SPOILER ALERT: This story contains spoilers for “We Visit the Garden Gnome Emporium,” Episode 3 of “Percy Jackson and the Olympians.”
For fans of Rick Riordan‘s “Percy Jackson and the Olympians” books, Medusa represents one of Percy’s first big victories: After being tricked into spending time with “Aunty Em,” he beheads the snake-haired woman, and her cursed, dead eyeballs are later used to turn another enemy into stone.
However, for those with a deeper knowledge of Greek mythology, and for many women, Medusa is a symbol of something darker.
In the original myth, Medusa is a human woman who takes a vow of celibacy out of devotion to Athena, the goddess of wisdom. However, Medusa eventually enters a relationship with sea god Poseidon that becomes sexual one night. Many interpretations posit that the encounter, which took place in Athena’s temple, was nonconsensual, and that Poseidon raped Medusa. Athena decides to punish Medusa, robbing her of her beauty by turning her into a gorgon that petrifies anyone she makes eye contact with. The story ends with the demigod Perseus — who Percy Jackson is named after — decapitating Medusa and gifting her head to Athena.
The 2005 novel was written for a middle school audience and understandably didn’t delve into that backstory. But Percy is the son of Poseidon, and Annabeth, who joins him on his quest, is the daughter of Athena, so both have loaded lineages in the presence of Medusa. So in the TV adaptation of “Percy Jackson and the Olympians” now airing on Disney+, the gorgon’s relationships with the kids’ parents gets unpacked with more depth.
Rebecca Riordan, who is married to Rick and executive produces the TV series, says that “the only reason Medusa is not more fleshed out in the books was that it was Percy’s narrative and we don’t have her perspective,” as the books are written in first-person. “As a 12-year-old boy in 2005, I don’t think he had the bandwidth for deconstructing the patriarchy,” adds Rick. “He was looking at it as, ‘This is a scary woman who’s trying to turn me into stone.’”
But that changed upon entering a TV writers room, where other perspectives become essential. “It was one of the first things we talked about, how to not have a patriarchal lens,” Rebecca says.
Medusa is first mentioned in the pilot episode, when Percy’s (Walker Scobell) mother Sally (Virginia Kull) takes her young son (played in a flashback by Azriel Dalman) to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and shows him Antonio Canova’s early 1800s statue of Perseus holding Medusa’s severed head. “Not everyone who looks like a hero is a hero, and not everyone who looks like a monster is a monster,” she says to Percy.
Young Percy (Azriel Dalman) sees Antonio Canova’s “Perseus With the Head of Medusa” at the Met Museum Disney
Then, in Episode 3,
