The Sandman Season 2 Review: A Dream Well Told

With Sandman‘s Season 1, Netflix found a way to approximate the hallucinatory quality of the groundbreaking graphic novel series by Neil Gaiman. Morpheus and his crew are among television’s most dazzling, and the extra attention to worldbuilding in the final season only improves on that. The series adapts the best of the book’s blockbuster story arcs, like Season of Mist and Brief Lives, while streamlining some of the supporting characters to do more with less. The pacing is fairly languid, but that’s by design. For the most part, Sandman makes the right choices to end its story on a suitably fantastical, melancholy, bittersweet, and—above all—hopeful note.

Netflix has made it clear in interviews and statements across social media that the streaming service will not renew Sandman for a third season. As executive producer and showrunner Allan Heinberg (unrelated to Gaiman) recently confirmed on X, the plan from the get-go was for the series to run for two seasons, after which it would be completed. Netflix’s announcement in January that Season 2 would be the last did spark rumors that this was somehow connected to sexual misconduct allegations that have circulated on social media against Gaiman, which he has publicly denied in multiple interviews. Heinberg is confident that Sandman was allowed to come to its natural conclusion rather than a messy one because it was well-received in Season 1, and the production team stuck closely to the source material to avoid that outcome.

Season 1 of Sandman adapts Preludes and Nocturnes and The Doll’s House, with two bonus episodes based on “Dream of a Thousand Cats” and “Calliope” from the original graphic novel compilation Dream Country. Season 2, on the other hand, mostly adapts Seasons of Mists, Brief Lives, The Kindly Ones, and The Wake. It also features more material from Fables and Reflections, especially the story “The Song of Orpheus” and the opening chapter of “Thermidor”, plus the Nebula-award-winning novella “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” from Dream Country. The bonus episode of Season 2 is an adaptation of the 1993 one-shot spinoff Death: The High Cost of Living. Sandman again glosses over the events of A Game of You and several short stories, but that doesn’t detract from the greater arc of the Dream King.

Season 2 begins directly after the action of the first season’s finale, after Morpheus defeated the Old Kingdom, found and recovered all of his talismans, unmasked and confronted the escaped Corinthian (Boyd Holbrook), and solved the Vortex situation with the lost magic of his brother Dream (Tom Sturridge) and sister Death (Kirby Howell-Baptiste). He is busy rebuilding the Dreaming with Death in the afterlife when Destiny (Adrian Lester) intervenes for the first time in centuries, bringing Death, Desire (Mason Alexander Park), Despair (Donna Preston), and Delirium (Esmé Creed-Miles) together for a not-so-family reunion.

Morpheus is summoned by his sister, who bluntly tells him he has to go find Nada (Umulisa Gahiga) and free her. Nada was queen of the First People and the Dream King’s lover, when he cast both of them into Hell and doomed her to die a thousand deaths every day. It turns out Desire and Delirium, the youngest of the Endless, still want to meet Destruction, their brother who left his realm to wander the universe centuries earlier, and Nada is the key. Their plan sends Dream on another collision course with Lucifer (Gwendolyn Christie), the self-proclaimed Goddess of Hell, who does not take kindly to being bested by a younger god like Morpheus in Season 1.

Expecting another all-out war with Lucifer and her legions, Dream is caught off guard when Lucifer instead resigns from Hell and hands him the key to the empty kingdom. Lucifer will leave the choice of who governs Hell in Dream’s hands, but there are many potential candidates to succeed her, including Odin, Order, Chaos, and the renegade demon Azazel, who will stop at nothing to take it over.

Delirium’s desire to help her youngest siblings find Destruction is what leads Morpheus on a journey towards his mortality and an encounter with the Kindly Ones, who are neither kind nor merciful.

Best Bits, Shortcomings, and Adieu, Dream King

The Sandman‘s second season retains the same visual splendor, production values, and fantastic casting as the first. The biggest criticisms so far have been that its two-hour episodes still feel slow, and the central story thread is less eventful. But when Sandman picks up speed, the results are exhilarating. The more meditative tempo works for this adaptation.

The nadir of Season 2, in my opinion, is a particularly lackluster episode where Morpheus visits his parents, Time (Rufus Sewell) and Night (Tanya Moodie). It’s a brief detour and one that is more or less canonically true (Time and Night do indeed appear in the original comics as the Endless’ parents), but their scenes are mostly just stiff, awkward dialogue heavy on exposition that even Sewell can’t breathe life into, like a couple’s therapy session.

Season 2 has some highlights that stand out above the others. For me, they include Lucifer asking Dream to cut off her wings and hide them from the next person who tries to challenge her in her kingdom; Ishtar (Amber Rose Revah) ripping off her flesh-toned body suit to dance naked for the last time as a goddess; Dream explaining to William Shakespeare why he can’t change the ending of The Tempest; the reformed Corinthian developing feelings for Johanna Constantine (Jenna Coleman); the mournful song that Orpheus sings in the Underworld, and Dream’s mercy killing of his son; the Furies descending on Fiddler’s Green (Stephen Fry), Mervyn Pumpkinhead (Mark Hamill), and Abel (Asim Chaudhry) and leveling their whole universe.