[ TV ] Olympus Has No Fire

Queen Medea (Sonita Henry), Hero (Tom York) and the Oracle of Gaia (Sonya Cassidy) star.

TV : Olympus Has No Fire

A solid two out of five stars.

SyFy’s newest original series Olympus marched onto the scene Thursday night as yet another offering to the lineup of ancient Greece drama-action tv shows. Yet the 10 p.m. premier was more like a wounded soldier limping  away from the fray than a warrior charging forward with his sword slashing through the air.

In short, Olympus is a watered down version of  the stomach churningly graphic blood, sex, and battle-ridden powerhouse that was 2011’s The Immortals.

The episode opens with the mercenary,  Hero (Tom York) ensnared by a wooden trap in the dark cave of a cyclops while on a journey looking for the Oracle of Gaia. A silly CGI cyclops squats down, leering at Hero before brandishing a brush and painting. . .  Hero’s feet blue, because cyclops’s get down on the art scene ‘natch.  

The scene gets even more campy when moments later Hero gets out of the bind whipping his weaponry with gusto, snapping the wooden trap open, and slicing the cyclops’s fingers off with a ricocheting boomerang all in a hot minute along with a constant stream of  silly sound effects.

It isn’t long before the episode plays leapfrog between the different characters as it sets the stage for the main cast and begins to start weaving the individual storylines. It is in those moments that Olympus takes a hit straight to the achilles heel. Under the reign of King Aegeus (Graham Shiels), a siege is tearing up Athens. These fight scenes, a routine in point A to B stab, whirl, and scream theatrics, painfully lack energy. The few fight scenes interspersed in this episode between the scenes with Hero, are slow, predictable, and feel like far too many.

Simultaneously, Aegeus’s wife , the venomous and domineering Queen Medea (Sonita Henry) is waging her own war as she regularly hacks into their young teenage son, Lykos (Wayne Burns)  in an attempt to bleed a vision out of him. She is a chilling character, ruthlessly trying to get a mysterious divine “lexicon” out of her son, but she’s  far from original. She goes through the motions but is never convincingly furious, or desperate, enough.

And so it begins....

When the point of view shifts back to Hero he discovers three women who had been stolen away in the cave by the Cyclops. All of which, who claim to be the Oracle of Gaia. It doesn’t take long for Hero to sort out who the true Oracle (Sonita Henry)  is; the youngest of the bunch and the one most doggedly trying to evade returning to the temple.

Back in Athens, the characters that make up King Aegeus’s battalion are a real life version of guess who. There’s a confusion over who’s who not just in names, which are fleetingly used, but in physical appearances as well. There are bald and bearded men who look like carbon copies, and slender women with cascading curls of brown hair who look even MORE alike. The overuse of CGI, especially in the case of the liberally used green screens outside of the battle sequences, make the world seem flimsy and doesn’t make for viewing that pulls the audience in.

Stilted acting  and poorly developed characters hamper scenes that are supposed to be setting the groundwork. The domino effect of drama isn’t successful with the well-rehearsed dialogue and cliched dangers --

“These are dark times indeed,”  one of the generals mumbles as he peers out beyond a row of columns in the courtyard outside the king’s stronghold. But the words fall out of him flat and bland. By the time an arrow strikes King Aegeus it feels more like checking the box off on the Grecian drama dropdown list than anything remotely surprising. However, the assassination attempt advances the episode and the main storyline.

The scenes shift to Hero who binds the oracle’s wrists and forcefully leads her across wood and plain to return to the temple of Gaia in Athens. The interactions between Hero and the oracle were the most engaging and interesting parts of the episode. Fueled by undeniable chemistry and emotionally infused and convincing acting,  Hero and the oracle are stubborn to a fault and both doing their damndest to pursue their own quests.

Yup even leashed she stands her ground....well, sits in this case.

The oracle, is determined to get to the bottom of the mysterious visions she’s been having, and the destruction that is due to come because of them. She’s even more determined to do it completely on her own, and several times tries to make a break for it. Her younger brother Theo masquerading as a robber attempts to help, but the two are thwarted and tethered up again by Hero.

Hero is equally driven to bring the oracle back to the temple so he could learn more about himself-- why his very name is cursed (“If you say it you’ll turn to stone,” he warns the oracle) and, why he grew up in hiding in a forest far from Athens. While there are some eye-rollingly ridiculous lines that come out of Hero and the oracle they manage to sell them more believably than many of the other characters.

It’s when Hero has finally managed to drag the oracle back to the temple that it’s  revealed in a decidedly sexual scene, as the oracle stands over a gaping hole in the stone temple with her legs spread, back arched, and recounts the story in a breathy voice punctuated with moans, that Hero is not only the real  first-born son of King Aegeus, but as such he’s the one who has the fabled Lexicon in his noggin-- a secret code that maps the way to Olympus where the Gods hang, and with it a chance for mortal men to super Saiyan it up and become immortals.

 

Just a little awkward....

 It’s far from a novel idea as is how the episode is wrapped up. Namely, a weak shot at shock value when Queen Medea poisons the general who “conspired”  against King Aegeus. Then, her equally uninspiring move appointing Lykos as the new ruler. True to the formula of Olympus’s predecessors, it’s obvious that the boy-king will now have a target painted on his head, and that the true conspirator is not only still among them, but that he is the King’s shifty-eyed brother, Pallas, who became a pale, jittery mess when the Queen announced to the room full of generals that the killer should confess to make his, “passage through the river Styx as smooth as possible.” 

 

Riiiiight. 

Olympus is an unimpressive debut that’s a cut-along-the-lines template of many other far superior ancient Greece TV shows and films. The characters are indistinct from one another in both their personality and their identical appearance, and are rife with cliche and lackluster dialogue. The off the rack costumes and excessive CGI detract from what could have been a different interpretation of an old familiar tale and an immersive experience. The saving grace of the show lies with the well-cast leads, York and Cassidy, who have interesting back-and-forth dialogue and a undeniable magnetism.  It’s too soon to tell but they have the makings of complicated and dimensional characters, they clearly have the key to unlocking some of each other’s most hidden selves, and have a certain fire, or energy inside of them.  It is because of that that I will be tuning in next Thursday at 10 for the second episode.

All images from the imdb and the SyFy website.