Shows that launch with two or three episodes at once instead of a simple one-and-done series premiere always intrigue me. Is this just some random fluke of streaming services’ inexplicably bizarre release schedules, or is there some narrative or thematic logic to it? Are those first two or three episodes telling one big chapter of the larger story, or are they just, y’know, the first two or three episodes?

Chief of War’s second hour falls firmly in the latter category. In retrospect, the Chief of War we saw in the actual first episode was only half a show. We got to know the lay of the land, the sociopolitical circumstances, our hero, and his family. But we had yet to meet his co-protagonist, or encounter the world of white people, the boundaries of which are expanding all the time.

Having inevitably grown sick of the war of aggression and conquest into which they were bamboozled by the megalomaniacal King Kahekili, war chief Ka‘iana and his family leave behind his father’s broken war club as a token of “fuck you,” kill their guards, and flee. Ever the mensch, Ka‘iana uses himself as a distraction to lure prince Kūpule’s hunting party away from his wife and brothers. While he himself is relentlessly chased through the wilderness, he sends the others to find his sister-in-law Heke and get the hell out of there. 

They do so by unexpected means. While sheltering from his pursuers, Ka‘iana makes the acquaintance of Ka‘ahumanu (Luciane Buchanan). She’s a member of the royal family, estranged from her uncle King Kahekili due to the marriage of her mother (Roimata Fox) to Moku (Moses Goods), a chief from the rival kingdom of Hawai‘i. Ka‘ahumanu seeks the counsel of Taula, Maui’s goth prophetess, previously seen appearing to Ka‘iana on the battlefield. The news is bad, unfortunately: The seer prophesies that Ka‘ahumanu “will break this world.”

In the meantime, however, she has some lives to save. When a wounded Ka‘iana stumbles into her seaside cave, she offers to escort him to safety in Hawai‘i with her family. When they split up so that he can further distract their pursuers, he sends her to rendez-vous with his wife, brothers, and sister-in-law, whom she takes back with her to Hawai‘i instead.

Before their parting, though, Ka‘iana and Ka‘ahumanu encounter unexpected visitors: the crew of a lost Western ship, ashore to pick up food and water and get the hell out of there. Cautionary tales of Captain Cook, the British explorer killed on Hawai‘i after mounting tensions with the locals. have spread on both sides of that encounter, and neither the Hawaiians nor the captain (Erroll Shand) and his men want trouble. Of course there’s one moron with an itchy trigger finger — but the bullet goes wide, and Ka‘iana saves the sailors from an attack by one of Kūpule’s soldiers rather than seek revenge.  

Neither person is free of the Europeans that easily. Ka‘ahumanu encounters a lost member of the party named John (Benjamin Hoetjes), erroneously presumed dead and left behind after getting knocked out by one of Kūpule’s warriors. Since she’s already bringing a whole family of refugees to meet her husband-to-be, what’s one more uninvited visitor? She invites him to join the ever-expanding wedding party.

Even as Ka‘ahumanu sails off to Hawai‘i for a new life with Ka‘iana’s family and a western sailor in tow, the rogue chief of war finds himself off to a new world as well. In a bloody cliffside showdown with his trackers, he flings himself into the sea to escape and wakes up aboard the Western vessel. They saved him from drowning as payback for his saving them from that enemy soldier, but unfortunately there’s no way they can turn back and return him to the island now. Once a self-imposed exile, Ka‘iana now finds exile thrust upon him.

At the end of the first episode of Chief of War, it seemed like we had all the ingredients we needed for an exciting historical epic: rival kingdoms, reluctant heroes, betrayal, prophecy, and battles galore, with Jason Momoa squarely in the lead. We didn’t know the half of it, almost literally. Episode two introduces Luciane Buchanan’s Ka‘ahumanu, a similarly displaced aristocrat chafing under the yoke of a tyrannical and bloodthirsty king, now prophesied to be as important as the long-awaited messiah-king. Holding the audience’s interest when the alternative is Jason Momoa killing people is tough — just ask the scenes in the first Dune that don’t have Jason Momoa killing people in them — but she seems up to the task.

Just as importantly, there’s a whole other historical timeline that crashes into ours in this episode. If you’re familiar with the time period or even just the marketing, you expected English sailors to show their faces at some point, but the show itself does nothing to telegraph it until the vessel looms out of mist like a ghost ship. Suddenly, King Kahekili’s plans of conquest face a massive new obstacle he’s not even aware exists. He’s not the only monarch in the world who likes unifying islands under his flag.

It’s a deftly done business. Saving the introduction of these major aspects of the show until the second episode gives everything in both episodes welcome room to breathe; the colonization storyline can only improve if we have a gut-level appreciation of the threat and stakes of the unification storyline, and vice versa. Setting up the old “reverse Shōgun,” with Ka‘iana as the anjin out of water — he even steered his warship, just like John Blackthorne was responsible for doing! — keeps things on familiar ground; that’s a dynamic people enjoy.

And does it hurt that Jason Momoa is basically bare-ass naked all episode long? It does not hurt, no. (I will try to limit these observations to one per review moving forward, but it really does seem worth noting that Momoa wrote himself a pantsless starring role.)

What Chief of War really excels at based on these two episodes is putting things in front of you that are really beautiful to look at, even when they’re ugly. Waterfalls and fields and jungles and beaches, kings and princes and prophets and priestesses, all of it deployed to bring you the most physically fit people you’ve ever seen sinking tooth-based weaponry into each other’s throats. And for what? To unify islands whose greatest threat is likely setting sail from a port a world away to rain down ruin on them all? There’s a message there, to quote another show set on a perfect and perilous island: live together, die alone.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.