The Sandman Season 2 Is a Lesson in Poetic Closure

The second and final season of Netflix’s Neil Gaiman-inspired spinoff hits The Sandman, ended earlier this month. And it delivers a fittingly beautiful and bittersweet end to the Dream King’s story. Season 1 of The Sandman had fans praising it for successfully adapting the vibe of the landmark graphic novel series into a surreal, hallucinatory fever dream. And much of that praise still applies to its second season, as Netflix weaves in standalone anthology stories without losing focus on the main narrative throughline, the fate of Morpheus, the current Dream King.

Netflix had announced that Season 2 of The Sandman would be the series finale back in January, which had many assuming that the decision was made as a direct result of sexual misconduct allegations against Gaiman himself, which he has since denied. But showrunner Allan Heinberg recently posted on X that a decision to end the series after two seasons was made well before the controversies, saying the team always thought they only had material for two seasons. And in speaking with those who worked on the series, Heinberg was right: The Sandman didn’t have the stories for a long series, but it had just enough for two.

Season 1 of The Sandman adapted Preludes and Nocturnes and The Doll’s House and had bonus episodes from “Dream of a Thousand Cats” and “Calliope” from Dream Country. Season 2, on the other hand, primarily adapts Seasons of Mists, Brief Lives, The Kindly Ones, and The Wake, with an emphasis on Fables and Reflections (primarily “The Song of Orpheus” and parts of “Thermidor”) and the Eisner Award-winning “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” from Dream Country. And the bonus episode was adapted from the 1993 standalone spinoff Death: The High Cost of Living. Other things that The Sandman doesn’t cover, like all of A Game of You or many of the short stories in the comic, don’t deal with the primary arc of the Dream King and so don’t negatively impact the series by being absent.

Season 1 saw Dream (or Morpheus, as he’s more commonly known in the books) go from losing everything, being tortured in captivity, and being accused of every crime under the sun, to escaping, recovering his talismans, confronting and killing the rogue Corinthian (Boyd Holbrook), and stopping the impending Vortex multiverse crisis. So with all the worst over with and Dream safely back in his place as the Dream King, the second season of the Netflix series sees Dream rebuilding the Dreaming, the entire universe as he sees fit. His peaceful labor is interrupted, however, by a rare visit from his oldest sibling, Destiny (Adrian Lester), who has brought Death (Kirby Howell-Baptiste), Desire (Mason Alexander Park), Despair (Donna Preston), and Delirium (Esmé Creed-Miles) together for a family intervention.

After Destiny lays out Delirium’s case, Morpheus must go find and rescue his former lover and the queen of the First People, Nada (Umulisa Gahiga). He had sentenced her to Hell after they had an affair, and she tried to kill him. This leads to Dream once again having to square off with Lucifer (Gwendolyn Christie), the demon queen of Hell, after Lucifer, surprisingly, resigns as ruler and hands the key to the empty Hell over to Morpheus to find his replacement. Among Lucifer’s replacements are such big names as Odin, Order, Chaos, and the original denizen of Hell, the demon Azazel.

Delirium’s yearning to find their long-lost brother Destruction (Barry Sloane) and prod him to return home to rule over their abandoned realm leads Morpheus on his path to his ultimate fate: Spilling family blood to invite the furies of the Kindly Ones down upon him.

Highlights, lowlights, and a fitting end

Overall, the production values remain strong, the cast spot-on, and the visuals, which take so much from the comic’s artwork and color schemes, are breathtaking. The only real criticism, which seems to be coming back to season two as well, is that the story has the pacing of a glacier. It’s a deliberate storytelling decision, and at this point, the audience who remains is old enough to know when to let the series take its time to ensure every step is considered and deliberate.

A low point in the new season is the slog of an episode, “Time and Night,” where Dream approaches his parents, Time (Rufus Sewell) and Night (Tanya Moodie), for assistance. It is mostly there to set up one of the more significant threats of the finale, so it’s interesting how the scenes with Sewell and Moodie come across like half-assed fanfic. Morpheus’ Endless parents are his parents in the books, but the dialogue here is so gratingly off that even Rufus Sewell can’t save it. It sounds like a bunch of therapy patients vying for the group’s sympathy rather than actual deities.

The standout moments are too many to list, but some of the better ones include Lucifer asking Dream to cut off her wings; the Mesopotamian goddess Ishtar (Amber Rose Revah) stripping away all of her lies and pretenses to dance like a goddess one last time; Dream explaining to William Shakespeare why he needs him to write The Tempest; and the reformed Corinthian pining after Johanna Constantine (Jenna Coleman). Other notable scenes include the despairing lament of Orpheus as he sings for his dead wife in the Underworld, Dream killing his son in mercy, and a murderous Furies tearing Fiddler’s Green (Stephen Fry), Mervyn Pumpkinhead (Mark Hamill), and Abel (Asim Chaudhry) apart at the seams.