From Seasons of Mists to The Wake: The Sandman’s Epic Conclusion

The Sandman has, after years of waiting and anticipation, returned for its second and final season on Netflix. As with the first season, this season mostly sticks to the source material, adapting many of its more prominent storylines with aplomb. Overall, it’s a good ending for the show, and those who loved the first installment of Neil Gaiman’s series should enjoy this.

A warning for those who have yet to watch either of The Sandman seasons: this review contains spoilers.

One major change in this season is the fact that it is the last. The show was renewed for Season 2 back in January, around the same time as rumors emerged that Netflix had decided to drop a third season due to sexual misconduct allegations against Gaiman. Gaiman has denied those allegations, and showrunner Allan Heinberg weighed in on the subject via X, denying any connection between the allegations and the show’s end, stating, “The decision for two seasons came very early on, even before we had a deal with Netflix. It was always our plan.” Heinberg went on to state that the creative team thought they had enough story to fill two seasons, and in retrospect, they appear to have been correct in their estimation.

Season 1 covered Preludes and Nocturnes and The Doll’s House, while the two bonus episodes, “Dream of a Thousand Cats” and “Calliop,e” both came from Dream Country. Season 2 is much more frontloaded and covers Seasons of Mists, Brief Lives, The Kindly Ones, and The Wake, but includes several important elements from Fables and Reflections (“The Song of Orpheus” and the first half of “Thermidor”) and the Hugo-award winning story “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” from Dream Country. The special bonus episode, dropped in advance of the season premiere, adapts the 1993 solo spinoff Death: The High Cost of Living. Other missing elements include most of the events of A Game of You and various short stories, which don’t hurt the central arc of the story of Dream.

Season 1 left our hero on top, having broken out of the prison to which he’d been subjected, regained his talismans, confronted and freed himself of the rogue Corinthian (Boyd Holbrook), and avoided an existential crisis with the help of the Vortex. Season 2 shows him hard at work, rebuilding the Dreaming after his time in captivity, when he receives a summons from his sister Destiny (Adrian Lester), bringing together Death (Kirby Howell-Baptiste), Desire (Mason Alexander Park), Despair (Donna Preston), and Delirium (Esmé Creed-Miles) for what one gathers will be a rather tense meeting of the family.

This meeting of the family, after Destiny sternly tells Dream that it was his responsibility to save all those trapped in his absence, sends Morpheus (Tom Sturridge) on a path to save Nada (Umulisa Gahiga), queen of the First People and his former lover, whom he sentenced to Hell. This, in turn, sends him into a round two with Lucifer (Gwendolyn Christie), the Devil and ruler of Hell, who is still sore about having been overthrown in Season 1. Morpheus had already restored the palace in Hell that the Corinthian had won in the card game to its original form, but what he didn’t bargain for was that Lucifer wasn’t going to fight. Instead, Lucifer, seemingly out of spite, resigns and hands over the key to the empty gates of Hell for Dream to name her successor. Potential successors abound, and Morpheus must deal with many of the most important figures in the Dreaming throughout the season, from Odin to Order and Chaos, to the demon Azazel, whom he would later play in the animated series Invader Zim.

Delirium’s need to find her missing brother, Destruction (Barry Sloane), who left her to die in his realm centuries before, leads Morpheus to his ultimate fate of spilling the blood of one of his sisters and being hunted by the Kindly Ones.

Highlights, Lowlights, and A Final Farewell

The production values remain outstanding, as do the casting and visuals, which have been consistently great at capturing the imagery of the source material. Pacing has been mentioned by some as a point of complaint, but even if it is slow, it is more of a deliberate creative decision than a result of low quality.

A slight letdown point comes during the episode “Time and Night,” where Morpheus consults his parents, Time (Rufus Sewell) and Night (Tanya Moodie). This is a particularly bad stretch of the show not just because it is a bit tonally off as the dialogue is not especially natural or good—some of the complaints leveled at the first season return here—and even Sewell’s performance can’t quite save these scenes, which sound more like a grief counselor than the kind of mythic dialogue that Gaiman is capable of in his more natural state.

Other more memorable moments include Lucifer asking Dream to cut off her wings; the goddess Ishtar (Amber Rose Revah) finally stripping away all pretense and dancing one last time in her divine form before giving up; Dream explaining to William Shakespeare why he must write The Tempest; and the reformed Corinthian pining for Johanna Constantine (Jenna Coleman). Other noteworthy sequences include Orpheus singing his eponymous song in the Underworld; Dream performing an act of mercy in putting his son to rest; and the Furies’ wrath as they take down Fiddler’s Green (Stephen Fry), Mervyn Pumpkinhead (Mark Hamill), and Abel (Asim Chaudhry) for Dream’s transgression.