REVIEW: ‘Blood of Zeus’ Season 2 Was Well Worth The Wait

It’s been a long wait, but Blood of Zeus Season 2 is finally on Netflix. Animated by Powerhouse Animation, the series is created by Vlas Parlapanides and Charley Parlapanides and, after three years away, is continuing Heron’s (Derek Phillips) story—and expanding it.

The second season of the series picks up immediately after the events of last season and the fight against the primordial giants. Zeus (Jason O’Mara) is dead, and with his demise, a power vacuum erupts. Still fighting against each other, Zeus’ children with Hera (Claudia Christian) and those who had been out of wedlock are in contention. In the mix is Heron, the demigod and the recent savior of humanity.

With his father’s blood, he’s still struggling to find his place. Grieving the man he knew, even in disguise, and his mother at the same time, a voice calls to him in his dreams, leading him to embrace who he is, which includes saving his brother Seraphim (Elias Toufexis), the half-demon.

Only Seraphim isn’t alive. Having killed him with his own bident, Heron’s task is more difficult than it may seem. At the same time, Seraphim is left to pay for his sins in the one place where power means nothing: the Underworld. With Hades (Fred Tatasciore) pulling the strings and offering Seraphim an offer he can’t refuse, Seraphim becomes Hades’ pawn to secure Zeus’ vacant throne and unite his family in spite of the gods’ punishment for his marriage to Persephone (Lara Pulver).

With a power struggle between the gods at the center, Blood of Zeus Season 2 could have easily gone where you expect. But it doesn’t. Instead, it embraces change and, more importantly, doesn’t lose the humanity of the gods, their desires, and fears to craft characters that are relatable first and foremost.

Last season, Hera was the antagonist, but her anger was focused on retribution instead of just power. While Season 2 doesn’t offer her redemption, it adds deep layers to her anger. In Season 1 we saw that her anger came from her love, and in her grief in the wake of Zeus’s death, it exists her too. In fact, to characterize Hera in all of her power as a woman moved by anything other than love is to miss her depth completely.

Blood of Zeus Season 2 doesn’t rely on a scorned woman trope, not that it did in the first season. That said, with Zeus dead, the series uses Hera’s position as a wife and mother, but more importantly, the intelligent Queen of the Heavens, to inform how others react to her and how she moves forward.

In fact, Hera, as a mother, is still a driving force for the cavernous space that becomes insurmountable between her children and Zeus’s bastards, Athena (Sarah Elmaleh), Hermes (Matthew Mercer), Apollo (Adam Croasdell), and others. As a driving force in Ares’s storyline, it’s his dedication to his mother that pushes him to compete to carry on Zeus’s legacy. Areas hate Heron because of the betrayal he signifies, and in that way, it’s actually relatable.

That’s just one example of how Blood of Zeus Season 2 builds very human relationships between gods. Love and loyalty are the true driving forces of the story—power is needed for it, but it’s not power alone. By putting relationships first, the series isn’t just showing the audience attractive and well-developed character designs but instead building layered characters in a large world that aims to develop the myths that we know but always looks to make them unique.

The other relationship that is a core pillar of Season 2 is fan favorite Hades and Persephone. Having received a romantic facelift in recent years with stories like  Rachel Smythe’s Lore Olympus, their marriage takes a new form here in Blood of Zeus. It embraces what readers everywhere have fallen in love with, the star-crossed nature of their romance, but uses the original myth in conversation.

A reimagining of the two, we see how the other gods feel and how it isolates the couple. But more importantly, how deeply they love each other and the family they’ve created, including the appearance of their children, including Zagreus—a nice nod to Supergiant’s acclaimed roguelike, Hades. Separated for half the year, Hades is left with his children, and all of them are left missing their mother.

As one of the arms pursuing Zeus’s title and power, they are doing so to reunite and ultimately become one family without anyone keeping them apart. It’s a heartfelt portrayal and one that consistently looks to place Hades in the position of a doting husband and respectful son-in-law to Demeter instead of an antagonist who’s aiming to ascend from the Underworld for his own ego. The detailed focus on Hades’ reasons for pursuing power makes him the strongest character of the season.

His pain is on display, his love is there too, and all of that creates someone to root for—even when we should root for the hero. Hades, at his core, is just. Driven to be so by the rules of the Underworld, he doesn’t have power or royalty but only on the deeds done. However, Hades is also fallible. He has endured so many wrongs that the one thing he cares for, his family, is ultimately what pushes him past his own rules, bending to Demeter in the process.

But if Hades is the best part of Blood of Zeus Season 2, Seraphim is a close second. The series manages to make him empathetic without absolving him of his sins. More importantly, the showrunners don’t want repentance. Through Seraphim, a broken man who has lost anyone he’s ever had, love means something different. It’s something that has been absent from his life, and the one time he fell it, it was ripped away. This led to his rage and to his violence. But he doesn’t apologize for it.

Instead, he accepts the past as is. A mirror to Heron’s growth over the season, Seraphim is as tragic as Icaraus, and it’s something that the series never loses sight of. Tragedy doesn’t mean redemption, and the series’ ability to keep that at the forefront of its storytelling sets it apart from other stories we see—though it does put it directly in line with the other series we’ve seen from Powerhouse Animation.

While I have saved Heron for last, he is certainly not the least. In Blood of Zeus Season 2, Heron has accepted his father’s power and his place in the larger story of the world. With Alexia (Jessica Henwick) and Kofi (Adetokumboh M’Cormack), he tries to honor his mother’s (Mamie Gummer) memory.

He ultimately stops trying to run from the destiny that Fates has laid out. Scared of his own power, Heron isn’t automatically a good person. While the gods all have their flaws that push them toward greed and selfish action, Heron has to push away those inclinations, too.

As a hero, Heron has to push away his need for revenge. It’s not about him forgiving those around him. Instead, it’s about moving forward. Wiping a slate clean to move the gods and humanity forward isn’t something that is easy. Instead, we watch Heron learn to move on from the past while still remembering everything that took place.

The wisdom that comes from accepting that you can’t change what you’ve done but can impact what you do in the future is core to his development into the hero we see at the end of Blood of Zeus Season 2. And it’s excellent.

Across each of the main characters and the relationships between the ensemble, love is a guiding force. It’s never too cliche and never overshadows conflict. Instead, like the Greek myths it’s based on, Blood of Zeus Season 2 uses loss, longing, and love to craft deep and violent conflicts.

Action and anger come hand in hand with grief and the need to be with the people who make you whole. With that, it brings an empathy that makes the tragedy of its characters all the more relatable when the shoe drops.

Ultimately, the only critique for Blood of Zeus Season 2 is that it’s too short. With one episode less than the first season of Blood of Zeus, the pacing does take a slight hit. At times, the middle episodes, while filled with emotional depth, lack the launch speed necessary for the ambitious finale we see in Episode 8.

That said, even that critique seems so slight in light of how ambitious the final swings of the season are. They are big and shake up the series down to its core. While we know that Blood of Zeus Season 3 is coming, the cliffhanger leaves such a lasting impression that every month is going to feel like a year.

With fantastic animation that captures epic action moments and emotional character growth that goes far beyond expectations, Blood of Zeus Season 2 is near perfect. For those who love Greek myths and tragedies and enjoy antagonists with complexity, this is the series for you.

Blood of Zeus Season 2 is streaming now, exclusively on Netflix.