Amazon’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is back for season 2 with its insanely huge budget on full display, easily on par with the visuals of the movies but…without the compelling story and characters to match.

I watched season 1, but after starting season 2, my interest is fading, and I’m not sure I can picture myself sitting through a reported five greenlit seasons of this. For me, the one reason it doesn’t work is an issue that plagues many prequels: everything feels like a foregone conclusion.

Prequels work best when they are relatively far removed from the mainline story everyone already knows. I’d cite House of the Dragon as a good example of that, as unless you read ahead in the books you don’t know where things are going, and nothing in Game of Thrones is negating the impact of what happens on the show. That’s not the case here, and on top of that the Lord of the Rings trilogy already has three other prequels in the form of the later Hobbit trilogy.

The problem is we simply know what happens to all these main characters, so there’s just no tension with the only ones at significant risk or going to unexpected places are brand new characters. And there simply are not many of those like the Harfoots.

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We know where things end up with Galadriel, Elrond, Celebrimbor and of course Sauron, where this version will no doubt be vanquished at some point only to return as the menace of the original trilogy. There’s also “The Stranger,” where his storyline very, very heavily hints that he’s a young Gandalf, or at worst, there’s perhaps a left turn that he’s Saruman instead. Either way, it doesn’t exactly feel like much of a mystery.

Season 1 had the “reveal” of Halbrand as Sauron, but it doesn’t feel like the show can hide all that many mysteries or interesting plot points. Sure, there are gaps to fill in, but this feels like Star Wars prequel syndrome where the entire saga is already known for the most part and as such, it doesn’t work that well.

There are plenty of fans of the show, albeit audiences tend to score it much lower than critics. There is certainly something about simply existing in a big-budget LOTR world that feels nice, and maybe people are connecting with the characters. But for me, I’m not, and on top of that there’s just nothing resembling actual tension here, given the timeline in which this is set.