“The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power” Season 2 kicks off tomorrow with a three-episode premiere on Prime Video, and the reviews are pouring in ahead of that debut. While the show’s first season drew ire from a certain subset of viewers, it scored pretty highly among critics, landing an 83% aggregate approval score on Rotten Tomatoes against a far worse 38% audience score. The latter rating is due in large part to a review bombing campaign, which, like so many of late, took aim at the show daring to include a diverse cast.

Of course, the eternally angry crowd doesn’t account for all the criticism against Season 1. In April 2023, The Hollywood Reporter published data that only 37% percent of viewers who started the show on Amazon watched through to the season finale. That’s hardly a great figure for the most expensive season of television ever produced. So, are things heading in a stronger direction with the series’ sophomore outing?

At the time of this writing, “The Rings of Power” Season 2 holds a strong 84% critical rating on Rotten Tomatoes, edging out its predecessor by the slimmest of margins. The overall score will surely oscillate a bit more as more reviews come in. That means that if you already enjoyed Season 1, you’ll probably continue to have fun with the next eight episodes, and it sounds like there are some notable improvements in key areas of the show. In particular, critics are praising a higher-stakes story, though the pacing and focus issues of Season 1 apparently haven’t been fully remedied.

The big highlights of “The Rings of Power” Season 1 seem to still be the draw in season 2 — lush production design with gorgeous locales and costumes and an epic scale that only the world of Tolkien can provide.

Helen O’Hara of Empire Magazine wrote that the new season is “lavishly made, endlessly beautiful to watch and substantive enough to make you care,” calling it “fantasy at its absolute highest level.” Ben Travers of IndieWire gave similar, if more measured praise, writing, “Not everyone leaps off the screen and a few nuanced emotional beats could’ve been portrayed with richer specificity. But ‘The Rings of Power’ does take advantage of TV’s mightiest weapon for building empathy, interest, and overall investment: time.”

One of the biggest problems with “The Rings of Power” Season 1 was its relative lack of scale during its big action scenes — due partially to COVID production restraints and partially to the nature of a story’s first chapter. That issue seems to have been addressed, at least in part, with Fiona Sturges of the Financial Times saying Season 2 “brings a better balance of talk and action.” It’s not uncommon for shows to grow into themselves, and no matter what your budget, serialized stories need space to set up the pieces and get you invested in the characters. From that angle, “The Rings of Power” seems to be progressing as planned, though other reviews have been more critical of the series’ lingering problems.

While the general critical reception to “the Rings of Power” Season 2 so far has been quite positive, the consensus seems to be that Amazon hasn’t fully fixed the issues many had with Season 1. In particular, that involves problems with the pacing, focus and overall story.

In a largely negative review for Variety, Alison Herman argued that the heightened momentum didn’t make the show much better, writing, “the second installment of this show, as gorgeous yet flat as a kitchen backsplash, has the same problems as the first, minus much confidence these issues will ever go away.” Other critics echoed this sentiment, arguing that the show still hasn’t gotten its hooks into the story enough to keep audiences enraptured. “It starts to feel like a story shaped backwards from events we already know will need to transpire, rather than one driven forward by the motives and choices of its characters,” Angie Han wrote for The Hollywood Reporter.

In essence, things are faster, it seems, but still too slow for some. Things are more focused, but still a bit too general. Many fantasy fans don’t mind a more lethargic journey, provided the worldbuilding and aesthetics remain sharp and captivating. And in general, the reviews praise the show’s loyalty to Tolkien’s mythos. Maybe it’s time for fans who fell off to give “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power” a second chance.