Before the first season of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power began streaming on Amazon Prime Video in 2022, executive producers and showrunners JD Payne and Patrick McKay had already completed much of their work on the story for Season 2. That’s partly due to the free time the COVID shutdown gave them in 2020. But in truth, Payne and McKay say they’ve known for years how the series will tell the rise of Sauron (Charlie Vickers) through the Second Age of Middle-earth, the millennia-long era that leads to the events of JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings novels.

“It’s surprisingly better mapped than you’d expect,” says McKay.

Season 2, for example, begins with a sequence the writers conceived six years ago: the depiction of what McKay calls “the series-canon origin story” of Sauron, a nerdy way of acknowledging that many details about the Second Age that Tolkien didn’t write had to be invented for the series. That necessity has nonetheless frustrated some Tolkien devotees, who have not shied away from voicing their displeasure at the liberties taken with Middle-earth lore and the deliberate pace of the storytelling.

Despite this criticism, Payne, McKay and executive producer Lindsey Weber remain true to their plans for the series. “It’s so tempting to try to find an explanation for why certain things feel different in Season 2,” says McKay. “It really was just the plan.”

But that doesn’t mean they can’t be at least a little flexible. “If you’re doing a road trip from San Diego to New York, you know the big cities along the highway,” Payne says. “But then you also see as you drive, ‘Oh, there’s a cool monument I read about on the Internet.’ We give ourselves that leeway.”

Much of the second season, which premieres Aug. 29, will explore Sauron’s work in forging the titular rings and how their evil nature draws darkness into Middle Earth — an outline familiar even to casual Lord of the Rings fans. But the series will also venture into literally unexplored territory east of Sauron’s domain of Mordor, a desolate wilderness called Rhûn, where the Stranger (Daniel Weyman) — a wizard who may be an early version of Gandalf — travels with his Harfoot companion Nori (Markella Kavenagh) to find his destiny.

“We always try to bring things from Middle Earth to the screen that have never been seen before,” says McKay. “Tormented rock formations in a barren expanse seemed like fresh images to us.”

Payne adds: “It was originally a green, lush paradise, but through dark forces and unsavory interventions it became the wasteland you see in the series.”

One of these dark forces is what McKay calls a “biker gang on horses.” They pursue the stranger and Nori through Rhûn on behalf of an evil wizard, played by Ciarán Hinds (“Game of Thrones”). Creating their appearance, however, proved to be a nuisance.

“We worked endlessly on the designs for these guys because we wanted it to be bizarre and otherworldly,” says McKay. “We had a lot of promising ideas, but there was a lot of repetition and we were going around in circles and we ran out of time.” It was only in post-production that visual effects supervisor Jason Smith suggested covering the faces of all the riders with computer-generated masks.

“Each one of these masks is a digital effect,” says McKay.

“And that presents us with a puzzle that we will come back to,” Weber adds.

“Secretly,” says McKay. “Why did they wear the masks?”

The Rhûn scenes were filmed in the Canary Islands off the coast of Morocco, which McKay says “seemed appropriately odd” for a region almost completely unknown to Tolkien fans. Otherwise, the rest of the second season was filmed in and around London, where production moved after filming the first season in New Zealand (where Peter Jackson shot his Rings and Hobbit films).

Most of the exteriors were shot in Windsor Great Park outside the city, including scenes with Weber’s favourite creatures, the tree-like Ents, voiced by Olivia Williams and Jim Broadbent. “We shot in four or five days of glorious English weather where it was either exactly zero degrees or minus one,” Weber says, laughing. “It was constantly changing between rain and snow. People were absolutely freezing at night in the woods where there were these huge metal poles with something like a blinking light on the end.”

The move to London “gave us the chance to kind of reboot the way we build the show,” says McKay, but it wasn’t her decision.

“That’s a decision by Amazon,” says Weber. “As a producer, you go where you go.”

Vernon Sanders, head of US and global television at Amazon MGM Studios, says the move was “the best creative place for us to develop a vision of the show that spans not just one season, but four or five seasons.”

“To be honest, it just made more business sense for us,” he adds.

Much has been written about Amazon’s huge investment in “The Rings of Power.” Between the roughly $100 million to $150 million spent per season for 50 hours of television time and the $200 million it spent in 2017 for the rights to the series (studio insiders now claim that’s closer to the actual price, rather than the $250 million originally reported), that kind of spending, a holdover from the golden age of streaming, doesn’t fit the new phase of recession. But Sanders says the company is “really behind the show” and he expects it to continue “driving people through all of Amazon’s channels,” including retail and music. “We want to get people to the service and hope to get a lot of sign-ups again.” (Sanders would not confirm, however, whether Amazon will release viewer data, as the studio did for “Fallout” and the latest season of “The Boys”: “If there are things that stand out to us, we will definitely announce them,” he says.)

McKay and Payne, for their part, have no contingency plans in case Amazon has to cancel its legendary road trip through Middle Earth.

“We don’t expect that,” says McKay. “We do our show and give it our all.”