Why The Sandman’s Conclusion Feels Both Inevitable and Satisfying

Netflix’s first-ever adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s seminal graphic novel series The Sandman has officially reached its end. The second and final season recently premiered on the streaming platform to the delight of fans, who welcomed the first season with open arms when it was released last November. Season 1 was praised by many, as it did a great job at capturing the strange, hallucinatory quality of the graphic novel while trimming down its anthology structure and focusing on the core story arc about Morpheus’ (Tom Sturridge) journey in re-taking the Dreaming from her captors.

A month before Season 1 premiered, Netflix announced that this would be the final season, with some fans immediately speculating whether this was due to recent sexual misconduct allegations against the author, which Gaiman has since denied. Showrunner Allan Heinberg later addressed the allegations on X, confirming that Gaiman had no involvement in the decision to cap the series at two seasons. “We knew from the start that it would be two seasons,” Heinberg said. “We sat down and felt like we had a little bit of a library to work with, and with any adaptation that you do of any material, you have to be strategic with what you include. And we knew at the end of the day, we had just enough to do two seasons.”

Season 1 was based on Preludes and Nocturnes and The Doll’s House, with two bonus episodes serving as adaptations of the story “Dream of a Thousand Cats” and the poem “Calliope” from the collection Dream Country. The main chapters of Season 2 adapt Seasons of Mists, Brief Lives, The Kindly Ones, and The Wake, while Fables and Reflections—the latter episode in particular, which also won an Eisner Award for Best Single Issue/One-Shot—is crucial to several scenes, including the story “The Song of Orpheus” and part of the classic story “Thermidor.” The series finale also incorporates elements of the Eisner Award-winning story “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” from Dream Country. The aforementioned bonus episode served as an adaptation of the 1993 one-shot spinoff Death: The High Cost of Living. The first Sandman spinoff series, The Dreaming, was just renewed for Season 2, and it follows Thomas Strange (Azor Ahai), a Dreaming assassin who faces his existential crisis as he is on the hunt for Morpheus. The series skips the events of the story arc A Game of You and most of the standalone short stories found in Endless Nights, which is perfectly fine, as they don’t have too much to do with the core arc about the Dream King.

Season 1 ended with the Dream King successfully escaping his prison, recovering all his talismans, finally confronting his abusive childhood friend, the Corinthian (Boyd Holbrook), and averting a crisis known as the Vortex. Morpheus has now set about to rebuild his world, the Dreaming, but he is stopped in his tracks by a request to meet with his sister Destiny (Adrian Lester). The dream lord is joined by his siblings, Death (Kirby Howell-Baptiste), Desire (Mason Alexander Park), Despair (Donna Preston), and Delirium (Esmé Creed-Miles) as the family of Endless gods sit down to a formal meeting.

The meeting that Destiny and Dream have quickly places the Dream Lord on a new mission: to rescue his ex-lover Nada (Umulisa Gahiga), the queen of the First People, the first race of humans, whom he condemned to Hell all those centuries ago. This throws him into another showdown with Lucifer (Gwendolyn Christie), who still bears a grudge from her defeat in Season 1. However, instead of fighting to the death, Lucifer surprises Dream by simply announcing her resignation, handing him the key to Hell—except that her Hell is now empty, and she is leaving Dream to decide who the next in-charge will be, among various candidates, including Odin, Order, Chaos, and the demon Azazel.

Delirium’s unresolved desire to find her long-lost brother, Destruction (Barry Sloane), who abandoned his realm thousands of years ago, also sets the Dream King on his fated course toward his inevitable end of spilling blood from his family and coming under the notice of the Kindly Ones.

Highlights, Lowlights, and an Emotional Finale

Visually, the series is consistently high quality and engaging, with a great cast and great production values that do a superb job at translating the graphic novel’s imagery and evoking the same reactions. Its pacing is very, very slow, but this is by design, and purists may be more critical of this aspect.

The low point for the series is in “Time and Night,” which is when Morpheus visits his parents, Time (Rufus Sewell) and Night (Tanya Moodie), to recruit their help in the battle against his sister, Delirium. Although it is canonically accurate to the comics in that Time and Night are the parents of the Endless children and the sentences they have each other are lifted from the graphic novel, these segments read much worse here, and Sewell’s performance is not enough to overcome their clunky dialogue, which reads more like a therapist than a living god.

Memorable sequences include Lucifer asking Dream to clip her wings; the goddess Ishtar (Amber Rose Revah) casting off all pretense to let go and dance for the first and last time in her true divine form; Dream’s gentle explanation to the living William Shakespeare (Simon Callow) as to why he needs him to write The Tempest; and a reformed and more ethical Corinthian finding a romantic connection to Johanna Constantine (Jenna Coleman).

Other standouts include Orpheus’ song to the Underworld to try and get Eurydice back, Dream’s mercy killing of his son and Nada’s baby, and the slow-burn vengeance of the Furies, three primordial gods of justice who decide to wipe Fiddler’s Green (Stephen Fry), Mervyn Pumpkinhead (Mark Hamill), and Abel (Asim Chaudhry) from existence.