Revisiting the Dreaming in The Sandman’s Final Season

I enjoyed the first season of Netflix’s The Sandman, based on Neil Gaiman’s popular graphic novel of the same name, for its fidelity to the surreal source material and striking visuals. Season 2 retains these strengths and more while further fleshing out the story. At its core, it is still closer to Morpheus’ character arc in the comics and thus resembles an anthology less than the first installment. If you liked the initial release, you will likely be pleased with the next and final chapter of the series.

A lot of viewers speculated when Netflix announced in January that The Sandman would be canceled after Season 2 that sexual misconduct allegations (by a Gaiman collaborator; Gaiman has denied) were a factor in the decision. However, Showrunner Allan Heinberg explained on X last week that the plan had always been to run the series for two seasons. “We always thought we had a beginning, middle, and end that felt like we had two seasons of material,” Heinberg said. “Looking at it now, we were right!”

Season 1 adapted Preludes and Nocturnes and The Doll’s House, along with two bonus episodes based on the short stories “Dream of a Thousand Cats” and “Calliope” from Dream Country. Season 2 is based mostly on Seasons of Mists, Brief Lives, The Kindly Ones, and The Wake, with crucial elements of Fables and Reflections (primarily “The Song of Orpheus” and a section of “Thermidor”) and the Hugo Award-winning “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” from Dream Country. The bonus episode is adapted from the 1993 spinoff Death: The High Cost of Living. Season 2 largely glosses over the events of A Game of You and many of Gaiman’s short stories, but this does not significantly detract from the main arc of the Dream King.

The bulk of Season 1 had Morpheus (Tom Sturridge) recently released from a long imprisonment, racing to regain his stolen talismans, track down the escaped Corinthian (Boyd Holbrook), and get ahead of a crisis in the Vortex. Season 2 finds the Dream King, having won out on all fronts, making repairs to the Dreaming. He has been interrupted, however, by the extremely rare occasion of Destiny (Adrian Lester) calling a family summit with Death (Kirby Howell-Baptiste), Desire (Mason Alexander Park), Despair (Donna Preston), and Delirium (Esmé Creed-Miles). The session, contentious at best, places Morpheus on a rescue mission for Nada (Umulisa Gahiga), his former lover and the queen of the First People, whom he banished to Hell.

He is further dragged into a second round against Lucifer (Gwendolyn Christie), still smarting from her Season 1 defeat. Rather than fighting again, Lucifer shocks Morpheus by resigning from her post and leaving him the key to a vacant Hell. He can choose from a slate of candidates—including Odin, Order, Chaos, and the demon Azazel—who she deems worthy to take her place. Delirium’s wanderlust in the face of her and her siblings’ absent brother, Destruction (Barry Sloane), leads Morpheus on a path to his inevitable conclusion—shedding family blood and incurring the fury of the Kindly Ones.

Highlights, Lowlights, and an Earnest Sendoff

It may be too early to give the series an official recommendation, but I will say that if you are on the fence, the production values are of a high caliber, and the casting is spot on. While some have commented on the leisurely pace, I feel this complaint is misguided because the creators are almost certainly deliberately giving viewers the chance to soak in the series.

For my money, the weakest part of the series is in the episode “Time and Night,” where Morpheus, at his parents’ behest, enlists the help of his mother Night (Tanya Moodie) and father Time (Rufus Sewell) to hasten his progress. It is canonically consistent that the Endless are their children’s progenitors, but it is clunky in its execution, and even Sewell cannot make the dialogue sound like anything other than a family therapy session.

The highlights, as usual, are many and varied: Lucifer tells Dream to cut off her wings; the goddess Ishtar (Amber Rose Revah) casts aside her last shred of pretense to dance in her full godly form for the last time; Dream explains to William Shakespeare why he must write The Tempest; and the reformed Corinthian falls in love with Johanna Constantine (Jenna Coleman). Other notable scenes include Orpheus singing the mournful “Daybreak II” in the Underworld; Dream mercifully killing his son after deciding he can no longer live a life in the Dreaming; and the unstoppable power of the Furies as they lay waste to Fiddler’s Green (Stephen Fry), Mervyn Pumpkinhead (Mark Hamill), and Abel (Asim Chaudhry).

Dream’s demise is as you would expect, taking Death’s hand for the last time before passing to make room for the new version of herself, Daniel Hall (Jacob Anderson), the sole human ever to have been conceived in the Dreaming. The childlike and decidedly unseasoned Daniel is rapidly brought to adulthood by his new siblings in the Endless, who mourn Morpheus while simultaneously celebrating Daniel’s new life.

The bonus episode functions as an afterword to the primary events, picking up as Death, as her contract dictates, experiences a single day as a human every hundred years before dying at the end of that cycle. “It just goes so fast,” she observes. “You want to hang onto every second. And you’d give anything for just one more.” She helps a young man (Colin Morgan) intent on taking his own life to see that there is life after all in the world.