How The Sandman’s Last Season Honors Its Source Material

Netflix’s Sandman, based on Neil Gaiman’s seminal graphic novel series of the same name, concluded with its second and final season. While the first season was a stunning adaptation of the source material, which managed to get across the surreal, almost psychedelic vibe of Gaiman’s writing, the second season is more of the same in many ways. Much like the comic books it’s based on, the second season strikes a balance between feeling like a true-to-the-source-material anthology and a more traditional story arc focused on the development of the main character, Morpheus.

Netflix announced in January that Season 2 of Sandman would be the final one, and rumors soon surfaced that the decision had something to do with sexual misconduct allegations against Gaiman, which he has denied. But showrunner Allan Heinberg posted on X that those claims were untrue and that the decision to cap the series at two seasons had been made long before. Heinberg goes on to say that the producers always believed they had just enough source material for two seasons, and he’s right—by the end of Season 2, the showrunners had exhausted all the necessary major elements of the story they wanted to cover. It also helps that they were smart enough to just… leave certain elements out.

Season 1 of Sandman covered Preludes and Nocturnes and The Doll’s House as well as two bonus episodes, which adapted the short stories “Dream of a Thousand Cats” and “Calliope” from the one-shot Dream Country. Season 2 is primarily based on Seasons of Mists, Brief Lives, The Kindly Ones, and The Wake, as well as certain elements from Fables and Reflections (most notably, “The Song of Orpheus” and portions of “Thermidor”) and the Hugo Award-winning “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” one-shot from Dream Country. The second bonus episode in the series adapted the 1993 one-shot standalone spinoff Death: The High Cost of Living. Curiously, the events of A Game of You, as well as many short stories found in Fables and Reflections, were omitted, but ultimately, those absences don’t much affect the character arc of the Sand King.

Season 1 saw Dream, a.k.a. Morpheus, a.k.a. the Dream King, winning several battles—breaking out of a century-long captivity, reclaiming his talismans and his throne, punishing the rogue former servant Corinthian (Boyd Holbrook) for his crimes, and razing the alternate reality Vortex to the ground after it endangered the Dreaming. The second season of Sandman shows Morpheus (Tom Sturridge) back in the saddle, rebuilding the Dreaming after the disastrous explosion from the first season finale. He is interrupted by one of his siblings, the nearly always stoic Destiny (Adrian Lester), who hasn’t called upon him for millennia to convene a sort of family intervention with his other sisters and brothers, Death (Kirby Howell-Baptiste), Desire (Mason Alexander Park), Despair (Donna Preston), and Delirium (Esmé Creed-Miles).

The meeting brings Morpheus to his senses and forces him to go on a mission to rescue his former lover, Nada (Umulisa Gahiga), the queen of the First People, whom he had banished to Hell for heresy. This then forces him into a rematch with Lucifer (Gwendolyn Christie), who’s still bitter about being overthrown in the season 1 finale. However, instead of immediately battling again, Lucifer surprises Dream by hanging up her horns and key to Hell and resigning, forcing him to find someone new to put in charge, from among numerous possible successors: Odin, Order, and Chaos (two new Endless who haven’t been mentioned before), and the demon Azazel.

Motivated by the sudden disappearance of their oldest brother, Destruction (Barry Sloane), who left his realm and his family centuries before, Delirium causes Morpheus to veer onto a path that he knows, at least subconsciously, will lead to his eventual demise, one which will involve spilling family blood and inciting the fury of the Kindly Ones.

Highlights and Weaknesses, and an Overall Appropriate End

As with the first season, the second season is overall top-notch, with strong casting, visuals, and production values, all of which bring the imagery of the graphic novel to life with uncanny accuracy. Some have complained that the show is a bit slow, but that’s not a bug; it’s a feature. It’s meant to be, a deliberate nod to the pacing of the source material.

Season 2’s low point is probably the episode “Time and Night,” in which Dream reaches out to his parents, Time (Rufus Sewell) and Night (Tanya Moodie). The scenes between them are by-the-number, and the dialogue in those scenes is embarrassingly clunky (canonically, it’s true that the Endless are Time and Night’s children, but in terms of dialogue, it’s as if the writers wrote this like a therapy session for people who aren’t characters in a Neil Gaiman comic). Even Rufus Sewell can’t elevate these lines to something watchable, although the facial expression when he learns of his oldest child’s imminent death is worth the price of admission alone.

Standout moments include Lucifer asking Dream to clip her wings; the goddess Ishtar (Amber Rose Revah) removing all pretense of normality to dance one last time in her true, divine form; Dream talking down William Shakespeare and making him see why he must write The Tempest; the Corinthian showing up on Johanna Constantine’s (Jenna Coleman) doorstep in a decidedly less villainous mood and making a pass at her; Orpheus breaking into song in the Underworld and Dido bathing in the stars; Dream mercy-killing his son; and the Furies destroying Fiddler’s Green (Stephen Fry), Mervyn Pumpkinhead (Mark Hamill), and Abel (Asim Chaudhry).