Hard-Earned Wisdom (Epic final analysis)

In my "Two Great Fears of Odysseus" article, I inferred that Jorge Rivera-Herrans was being glib when he told TikTok what the intended message of his work was, and that Epic is actually about a morally weak man struggling to hide from his spiritual mediocrity. Looking at the way the musical ended up going, I don't think that my analysis still holds water.

At the same time, the creator's own assertion that the work is about how ruthlessness really is mercy upon ourselves and that the story is about Odysseus learning to be a monster holds even less water.

So, one possibility is that he was in fact being glib in that video, but that I have failed to meet the challenge and figure out what he's really doing. The other possibility is that whatever he was intending to do here, he screwed it up.

For what it's worth, the person who commissioned these reviews and who followed Epic pretty closely during its development is convinced that the last couple of sagas were mangled by last-minute crunch. I don't know enough myself to say if that's true or not, but I can easily believe it. It certainly felt like something changed between Wisdom and Vengeance.

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Before going any further though, I just want to make it clear that whatever failings I think Rivera-Herrans might have as an author, I have next to no criticisms of him as a musician, a director, and a talent-seeker.

Musically, Epic is peak. No ifs ands or buts. The fact that this guy was able to scrounge up such a uniformly great cast of singers and voice actors, many of whom were basically nobodies until then, is almost as impressive as his own composing. On a technical level, there's hardly anything about Epic that isn't amazing. Well, okay, there are some questionable lyrics here and there. The past tense of "slay" isn't "slayed" lol. But, I did say hardly anything.

But, my main thing is thematic analysis, so that's what I'm always going to spend the most time on. There are people who know much more than me about music who have broken down exactly how and why Epic is technically brilliant at length. I linked one of them last time. You can easily find others on your own.

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So, I'm going to try to do the best I can here, and be as charitable to the author as possible. Granted, the more I think about just how badly the Ithaca saga fails to address the questions poised earlier in the story, the less charitable I feel like I should be. Epic's problems are the kind that keep getting worse the more you think about them. But, again, I'm going to assume the best intentions of the work and do some extra legwork in places where it might have simply forgotten to.

I thiiiiiink what it all really comes down to is Athena. She, rather than Odysseus, might actually be the real main protagonist of this story.


Competing Wisdoms

There's one piece of my old interpretation that the final arcs do vindicate; Odysseus' sea-journey takes place on a deeper level of allegory than the rest of the story. Just like the fantastification of the lotus-eaters at the beginning, Epic outright removes some of Odysseus' encounters with other humans during his final approach to Ithaca. In their place, the supernatural aspects are amped way up. Meanwhile, the Wisdom Saga replaces Athena's physical (albeit disguised) visit to Ithaca with a mere vision. Her only intervention on Ithaca - aiding Telemachus in his fight with Antinuous - could credibly have just been Telemachus locking in and managing to fight a bit better than expected.

The musical is very consistent about this. On land, the monsters are human beings and the gods are voices in people's heads. On the sea, monsters are literal and gods are tangible.

The only characters (besides Odysseus) who appear in both worlds are Athena and Zeus. These same two characters also have a dramatic interaction - original to Epic - in a third, totally abstracted world of their own.

The first Athena we meet embodies a particular kind of wisdom. She's a war goddess through and through. Cold, hard pragmatism. All about obtaining total victory, whatever the material or moral cost, and shutting out any emotional or philosophical pangs that might jeopardize that. She's the one who guided Odysseus through the war, which is basically another way of saying that she's the one who broke him. She dictated, over and over again, that he do things that he wasn't comfortable with and couldn't live with himself after doing. When he rejects her, she calls him a weak fool and abandons him.

That's not who appears to Telemachus on Ithaca. Telemachus (at least, Epic's version of Telemachus. Which I'm not fond of, but I'm trying to roll with this here) isn't a soldier fighting a war. Telemachus never participated in the war, but was forced to simply watch and feel it as the war took his father, threw his homeland into chaos, and up until the end seemed like it would cost him his future. There's still a little bit of Athena's martial aspect in here (she introduces herself by coaching him through a fistfight, after all), but for the most part the wisdom she imparts into him is that of continuing to hope for the future and not giving in to pessimism. This Athena values friendship, whereas the previous Athena seemed to hold herself above such sentimentality. This Athena is trying to find paths to happiness rather than merely victory.

During "We'll Be Fine," Athena sort of dances around the particulars of what went wrong between her and Odysseus. She says that she might have pushed him too hard, but it's still framed as a matter of her just not grasping his limits rather than her being wrong in the first place. In "God Games," she doesn't acknowledge how Odysseus came to be trapped on Ogygia when she's asking for his release; she just says that she wants him to be released.

It's only after she gets incinerated by Zeus' thunderbolt that she's able to admit, in "I Can't Help But Wonder," that she outright led him astray rather than just asking for too much.

Zeus's role in Epic is to 1) punish hubris, and 2) force people to confront who they really are and what they're really doing. The framing he himself provides for why he zaps Athena in "God Games" doesn't really make sense (it's not like he gave her a particularly hard challenge, convincing a few gods who don't really care that much about Odysseus to vote one way rather than the other). But, what if that seeming irrational anger he displayed was actually part of the test? Would she recoil in fear? Would pain deter her? Was she willing to give up her own ego and grovel and beg like a worm for someone else's sake?

Would she do what Odysseus failed to do? Would she take responsibility for putting him in a situation where he would be responsible for putting his men in a situation where they would have to butcher Helios' cows? Would she admit that her advice was self-destructive from the beginning?

The wisdom that Odysseus was taught when he went off to war, and the wisdom that Telemachus learned by seeing what the war did to his father, cannot coexist. One of them has to be destroyed.


Damage Done

I think I might have been zooming in a little too hard on "Odysseus as a traumatized veteran" and not giving enough thought to "Odysseus as an active duty soldier."

In my last analysis post, I observed that the Polyphemous encounter basically acts like the Trojan War in miniature. Odysseus goes in following Polites' naive optimism. Unthinkingly does something bad. The consequences of that act put him in a situation where he has to do something even worse. Then, he's left trying to convince himself and the world that he didn't actually do anything wrong at all. Likewise, I interpreted the ocean itself as representing the war and all the damage it did to him, with Poseidon as its spokesman. But, I didn't keep thinking about the story through that lens after the Ocean saga, and that might have been a mistake. What if Odysseus' journey as a whole is about not just coping with war trauma after the fact, BUT ALSO about getting through the war itself?

In that context, yes. Ruthlessness is mercy upon ourselves. He had to accept that in order to make it home in the literal, non-allegorical sense. He had to be brutal to survive the war. He had to be even more brutal in order to win the war. He couldn't make it through with any delusions of goodness or morality intact.

But.

Just because it's what he HAD to do doesn't mean that it's what he SHOULD have done. Because, let's face it; who's decision was it to go sailing off to Troy in the first place?

Boring idiot asshole Eurylochus was right. They had to raid innocent islanders in order to feed their troops. Odysseus knew it would be like that when he left home. That's how armies sustain themselves when they're cut off from the supply chain. Once you're on the ship with the hungry men, you need to pillage. Once you're in the cave with the unconscious cyclops, you need to blind it. Once you've committed perfidy and then sacked the victims' city, you need to make sure they can't rally around a charismatic heir and come back for revenge. The way to maximize one's chances of victory is to be evil, but not even the cool kind of evil. Just the selfish, cowardly, greedy kind of evil.

Only an idiot would want to be a great swordsman.

If you can't live with yourself afterward, then sucks to be you. And, as the musical shows, it does indeed suck. Odysseus might be able to rebuke Poseidon at the end, but he's still corrupted by him and there's no way to change that.


Generational Shift

The only winning move for Odysseus would have been to not play.

I'm hesitant to acknowledge this, since the musical itself didn't (and if this is the intended reading, then it really should have), but in the Odyssey it's established that Odysseus really didn't want to join the war in the first place. He tried to get out of it by feigning madness. Essentially faking a medical condition to avoid the draft. He didn't think it was a necessary war, and he didn't want to leave his family for it. It was only after revealing the ruse that another Greek king, Palamedes, was able to shame him into adding Ithaca's forces to the roster.

Going back to Epic's version of the story now...eeeh. This is me doing a LOT of heavy lifting that the story didn't do, but. When we first meet Telemachus, he's romanticizing his father and dreaming of going off and "fighting monsters" like he did. However, the monster he himself needs to deal with - Antinuous and Co - was only created BY his father going off to war. Then Odysseus finally comes home and solves the problem himself, but only after becoming a "monster" himself.

I think that the single biggest mistake in Epic - worse than even the backpeddling with Calypso - was NOT having Telemachus be frightened or horrified by his father in "I Can't Help But Wonder." I'm not saying he should have rejected him. Just, there needed to be a moment where he realizes that you shouldn't want to fight monsters and doom yourself to become one.

I feel like Telemachus' poor performance in the final battle might have even helped convey this, if the musical had just bothered to include this critical moment. War isn't for him. He's not cut out for it. And, after seeing his father, he realizes that this is a GOOD thing rather than a bad thing; his lack of appetite and aptitude for killing reflect well rather than poorly on himself.

I thiiink maybe the musical just sort of assumed the audience would understand Telemachus having this realization without actually showing him having it. That...well, it sounds unbelievably clumsy, but I really don't know what else Telemachus' arc could have been trying to go for other than this.

If we assume that this was in fact the intent of "I Can't Help But Wonder," then that gives Telemachus' arc a close. The Telemachus we meet in "Legendary" would be easy prey for someone like Palamedes. The Telemachus at the end of the musical would not be. I think that post-Epic Telemachus wouldn't feel the need to protect his ego by playing sick, either. I think he'd just refuse, confident in the knowledge that the diplomatic consequences of this - while potentially very harsh - would still hurt less than the alternative. That's the wisdom that he's learned from looking at the grim, near-feral wreck of a man that used to be his father.

As Odysseus said to Poseidon in their final meeting: "Look what you've turned me into. Look what we've become." A soldier talking to the war he signed up for, now that the bold talk and promises of glory and glamour have given way to animal survival instinct.

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Once again, don't take this as me softening on Epic's treatment of Telemachus as a whole. I'm talking about what I think it might have meant to do with him, not what it actually did with him. And even then, he'd still need a lot more payoff for his screentime in Wisdom to not feel like a waste of time.

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Going with this interpretation, I think that the final stage-play version of Epic would probably have two costumes for Athena. For most of her appearances, she'd have her signature helmet and spear as Athena Promachos, her war god aspect. For her final, remorseful appearance in "I Can't Help But Wonder," she's ditched the helmet and traded in her spear for the distaff of Athena Mechanitis, the patron of crafts, creation, and comfort.

When Odysseus turns away Athena's offer to guide him in improving the world and finding a better way, he turns her away with the assertion that he can't do that anymore. Maybe he could have, once, but not as he is now. "You might live forever, so you can make it be." The best she can do is try to make sure that the new generation - Telemachus' generation - don't end up the way their parents did.


This interpretation has holes in it, but I think it has fewer holes than anything else I can think of. And, listening to the final two songs, just going by the vibes of them, it feels like I'm on the right track.

So, that's the message I think you should take from it, and that I think (hope?) that the author wants you take from it as well. That if Palamedes ever shows up at your children's high school promising a great adventure and full college tuition, you should know exactly what to tell them.