The most expensive show in TV history, the “Lord of the Rings” prequel has a major creative glow-up in Season 2. From storytelling to visuals, Middle Earth > Westeros.

Photo Illustration by Erin O’Flynn/The Daily Beast/Amazon Prime Studios and Getty Images

Hunky Sauron returns in the second season of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, and though he divided fans during the series’ maiden run, his duplicitousness proves the lynchpin of its superb sophomore outing.

Determined to create additional rings of power and, with them, to manipulate Middle Earth’s numerous races into aiding his quest for world domination, Sauron is a villain of menacing Machiavellian proportions, and Charlie Vickers’ sterling performance as the dark lord drives much of this thrilling saga. Rife with deceptions and betrayals, the latest installment in the J.R.R. Tolkien-inspired prequel is a grand and unnerving showcase for Sauron’s superior cunning, intuition, and gift for treating his adversaries as pawns and rendering them fools—including a legendary craftsman who turns out to be the one dupe to ruin them all.

With these eight new episodes, The Rings of Power, launching August 29 on Prime Video, remains a worthy backstory complement to Peter Jackson’s Oscar-winning cinematic trilogy, marked as it is by CGI that brings the diverse realms of Middle Earth to stunning life, intricate plotting that’s rooted in three-dimensional characterizations and a sense of this civilization’s history and lore, and a collection of set pieces that culminate with an all-out war that recalls The Two Towers’ Battle of Helm’s Deep.

Filled with extravagant monsters, vast and unique lands, brawny skirmishes, and striking tableaus, J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay’s fantasy epic—the most expensive TV show ever produced—is an aesthetic triumph, its direction (courtesy of Charlotte Brändström, Louise Hooper, and Sanaa Hamri) and score (by Bear McCreary) channeling the sweeping scope and scale of its big-screen ancestors without ever feeling duplicative or redundant. Yet more important than its style, ultimately, is its nuanced multi-pronged narrative about greed, ambition, and seduction, all of it exploited by Sauron for devious ends.

There’s more going on in The Rings of Power than just about anything on television, but Payne and McKay weave their several storylines together into a coherent tapestry of honor and treachery, selfishness and altruism.

Having discovered that her comrade Halbrand was Sauron, Galadriel (Morfydd Clark) becomes convinced that the three rings of power created with the dwarves’ mithril is the key to saving the elves from extinction. Given that they were designed under Sauron’s watch, however, Elrond (Robert Aramayo) is deeply distrustful of the rings, thus putting him at odds with his long-time friend.

Their dispute is one of many sown by Sauron, who having outed himself to his former allies allows himself to be captured by Adar (Sam Hazeldine, replacing Joseph Mawle). The Orc leader holds him prisoner without realizing his true identity, and in an opening flashback, he’s revealed to be the figure who, in the aftermath of Morgoth’s demise, attempted to kill Sauron, played in this earlier incarnation by Slow Horses’ Jack Lowden.

Following his escape from Adar’s military encampment, Sauron travels to Eregion to meet with master elven smith Celebrimbor (Charles Edwards), whose trust he gains after divulging his “authentic” (read: false) self as Annatar, an elf god. Celebrimbor’s genius and hubris are easy prey for Sauron’s trickery, and he’s soon persuaded to craft new sets of rings, beginning with seven for the dwarves.

Dwarf King Durin III (Peter Mullan) is eager to accept these gifts, considering that their predecessors restored the elves’ immortality and his mountain kingdom of Khazad-dûm has suffered cave-ins that have left it without sunlight. Alas, the ring he wears quickly corrupts his heart and mind, making him mad with avarice, which seriously concerns his estranged son Prince Durin IV (Owain Arthur) and daughter-in-law Disa (Sophia Nomvete) but earns Sauron further mithril supplies for his ring-making endeavor.

Elsewhere in Middle Earth, elf warrior Arondir (Ismael Cruz Córdova) is grieving a painful loss and crosses paths with Isildor (Maxim Baldry), who winds up partnering with a wild woman named Estrid (Nia Towle), whose romantic feelings for him are as obvious as her motivations are clandestine. In Isildor’s native Númenor, blind queen Míriel (Cynthia Addai-Robinson) and her beloved right-hand man Elendil (Lloyd Owen) find themselves at odds with scheming politician Pharazôn (Trystan Gravelle), who wants to usurp the throne and free their kingdom of elven influence even as he secretly wields an elf crystal ball (known as a palantir) that, like so much in The Rings of Power, spreads Sauron’s influence like a plague.

At every opportunity, the dark lord takes advantage of men and women’s dreams and desires, noble impulses and base vulnerabilities, to advance his plan. Though he’s not always present in these narratives, Vickers’ baddie hovers over them like a malevolent specter, orchestrating chaos with a seemingly helpful insinuation here and a tantalizing promise there.

This is just the tip of the iceberg for The Rings of Power’s second season, which also picks up with the Stranger (Daniel Weyman)—accompanied by his diminutive Harfoot friends Nori (Markella Kavenagh) and Poppy (Megan Richards)—as he searches for a staff spied in slumbering visions. This trek leads him to Tolkien favorite Tom Bombadil (Rory Kinnear) as well as a Dark Wizard (Ciarán Hinds) who commands a battalion of skull-masked marauders.

The identities of the Stranger and the Dark Wizard are hardly big mysteries, but the series nonetheless has fun playing coy with them, and it offsets that impishness with a mounting atmosphere of doom and gloom begat by Sauron, whom Vickers inhabits with a calculating friendliness and benevolence that belies his monstrous intentions. The actor’s terrific turn evokes both Sauron’s slyness and the bottomless void it masks, and it’s matched by a collection of equally solid performances led by Clark, whose fierceness and resolve are as daunting as her skill at rolling her Rs (especially when she purrs “Celebrimbor” and “Sauron”) is impressive.

The Rings of Power elegantly balances its myriad points of interest, only faltering slightly with a Númenor thread that too closely resembles House of the Dragon. Still, unlike that TV rival, Payne and McKay’s series boasts no stagnant placeholder episodes; every scene and subplot moves with urgent purpose. Better yet, it exudes grandeur in its expansive panoramas of Middle Earth and conflicts between combatants big and small, and it rarely indulges in one-dimensional writing, such that even the Orcs are complicated creatures rather than merely snarling, rabid fiends.

Building to a prolonged campaign between forces that don’t (or refuse to) understand that their strings are being pulled by a virtuoso puppeteer, The Rings of Power is a tragedy born from arrogance, gluttony, and ego. Suspenseful, graceful, and frequently breathtaking, it’s a portrait of the way in which our chief strengths are also often our greatest weaknesses—a notion embodied, here, by Celebrimbor, an artist whose aspiration for immortality is the seed of incalculable destruction.