The Rings of Power has always been about Sauron, even if the Dark Lord didn’t actually reveal himself until the final minutes of Season 1.

“We knew Sauron was such a powerful spice in the soup,” co-showrunner Patrick McKay tells Inverse. “We wanted a season to be about heroes and Middle-earth and have Middle-earth be beautiful. Meanwhile, along the way you’re learning who Sauron is. You just don’t know it yet. And that gives you the opportunity to be deceived by him.”

But mere minutes into The Rings of Power Season 2, it’s clear McKay and his co-conspirer J.D. Payne were working with one ring-covered hand tied behind their backs. Played by Charlie Vickers (now tasked with portraying two of Sauron’s disguises as both the human Halbrand and the Elf Annatar), Sauron plays a pivotal role in the show’s second season, driving the plot forward while everyone else does their best to respond to his terrifying presence.

“Sauron affects everything,” says Morfydd Clark, who plays Galadriel, one of the few Rings of Power characters to also exist thousands of years later in The Lord of the Rings.

The Dark Lord casts a dark shadow over Rings of Power Season 2, and it extends from the island nation Númenor where Men rule to the dwarven mines of Khazad-dûm. Ahead of the show’s long-awaited return, Inverse spoke to the cast and creators — including the villain himself, Charlie Vickers — to unpack how Sauron’s plan begins to come to fruition, and what the rest of Middle-earth can do to stop him.

Terminator Zero knows you can’t really go back to the past. Even with the help of time travel, it’s technically impossible to return to a point of time that previously existed. Unlike other contributions to the Terminator the franchise, Zero doesn’t waste any time justifying loops or paradoxes. When Skynet sends a cyborg assassin back in time, it actually creates a branched timeline, aka a new past. That means that the future truly is not set; that fate doesn’t really exist. That small change untethers the series from any narrative that’s come before it: Not only are its characters free to make new choices, but so is the franchise.

That doesn’t mean that Zero is completely abandoning the tropes that define the Terminator saga. On the contrary: the series feels like an amalgamation of every storyline, archetype, and theme the franchise has ever explored — and it doesn’t discriminate between James Cameron’s original ideas or the lesser-appreciated sequels like Terminator: Genisys. Diehard fans will find a lot to like here, but Zero also strikes a difficult balance between past and future. That it manages to spit out something that actually feels new is nothing short of a miracle. But Netflix, with the help of legendary anime studio Production I.G and creator Mattson Tomlin, might just have pulled off the impossible.