How The Sandman Turns Tragedy into Art

For those who enjoyed the first season of Netflix’s adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s iconic graphic novel series The Sandman, its second and final season will come as a welcome homecoming. Season 1 fans will be pleased to know that the showrunner’s run with the surreal, dreamlike quality of Gaiman’s vision continues in this last batch of episodes. The trick of the series has been to take the anthology quality of the comics and inject enough grounded story in Morpheus’ arc to make the whole feel as cohesive as it does.

Netflix announced back in January that The Sandman would be ending with Season 2, prompting many fans to suspect that Netflix’s decision to cancel the show had to do with the recent sexual misconduct allegations leveled against Gaiman (he has denied any wrongdoing). Showrunner Allan Heinberg denied this on X, saying that from the start, the showrunners and Netflix were in agreement about a two-season order for the Sandman series. Heinberg, who also went on to say that the show would not be getting a third season, added that the creative team always felt like they “had two seasons of story and not much more.”

Season 1 covered Preludes and Nocturnes and The Doll’s House, with the bonus episodes “Dream of a Thousand Cats” and “Calliope” from Dream Country. Season 2 covers the majority of Seasons of Mists, Brief Lives, The Kindly Ones, and The Wake, with key elements from Fables and Reflections, most notably “The Song of Orpheus” and part of “Thermidor” as well as “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” from Dream Country. The bonus episode was based on the 1993 one-off spinoff Death: The High Cost of Living. There are a number of things from the comics that the series has ignored, most notably A Game of You, a short story included in Brief Lives and numerous other one-shots and short stories that did not particularly need to be covered for the main story of the Dream King.

Season 1 saw the Dream King (Tom Sturridge) escape his long imprisonment, recover his talismans, and confront the rogue angel and his acolyte Corinthian (Boyd Holbrook), before righting the wrong of the Vortex crisis. Now Season 2 opens with Dream rebuilding the Dreaming with some much-needed help, when he is called to a rare family meeting by his sister Destiny (Adrian Lester), together with Death (Kirby Howell-Baptiste), Desire (Mason Alexander Park), Despair (Donna Preston), and Delirium (Esmé Creed-Miles).

The meeting with his siblings proves tense, and Morpheus is tasked by Destiny with having to track down Nada (Umulisa Gahiga), queen of the First People and his lover from before time, whom he banished to Hell after she broke his heart. He is forced to have another go at Lucifer (Gwendolyn Christie), who hasn’t forgotten her defeat at the end of Season 1 and comes with her plans, which do not involve fighting. Lucifer shocks Dream by resigning as Hell’s Keeper, and instead of a battle, Morpheus is presented with the key to an empty Hell and given free rein to choose her replacement from among the most likely contenders, including Odin, Order, Chaos, and the demon Azazel.

The discovery of the disappearance of Destruction (Barry Sloane) by their sister Delirium leads to Dream being funneled towards his endgame: spilling the blood of his family and enraging the Kindly Ones.

Highlights, Low Points, and a Final Goodbye

Visually, the series continues to be high quality with wonderful casting and beautiful visuals that continue to take Gaiman’s panels and make them pop as stunningly rendered live-action art. The pacing in some places has come under criticism as being glacial, but this has always been a show that savored its time, and the luxuriant pace was intentional.

The low point in Season 2 has to be in the episode “Time and Night,” when Morpheus approaches his parents for help. Time (Rufus Sewell) and Night (Tanya Moodie) are technically canons as his parents, as the Endless were borne by them, but the scenes themselves are very awkward, and no amount of Rufus Sewell’s usual charm can make the stilted dialogue seem like anything more than a group therapy session.

The best scenes include Lucifer asking Dream to cut off her wings for her owfety; the goddess Ishtar (Amber Rose Revah) casting off every pretense and dancing away for the final time in her full goddess form; Dream explaining to William Shakespeare the need to write The Tempest, and a reformed Corinthian slowly falling in love with Johanna Constantine (Jenna Coleman). Other highlights: Orpheus singing of his loss to the Underworld, Dream performing an act of mercy killing on his own, and the Furies’ horrific rampage that sees Fiddler’s Green (Stephen Fry), Mervyn Pumpkinhead (Mark Hamill), and Abel (Asim Chaudhry) all killed off.