Series Review: The Sandman, Season 1

The Sandman, Season 1 (2022)

So yeah, it's about damn time that someone did an adaptation of Neil Gaiman's The Sandman, one of the best stories to come out of comic books. And I had originally wanted to do a review of this episode-per-episode, but... I basically binged the whole season in like, three days. It's great, even if it doesn't necessarily deviate too much from the source material other than the expected gender/ethnicity-swapping of certain characters. It works for Sandman, though, with its psychedelic storyline. 

And... and it's definitely a competent adaptation. Netflix's The Sandman adapts the first two TPB's, namely Preludes and Nocturnes and The Doll's House, with a partial adaptation of Dream Country, the third TPB. There are definitely three very obvious arcs with Dream recovering his artifacts leading to the confrontation with Dr. Destiny (or just John Dee here); and then the arc with Rose Walker and the Corinthian. Everything is streamlined and told without really changing too much from the source material, with as best that television can get the psychedelic imagery of the Sandman across. 

Obviously, other than a few ambiguous cameos (Silver Age artwork of DC supervillains in Jed's dream; the Static Shock/JLA cartoon being shown on-screen) the show doesn't even try to pretend that it's part of the DC superhero show. In fact, other than Doctor Destiny and Johanna Constantine showing up, there's no real indication of this series' role as being a part of the DC comics universe. Which is fine, because the source material itself really only paid lip service to the greater DC universe and the cameos only really served as lip service anyway. 

And a vast majority of the show hinges on Tom Sturridge, the actor that plays Dream of the Endless (or Morpheus, or the Sandman, or Kai'ckul), works. He's got that smoldering intensity that's both morose, melancholic but also at the same time gives a heart to this eternal being when he has to. Practically every aspect of the comic that doesn't involve superheroes ends up being adapted here, and without going episode-by-episode I'm actually kind of a loss as to what to say here. I'm always been a huge fan of stories that involve physical manifestations of concepts like Dream or Death or Desire, and The Sandman is easily one of the ur-examples of that. 

A lot of the reviews about this show did talk about how it's merely a competent adaptation, but... but we take those. That's a huge, huge win here! How many times have we seen people complain that their favourite comic book, or video game, or novel, be compromised by sub-par adaptations? Percy Jackson, anyone? The movie Avatar: The Last Airbender?

The series runs 11 episodes, and briefly summarizing the story arcs adapted there, the first episode shows the immortally powerful Dream being trapped by humans aided by the rogue nightmare Corinthian for centuries, which would inadvertently lead to the other two arcs we see here. After being freed, we get to meet other members of the cast in the second episode -- Lucienne, Matthew, and other wacky parts of the Dreaming like Cain, Abel, Mervyn and other eldritch, godlike beings like the Fates. They could admittedly go a bit more with the psychedelic imagery (think Legion) but I'm fine with what we got, honestly. 

Then later on each episode basically works similarly to the comics, adapting individual self-centered arcs as Morpheus goes to get his plot devices back, while also slowly learning more and more about humanity. Episode 3 has Johanna Constantine (a genderflipped John Constantine) as the guest star, which admittedly doesn't quite have the bite of Matt Ryan's Constantine, but okay. Episode 4 has Lucifer in hell (no offense to Gwendolyn Christie, but she really lacks the bite of Tom Ellis' Lucifer), and... it's a bit cooler with the world-building of the cosmic mythos of the universe.

It all culminates with a sub-arc running in the background of these four episodes, finally leading John Dee (Doctor Destiny) to bear Dream's Ruby after an altercation and confrontation with his mother. Episode 5 is perhaps the most horror that the show gets into (the source comic tended to dip into horror a bit more) as John tries to use the Ruby to affect everyone and force the people attending the diner to be brutally honest with each other, removing any and all inhibition. Again, a bit changed from the comics' version, but it's really pretty fucked-up regardless!

Episode 6, meanwhile, combines two of the best stories in the early comic run -- Dream's little walkabout with his sister Death (the decision to make her display outwardly as a more mature woman instead of a gothic teen is better for storytelling, even if it does make her a lot less visually distinctive), as well as the issue with Dream's immortal friend Hob Gadling. Probably the most standalone of these episodes, but the most powerful one, too. 

The final four episodes are an adaptation of the 'Doll's House' storyline where Dream has to hunt down three missing nightmares -- Corinthian, Gault and Fiddler's Green -- while at the same time dealing with the emergence of a brand-new reality warping vortex in the form of the human Rose Walker. All the while, the Corinthian (Boyd Holbrook, easily the strongest member of the supporting cast) tries his best to set up yet another plan to basically get Dream to fuck up and be destroyed. The Corinthian is a complete and utterly irredeemable lunatic; a serial killer with a completely brutal fetish for ripping eyeballs out and had inspired a literal convention's worth of serial killers (or 'cereal killers')... yet there's a sense of melancholy in him. He was, after all, a nightmare meant to draw from the worst of humanity's impulses. Can he really help what he was? All he wanted to do was to escape from his uncaring master.

Meanwhile, as she awakens to her powerful dream powers, Rose Walker hunts for where his brother Jed has been taken after certain custody wars. A lot of the bizarre side-characters that Rose bumps into are, again, adapted faithfully and she ends up confronting Dream and being in conflict with him as Dream tries to put the world in order to prevent the universe from breaking -- while Rose sees things more in short-term forms like keeping his best friend Lyta happy with her dream-but-actually-a-ghost husband. Again, a lot of fun moments as the eternally-gothic Dream tries to learn what it means to be a person as he apologizes to Lucienne, as he realizes what makes Gault rebel and remakes her as a dream, and even his melancholic destruction of the Corinthian.

Everything is wrapped up relatively nicely on the Rose Walker and John Dee sides of things, the two major mortals that carry their respective arcs... and the final couple of episodes also give us shots of the other Endless -- Desire and Despair -- who are scheming against their much more powerful brother. Or, well, Desire is, anyway. It is revealed that they're the one that impregnated Unity and led to the creation of the vortex, and while that plan is successfully averted -- albeit mostly by accident and coincidence -- it does set up Desire as a subsequent antagonist. Also, there's that whole deal with Lucifer in hell.

And... again, the adaptation is competent. Could they have done better? Absolutely. Better psychedelic dream-scapes would work. And it's no real complaint against their actors, since they do a passable jobs, but having seen essentially definitive versions of DC's Lucifer Morningstar and John Constantine, I really do wish for a version of this show that had those specific iterations at the helm. Ultimately, though, I did enjoy my run through this one -- a very fun adaptation. Yeah, admittedly, the source material is better, but honestly... this is pretty damn close as far as an adaptation goes. Now if you'll excuse me, I think I might reread some more Sandman...