The Sandman Ends as It Began: With Grace and Surreal Beauty

Netflix’s live-action adaptation of the legendary graphic novel series The Sandman from Neil Gaiman comes to an end with Season 2, which drops May 5. Fans of the first season will not be disappointed as the second installment maintains the excellent surreal, dream-like tone of the series. It also holds to the balance it struck between the anthology structure of the source material and a more grounded through-line in the arc of Morpheus, the Lord of Dreams.

Netflix announced in January that this season would be the last, prompting many to wonder if sexual misconduct allegations against the author that he has denied were behind the decision. However, Showrunner Allan Heinberg addressed the question on X, explaining that from the beginning, The Sandman was intended to last two seasons and no more. Heinberg wrote, “We always intended to tell the story in two seasons, because the writers and I felt we had exactly enough story for two seasons. It was a creative decision, and I think one that’s vindicated by how this season is turning out.”

Season 1 was an adaptation of Preludes and Nocturnes and The Doll’s House, with two bonus episodes based on “Dream of a Thousand Cats” and “Calliope” from the one-shot Dream Country. Season 2 is based mostly on Seasons of Mists, Brief Lives, The Kindly Ones, and The Wake, with major appearances by material from Fables and Reflections, specifically “The Song of Orpheus” and part of “Thermidor,” as well as the Oscar-winning “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” from Dream Country. The bonus episode is based on the 1993 one-shot spinoff Death: The High Cost of Living. The events of A Game of You are missing, as are several short stories, but their exclusion doesn’t noticeably affect the arc of the Dream King.

Season 1 left Dream victorious—he had escaped from imprisonment, regained all his talismans, dealt with the rogue Corinthian (Boyd Holbrook), and brought the Vortex situation under control. In Season 2, Morpheus (Tom Sturridge) has settled into restoring the Dreaming after the damage he suffered. He is only partially successful when he receives a summons from his sister Destiny (Adrian Lester), an event that rarely happens. Death (Kirby Howell-Baptiste), Desire (Mason Alexander Park), Despair (Donna Preston), and Delirium (Esmé Creed-Miles) are summoned for a serious family intervention.

This meeting sends Morpheus on a mission to save Nada (Umulisa Gahiga), queen of the First People and his former lover, from a Hell she was never meant to inhabit. This forces him into a second confrontation with Lucifer (Gwendolyn Christie), who hasn’t let go of her defeat at Dream’s hands in Season 1. Rather than fight again, Lucifer shocks her by resigning as Queen of Hell and giving Morpheus the key to her now empty domain to select a new keeper from a list of candidates that ranges from Odin, Order, and Chaos, to the demon Azazel.

Delirium’s need to find her missing brother, Destruction (Barry Sloane), who abandoned his realm to wander the mortal world hundreds of years ago, has set Morpheus on the road to his destiny—spilling family blood and summoning the rage of the Kindly Ones.

Highlights, Lowlights, and a Better Send-Off Than Dream Deserved

Production values remain high with excellent casting and effects, and the visuals remain stunning and evocative of the pages of the graphic novel. Pacing has been described as slow, and it is, but that seems to be by design.

Season 2’s weakest moment is “Time and Night,” in which Dream turns to his parents, Time (Rufus Sewell) and Night (Tanya Moodie), for help. These scenes, while not wrong—The Endless are their children after all—are almost as bad as the Corinthian’s dialogue in the first season, and Sewell does not have the comic chops to pull it off. It’s more a group therapy session than a scene about primordial deities.

A few other standout moments: Lucifer demanding Dream cut off her wings; Ishtar (Amber Rose Revah) casting aside all her artifice to dance naked and divine before being hurled into the heavens by her brother Baal (Shane meier); Dream explaining to William Shakespeare how she will use The Tempest; and a reformed Corinthian becoming a recurring romantic interest for Johanna Constantine (Jenna Coleman). Other powerful sequences include Orpheus’ elegy as he sings to the Underworld, Dream’s mercy killing of his son, and the unbridled fury of the Furies in their evisceration of Fiddler’s Green (Stephen Fry), Mervyn Pumpkinhead (Mark Hamill), and Abel (Asim Chaudhry).

The end of Dream’s story is a beautiful farewell with him taking Death’s hand one last time before making room for the latest incarnation to take his place as the latest Dream of the Endless—Daniel Hall (Jacob Anderson), the only human ever created in the Dreaming. Daniel stumbles and rages his way into the role, still reeling from being born too soon, but now living up to his potential. His Endless siblings mourn their fallen brother and welcome the newest Dream into the family.