You can see right off the bat that the quality has improved from season one (though I enjoyed it too). While season one had a huge mountain to climb in having to adapt to tv the first book, which was always going to be difficult, books two and three are much more similar to the rest of the book series, so I was confident it would be a smoother ride.
This episode really set up the plot and caught us up on events. Great world building and characterisation, you quickly get a good sense of what's driving characters and what they're struggling with. The magic system is more deeply explained and the overall threat reiterated, with a tantalising glimpse of what's to come both in the rest of this series and the wider plot. A solid season opener.