The Sandman Finale: A Bittersweet Goodbye to the Dream King

You’re exhausted but unfulfilled, numb to the television before you. These last several hours have just laid waste to the spirit. Morpheus’ tale concludes in grimness, despite his past victories in the first season. He takes solace in Death, his Endless sibling. Dream is mercifully killed by her hand, dying heroically in a noble effort to save a teenager. It’s a harsh finality for a character who continues to grow from book to book. This is the grimmest ending Neil Gaiman has ever composed. The Sandman on Netflix wraps Morpheus’ arc over two seasons with poignant satisfaction and echoes of the strange, unpredictable tone of the source material.

Fans of the first season of The Sandman on Netflix were fortunate: The showrunners nailed the cartoonish but magical tone of Gaiman’s original Sandman comic book series in their first go. There are elements of the standalone anthology quality of the comics still present, but it’s far less jarring than the first season. Morpheus’ story and identity ground the second season of The Sandman on Netflix.

Netflix had revealed in January that Season 2 of The Sandman on Netflix would be the last. Rumors swirled that the production house was cutting it short because of recent sexual assault allegations made against author Neil Gaiman. Gaiman has flatly denied those accusations. Recently, though, on X, showrunner Allan Heinberg clarified that the creators from the start had only the material for two seasons, and Season 2 was the end. Heinberg said that the production team figured that “if we’re lucky, we might get three seasons out of it. If we were lucky, if we’re pushing the stars to line up.” He admitted it was only later that they looked at what they had, and they guessed right. They only had two seasons’ worth of material. In some ways, Heinberg was correct in that judgment.

Season 1 of The Sandman on Netflix adapted Preludes and Nocturnes and The Doll’s House with bonus episodes that focused on “Dream of a Thousand Cats” and “Calliope” from the fifth issue of Dream Country. Season 2 is based mainly on Seasons of Mists, Brief Lives, The Kindly Ones, and The Wake. All of the parts of Fables and Reflections, particularly “The Song of Orpheus” and the pivotal “Thermidor” passage, and the award-winning short story “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” from Dream Country play a large part in the season. The bonus episode was a retelling of the 1993 graphic novel spinoff Death: The High Cost of Living. The season does not adapt A Game of You or all the shorter vignettes found in each chapter of the graphic novel. Both are small losses, and their omission has little effect on Morpheus’ main journey.

Season 2 of The Sandman on Netflix finds Morpheus (Tom Sturridge) in the process of restoring the Dreaming. He gets word from his sibling Destiny (Adrian Lester) that she and the other Endless have been summoned. He sends a reluctant Death (Kirby Howell-Baptiste), Desire (Mason Alexander Park), Despair (Donna Preston), and Delirium (Esmé Creed-Miles) to meet with Destiny, and eventually his other brothers and sisters as well. The terse family summit orders Morpheus to rescue Nada (Umulisa Gahiga), queen of the First People and a former lover, whom he banished to Hell.

A reluctant Morpheus must square off with Lucifer (Gwendolyn Christie) once more. This time, the second-in-command of Hell isn’t willing to fight. Her Season 1 defeat still rankles, and in a surprise move, Lucifer resigns from her position as Hell’s governor and hands Morpheus the key to an empty and mostly unpopulated hell. He must find a new ward and champion for the Underworld, and many will vie for the honor, like Odin, Order, Chaos, and a demon named Azazel.

In one of the season’s weaker but necessary plotlines, Delirium and the other Endless seek their missing brother, Destruction (Barry Sloane). He abandoned his dominion hundreds of years ago and has not been seen since. The path of that quest will take Morpheus to his doom and doom the whole family with the spilling of their blood and the invocation of the Furies.

Memorable moments and weaknesses

Season 2 of The Sandman on Netflix is visually as stunning as the first season, with the script as well-acted, and the characters continuing to shine as they learn about themselves and their world. Complaints of this being an overly languid series are a function of how the show is made, and critics of the series should look elsewhere for something less deliberate.

The season’s low point occurs with an episode called “Time and Night,” where Morpheus consults his parents, Time (Rufus Sewell) and Night (Tanya Moodie), for advice. Morpheus’ conversation with them, while technically within canon (the Endless are their offspring), is painful, the lines read poorly, and even Sewell cannot breathe life into the dry lines that come off as something between a community counseling circle and a glorified TV Guide roundtable.

Season 2 has many scenes to savor. Lucifer demanding Dream clip her wings; the goddess Ishtar (Amber Rose Revah) removing all her makeup and clothing to finally let loose and dance one last time in her divine form; Dream giving William Shakespeare the short end of the stick and an explanation as to why he must write The Tempest; and the redeemed Corinthian pining for Johanna Constantine (Jenna Coleman). All have emotional resonance and linger in the mind after the screen goes dark. Other moments that sing are Orpheus’ mournful elegy in the Underworld; Dream putting his son out of his misery rather than see him tortured for all eternity; and the twisted vengeance of the Furies as they descend upon and erase Fiddler’s Green (Stephen Fry), Mervyn Pumpkinhead (Mark Hamill), and Abel (Asim Chaudhry) from existence.