because if they have one chance to get their quest done in time they need to find Hermes (Lin-Manuel Miranda). I mean, one god in all of Las Vegas, how difficult could that be? We will be looking at the episode as a whole from here, so there will be some [SPOILERS] ahead.   

This was an exciting episode in that not a lot happened, but also quite a bit happened. We didn’t get far, with most of the content happening in the Lotus Hotel and Casino. I did like that everyone understood the danger of the Hotel before walking in before fundamentally misunderstanding just how much risk they were in. The play on how casinos really trick people into staying longer than they mean worked here. I mean, it does call into question how many people are in the Hotel and the space requirements, and surely someone would have spotted something odd in a Yelp review.   

The highlight of the episode was the conversation between Hermes, Annabeth, and Percy. There is sadness for Hermes, the god who can be anywhere in the blink of an eye but has become a god who has seen it all, including the death of all his children. The wreckage of his life and the damage that he and Luke (Charlie Bushnell) have done to each other weighs on the god. While not much happens this week, what it does is make a lot of illusions about things that are coming, which I can’t get into for spoiler reasons, but if you have read the books, you will know. It is also nice to see Percy starting to take on a leadership mantle.

The ending of the episode is this odd mix of delight and sadness. Percy, remembering to use the horn like a minute after almost hitting another car and then just wrecking the taxi along the side of the wall, all while the jovial music played, left a big smirk on my face. But much like the hard cut in the show, we also get a hard cut to the emotions of the ending, where we discover that all has been for naught. There is the joy of remembering, the understanding that they work best as a team, and then the shock of finding out that they are late and war is happening. Defiance in the face of terrible odds: a hero’s gambit.     

In the end, do we recommend Percy Jackson and the Olympians: We Take a Zebra to Vegas? Yes, we do. Now, it is clear that we are about to hit the endgame, and it could be that the show can’t stick the landing. But if you can make a water nymph passing on a message from a father feel emotionally resonated, well, then that gives me hope. “Save the world, and then go save your mother.”