Jon Fortt and David Tieche open Season 2 of Character Study, their Scripture-through-people podcast and companion to their dozen-plus YouVersion Bible plans. Season 1 covered the Abraham cycle; Season 2 turns to Jacob. The launch timing coincides with a cultural moment: Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey is nearing $1 billion at the box office, and its trickster hero Odysseus becomes the hook for exploring Jacob.

Jon recounts a comic detour about nearly missing a 70mm IMAX screening while visiting San Francisco — scoring a front-row companion seat blocks from the Metreon so he'd at least know the film's true framing before taking his family to a standard IMAX showing.

The heart of the conversation is the trickster archetype and the longing for home. Odysseus, Jacob (whose name means trickster, and who becomes "Israel" after wrestling God), Bugs Bunny, and Ferris Bueller share one pattern: a cunning wanderer using his wits to get home. Why does it resonate across millennia? Because these stories wrestle with deep, universal questions — home, moral responsibility, and encounters with forces greater than ourselves — that a "surface culture" of TikToks and cat videos paves over, even though "we're not surface people."

The central contrast: the Greek gods are powerful but mercurial and remote, offering no intimacy. The God of the Bible invites wrestling. Abraham bargains over Sodom; Moses argues God out of destroying Israel; Jacob wrestles at Peniel and won't let go without a blessing. Jon argues the right kind of wrestling — rooted in faith, not rebellion — isn't merely permitted but required; it's a form of intimacy, unlike Cain's obstinacy or Miriam's challenge to authority. Even Jesus wrestles in Gethsemane ("not my will, but yours").

They probe desire and passivity: Jesus repeatedly asks "What do you want?" (blind Bartimaeus, the invalid of 38 years), calling people to risk naming their longing rather than passively accepting their conditions. David confesses this is his own struggle — comfortable with God as King and Creator, but resistant to God as friend and spouse — a passivity that pushes God far away, the opposite of the whole point of the Incarnation.

On trickery in Scripture, they separate deception-for-gain (prohibited) from wit that forces intellectual engagement: Jesus' parables and riddles, "render unto Caesar," the woman caught in adultery, the Syrophoenician woman who out-argues him in faith. Righteous "tricking" appears in preserving life against tyrants — the Hebrew midwives, Moses' basket, the nuns in The Sound of Music.

The takeaway: The Odyssey is an on-ramp to introduce audiences to Jacob's story and to the radically different, intimate, self-sacrificing God of the Bible — the promise of Season 2.