The Sandman Finale: Closing the Dreaming’s Gates

The Sandman has completed its run on Netflix, with the release of its second and final season. Those who enjoyed Season 1, which succeeded so well in recreating the comic’s trippy, dream-like atmosphere, will be pleased to know that the Season 2 finale largely maintains the high standard. While the Netflix Sandman, like the original Vertigo series, maintains much of the anthology series’ flavor of the original, the showrunners keep it grounded and relatable with a focus on the arc of the Dream King’s character.

Netflix announced in January that Season 2 would be the series’ last, with speculation that the choice was tied to sexual harassment allegations against Gaiman that the author has vehemently denied. Heinberg later confirmed on X that the two-season limitation was planned since Day 1. “We have two seasons to tell a story that can neatly fit in that time frame, and not more,” Heinberg stated. “We think we have a story that would be just long enough for two seasons, and we’ve given ourselves two seasons to tell it, and this is that.”

Season 1 adapted Preludes and Nocturnes and The Doll’s House and featured bonus episodes based on “Dream of a Thousand Cats” and “Calliope” from Dream Country. Season 2 draws most of its material from Seasons of Mists, Brief Lives, The Kindly Ones, and The Wake, with important elements from Fables and Reflections (mainly “The Song of Orpheus” and parts of “Thermidor”) and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” the award-winning story from Dream Country. The bonus episode is based on the 1993 anthology spinoff one-shot Death: The High Cost of Living. The events of A Game of You and some short stories from The Sandman have also been skipped, but they don’t meaningfully touch on Morpheus’ main arc.

Season 2 begins with Dream having weathered all the conflicts of the Season 1 finale—he escaped the Rose and collected all his talismans, faced down the rogue Corinthian (Boyd Holbrook), and reversed the Vortex anomaly—and is hard at work reconstructing the Dreaming from the inside out. His labor is interrupted by a rare request from his sibling Destiny (Adrian Lester), who has called a rare family meeting and convened the Endless siblings: Death (Kirby Howell-Baptiste), Desire (Mason Alexander Park), Despair (Donna Preston), and Delirium (Esmé Creed-Miles). The tense meeting immediately plunges Morpheus into another external crisis: to retrieve and free Nada (Umulisa Gahiga), queen of the First People and an old lover he sentenced to Hell. Morpheus will have to go toe to toe with Lucifer (Gwendolyn Christie), still bitter over her Season 1 defeat, once more.

Yet rather than challenge the Lady for her throne, Lucifer surprises Dream by handing him the key to a newly emptied Hell and her official resignation. Lucifer informs him that the job of ruler now falls to Dream and, after a list of possible candidates (ranging from Odin, Order, Chaos, and even the Old Testament demon Azazel) and a personal plea, entrusts Morpheus with choosing who the next Hell will serve. A side quest in Delirium’s quest to find her long-lost brother, Destruction (Barry Sloane), who fled her realm centuries earlier, results in Dream rapidly drawing his close: the spilling of family blood and the fatal anger of the Kindly Ones.

Sandier Moments, Quirks, and a Suitable Ending

Season 2 sees the production quality, as well as the casting and effects, reach even greater heights, truly bringing to life some of the most beautiful panels from the graphic novel. Pacing has been one of the few criticisms of The Sandman in Season 2, with some viewers finding it too relaxed. It’s worth remembering that, like the comics, The Sandman TV series is a deliberate and not an accidental exercise in the art of lingering.

The series’ weakest part is in the “Time and Night” episode, where Morpheus seeks assistance from his estranged parents, Time (Rufus Sewell) and Night (Tanya Moodie). It’s a perfectly canonical move (the Endless are, after all, their children), but in contrast to the rest of the series, the dialogue during these exchanges between Dream and his forebears is clunky at best. Even Sewell, as much in love with the material as he is, can’t make these scenes feel like much more than group therapy with the ancient gods.

Highlights include Lucifer asking Dream to cut off her wings; the goddess Ishtar (Amber Rose Revah) casting off all pretense to dance one last time in her divine form; Dream explaining to William Shakespeare why The Tempest must be written; and, of course, a reformed Corinthian developing genuine romantic feelings for Johanna Constantine (Jenna Coleman). Other major sequences include Orpheus singing his death dirge in the Underworld; Dream mercy killing his son; and the world-wracking might of the Furies, whose quest for vengeance against Mervyn Pumpkinhead (Mark Hamill) and Abel (Asim Chaudhry), and Fiddler’s Green (Stephen Fry) results in their complete and utter destruction.