What The Sandman’s Final Season Teaches About Endings

Netflix’s The Sandman has concluded the adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s seminal graphic novel series with the second and final season. If you enjoyed the first season of The Sandman, which generally did a wonderful job of bringing Gaiman’s uncanny, ethereal vision to life on screen, you will most likely enjoy the second as well. The Sandman had to walk a fine line between the anthology nature of the comics and the grounded approach needed for a serial focus on Morpheus, the brooding lord of the Dreaming, and it generally succeeds. After Netflix announced in January that Season 2 of The Sandman would be the final one, some accused Netflix of canceling the show in the wake of sexual misconduct allegations against Gaiman, which the author has denied. Showrunner Allan Heinberg took to X (formerly Twitter) to set the record straight: according to him, The Sandman was always going to be a two-season show. Heinberg added, “At the time we were writing and shooting [Season 1], we thought we’d have enough material for a two-season run. The time has come, and we feel like we hit that number pretty exactly.”

Season 1 covered Preludes and Nocturnes and The Doll’s House with two bonus episodes based on the “Dream of a Thousand Cats” story from Dream Country and “Calliope” from The Doll’s House, and Season 2 is adapted from Seasons of Mists, Brief Lives, The Kindly Ones, and The Wake with crucial elements from Fables and Reflections (most notably “The Song of Orpheus” as well as parts of “Thermidor”) and the award-winning Dream Country story “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” The Sandman’s bonus episode, which follows Daniel Hall’s ascension to the throne as Dream, is based on the 1993 standalone spinoff Death: The High Cost of Living. The two missing big chunks of the source material are A Game of You, which features Morpheus’ coming to terms with his sexuality through his love of a human woman and an attack on the Dreaming by witches, and some short stories, neither of which has much to do with the overall arc of the Dream King.

Season 2 picks up after the many victories Morpheus (Tom Sturridge) won in Season 1: his escape from captivity, the recovery of his stolen talismans, the defeat of the outlaw Corinthian (Boyd Holbrook), and the end of the Vortex ordeal. The season proper picks up with Morpheus, along with his three old constant companions, Death (Kirby Howell-Baptiste), Desire (Mason Alexander Park), and Despair (Donna Preston), rebuilding his devastated Dreaming. Morpheus’ work is interrupted by a rare summons from his sibling Destiny (Adrian Lester), who has called together a summit with Death, Desire, Despair, and Delirium (Esmé Creed-Miles) for a tense family meeting.

The meeting ends with Morpheus off on another rescue mission, this time to save Nada (Umulisa Gahiga), the queen of the First People and Dream’s former lover, whom he sentenced to Hell for the murder of her entire village in a fury of grief and rage after her lover was killed. To save Nada, he must tangle once again with Lucifer (Gwendolyn Christie), who remains bitterly resentful of her Season 1 defeat at the hands of Dream and Death. Instead of fighting, Lucifer shocks Morpheus by resigning as ruler of Hell and giving him the key to an empty Hell to let him choose its next steward from a group of more or less obvious contenders, including Odin, Order, Chaos, and the demon Azazel.

Delirium’s desperate wish to find their missing brother, Destruction (Barry Sloane), who long ago gave up on the world and left his domain to die eons before the events of the show, tugs Morpheus inexorably on the path toward his eventual fate, spilling family blood and summoning the dreaded Kindly Ones.

Highlights and Lowlights and a Good Send-Off

The Sandman has more or less maintained its high production values throughout, with top-notch casting and visuals that bring the image of the graphic novel to life like nothing else in recent television. Some have complained about the pacing, but that is a choice of the creators that I am fine with: the dreamlike pace of the show, in which nothing feels rushed, was a crucial part of the show’s immersive approach.

The lowlight episode, if one is needed, comes in “Time and Night,” in which Morpheus asks for aid from his father Time (Rufus Sewell) and mother Night (Tanya Moodie). As far as the Gaiman-verse goes, it is canonically not a problem: the Endless are children of Time and Night, and their child-parents can show up to aid them when need be. The problem comes in the clunky dialogue for these scenes, which even the best acting in the world (and few actors outclass Sewell) cannot elevate above the level of a group therapy session.

Highlights include Lucifer asking Dream to cut her wings off; the goddess Ishtar (Amber Rose Revah) stripping away all her layers of humanity to dance one last time in her true divine form; Dream explaining to William Shakespeare why he must write The Tempest; a reformed Corinthian falling in love with Johanna Constantine (Jenna Coleman); orpheus crooning his heartbroken song in the Underworld; Dream mercifully ending his own son’s life; the Furies’ total annihilation of Fiddler’s Green (Stephen Fry), Mervyn Pumpkinhead (Mark Hamill), and Abel (Asim Chaudhry) after their children’s death; Lucifer’s quiet breakdown as her plans go sideways; Morpheus reconciling with Desire after his vendetta against all women; Dream’s agonized departure from his true love Nada; the Kindly Ones laying waste to entire worlds to track down their missing brother Destruction; the death of Morpheus; and the rise of the new Dream.