The Art of Ending: The Sandman’s Perfect Farewell

Netflix’s The Sandman has aired its second and final season, concluding its adaptation of the legendary comic book series of the same name, written by Neil Gaiman. The first season is a wonderfully faithful adaptation of the source material, managing to capture the otherworldly tone and surreal atmosphere of the original comics. It also managed to take the sprawling anthology-style of the comics and center it more around a singular narrative and character arc for the main protagonist, Morpheus, and Season 2 continues this trend.

After Netflix announced in January that Season 2 would be the final season of the series, some suspected that the cancellation might have been related to sexual assault and misconduct allegations leveled at Gaiman, which he has denied. However, on X, showrunner Allan Heinberg confirmed that the decision to make Season 2 the finale was always the plan, saying, “There never was a season 3 in development at Netflix. It was always two seasons. We felt like we had a nice place to end it.”

Heinberg also explained that the creators felt they had just enough content for two seasons to do the material justice. In retrospect, this assessment now seems on the nose. Season 1 was adapted from Preludes and Nocturnes, The Doll’s House, and two bonus episodes from Dream Country: “Dream of a Thousand Cats” and “Calliope.” Season 2 is adapted from Seasons of Mists, Brief Lives, The Kindly Ones, and The Wake, as well as important segments from Fables and Reflections, most notably “The Song of Orpheus” and part of “Thermidor,” as well as the Hugo Award-winning “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” from Dream Country. The bonus episode is adapted from the 1993 spinoff one-shot Death: The High Cost of Living. Not included are the events of A Game of You and several of the short stories, but that’s more a feature of those elements being only tangentially related to the Dream King’s overall arc.

Season 1 ends with Dream successfully escaping imprisonment, reacquiring his stolen talismans, stopping the loose Cannon (aka the Corinthian, played by Boyd Holbrook), and resolving the Vortex crisis. He now sets about the laborious task of rebuilding the Dreaming, only to be interrupted by a rare request from his sister Death (Kirby Howell-Baptiste) to have a meeting with his other siblings, Desire (Mason Alexander Park), Despair (Donna Preston), and Delirium (Esmé Creed-Miles). This confrontation leads to Dream’s attempt to rescue his ex-lover, Nada (Umulisa Gahiga), the queen of the First People, whom he sentenced to Hell for her crimes and now must do the journey of a thousand years back to Hell to rescue her from Lucifer.

In the process, he has to do battle with Lucifer (Gwendolyn Christie), who is still bitter after her Season 1 defeat and doesn’t want to give Dream back one of her offspring in her charge. This quickly goes from conflict to stalemate and then to subversion when Lucifer surprises Dream by quitting her job as Queen of Hell and giving Dream the key to an empty Hell, giving him free rein to find a new Keeper with a long list of applicants, including Odin, Order, Chaos, and the demon Azazel.

Driven by Delirium’s sense of abandonment and homesickness for their long-lost brother Destruction (Barry Sloane), who abandoned his domain thousands of years ago, Dream is inexorably drawn toward the events that will finally trigger his demise and the vengeance of the Kindly Ones.

Season 2: High Points, Low Points, and An Encore

Season 2 continues the high standard of production, excellent casting, and gorgeous art design that makes the show a sumptuous feast for the senses and captures the artist renderings of Gaiman’s comics. One frequent criticism is that the pacing is a bit slow, but that may be by design and not necessarily a fault of the show.

Weak episode: “Time and Night” chronicles Dream’s visits with his parents, Time (Rufus Sewell) and Night (Tanya Moodie), to ask them to convince Delirium not to leave the Dreaming. It’s canonically sound (Time and Night do have children in the comics, they just don’t talk about it much), but the dialogue in this episode is especially wooden, and even Sewell struggles to add much nuance to his lines. It all sounds like a therapy session or a 1970s soap opera and not epic poetry or mythology.