Requiem for a Dream

For as earth-shattering as Dream’s fate is supposed to be, The Sandman doesn’t give us much time to process it.
Photo: Netflix

Spoilers follow for the second season of The Sandman through finale “A Tale of Graceful Ends,” streaming on Netflix as of July 24. 

In the back half of The Sandman’s second and final season, Morpheus of the Endless is told over and over that he’s changed. As Master of the Dreaming, Morpheus is responsible for countless gazillions of dreams over the centuries he’s held his position, and he takes his duties incredibly seriously. He’s a grump and a workaholic, a possessive lover and a strictly hierarchical aristocrat, and he believes he’s incapable of transformation. But his siblings, confidantes, and friends insist he is, pointing to the past 11 episodes as evidence: He’s become a thoughtful ex-boyfriend, a better father and brother, a forward-planning caretaker of his realm. He’s even apologized to those he’s wronged!

Yet for all that Morpheus’s allies tried to convince him that he had grown and changed, he was never convincing as the center of this adaptation. Too often in The Sandman, he was the connective tissue between characters more reactive and compelling than he was and between narratives more engrossing and stressful than his own. He was the stuffed shirt styled like ’90s Trent Reznor at their nexus, a scowl with cheekbones linking them together — and a bit of a drag. As the back half of the second and final season adapts The Kindly Ones and The Wake comic collections, kills off Dream, and then collects most of the series’s ensemble for his funeral, the gap between who The Sandman thought Morpheus was and how he actually came across onscreen is at its widest.

The season’s sendoff for Morpheus would be unsatisfying even without the metatext, but as author of The Sandman comics and co-creator of this adaptation, Neil Gaiman is an inescapable shadow looming over these final episodes, even if he didn’t write them. (He does have a co-writing credit on season two’s July 31 bonus episode “Death: The High Cost of Living.”) In July 2024, about 20 months after the series had been renewed for a second season, five women accused Gaiman of sexual assault and abuse, accusations that were corroborated and expanded in a January 2025 New York cover story; within days, Netflix announced the second season of The Sandman would be its last. After those women went public, certain elements of Gaiman’s work shone with a new, chilling context, like The Sandman character Richard Madoc, a writer whose work is inspired by his regular rape of a captive muse (and who is featured in the season-one episode “Dream of a Thousand Cats/Calliope”). Then there’s the unignorable sense that Morpheus is another Gaiman self-insert: an imaginative but misunderstood crafter of worlds obsessed with his job, coveted and adored by many, and eventually lavished with praise and awe. Given everything that Gaiman has been accused of, it’s uncomfortable, to say the least, to watch the character be eulogized, celebrated, and wept over in the final chapters of this adaptation. But it also highlights how much better The Sandman is when it dreams beyond Dream.

In the series’s first season, this wasn’t exactly the case. The Sandman began by introducing Morpheus as Dream, who was held captive on Earth for decades, and traced his escape and reunion with his comrades in the Dreaming. Seeing this ancient being retake his mantle was like tumbling into a new world of fantastical imagination, occultist references, and Gothic imagery. The visuals sometimes felt a little too much like a Halloween display at Party City, yet there was a grandeur to Dream’s fury that really drew you in. The second half of that season was more human-focused and hampered by some not-great child acting. But in those episodes, The Sandman more thoroughly depicted how the Dreaming works, the way it reflects and refracts every feeling from desire to fear, and spreads those emotions into the “waking world.” In doing so, it shifted its interest from Dream, whose characterization settled into stiff detachment, to his creations or foes, who were most beguiling in their enmity toward him.

Tom Sturridge’s Dream was mostly stuck in a constipated emotional range, shifting only incrementally from frowning and stoic to frowning and angry. Around him, though, were an array of more fluid and flexible characters with personalities more layered than Dream’s: the Corinthian, a nightmare with teeth for eyes played by Boyd Holbrook with an unsettling amount of sensuality; Lucifer Morningstar, a smiling demon in silk and chiffon given crisp menace by Gwendoline Christie; the humans Johanna Constantine (Jenna Coleman) and Hob Gadling (Ferdinand Kingsley), who were friends with Dream but had their own full lives outside of their interactions with him. Meanwhile, Dream is just swanning around in his beautiful coats, glaring at whomever crosses his path. Hotly! But predictably.

Admittedly, this is somewhat the structure of The Sandman, that Dream is stuck in his lofty ways and refuses to bend while others are more open to variation. In the series’s second season, though, when Dream is loosening up and reconsidering himself, his metamorphosis falls into a pattern that is ultimately monotonous. First, Dream accepts that he made mistakes, like when he sentenced his human lover Nada (Umulisa Gahiga) to 10,000 years in Hell because she refused to stay with him or abandoned his son, Orpheus (Ruairi O’Connor), after he went to the Underworld against Morpheus’s wishes and was cursed with immortality. Then Dream finds the person he wronged, rescuing Nada from the demon Lord Azazel (Wil Coban) and locating Orpheus on a remote island in the Mediterranean. Dream apologizes, Dream is forgiven, and Dream is praised, even when those he wronged suffered for hundreds of years because of his initial cruelty. There’s a sameness there that the series’s compressed adaptation of its source material only exacerbates, and that makes Dream’s one-note development feel thin and self-congratulatory.

In season two, The Sandman asked far more curious questions about the experience of life, its ups and downs and plateaus, through other characters and their self-assessments. Dream’s imperious and aloof parents, Time (Rufus Sewell) and Night (Tanya Moodie), are disinterested in Dream’s desire to help Orpheus, devoted to their own singular missions, and responsible for some of the second season’s most stunning imagery through their inky-dark and jungle-green realms. The first season finale implied a major upcoming conflict between Lucifer and Morpheus, but when the second season begins, Lucifer has suddenly abandoned that plan. The Morningstar is now bored with being in charge of Hell, and abdicates their position, a choice that Dream can’t understand but the certainty of which we feel through Christie’s performance — her proud posture, her coy smile when she hands Morpheus the key to her realm, her later lightness when Dream finds her chilling on a beach. The trend of supernatural beings turning their back on their obligations and raising questions about free will through their choice is extended through chaos twinks Puck (Jack Gleeson) and Loki (Freddie Fox). In a change from the comics, they’re in an explicitly romantic relationship, a bond that gets complicated when Puck feels protective toward Daniel Hall, a baby conceived in the Dreaming whom Morpheus has deemed his heir, who Puck wants to adopt and Loki wants to kill. But before then, Fox’s annoyed affect while Loki lists his children to Puck — a giant serpent, an eight-legged horse, a son who killed another son — is a wonderful contrast to Dream’s self-serious approach to Orpheus, and Fox’s “Children are terrible” might be the funniest line delivery of the series.

Most impressive of all is Holbrook as the Corinthian, who was destroyed by Dream in the first season and is here remade. The nightmare who became an icon for serial killers is now a goofy do-gooder who uses his teeth-eyes for investigative work and flirts up a storm with Johanna Constantine, eventually winning her over with the suggestion that they date in her dreams. Their debate on whether they should take a chance on a relationship is shockingly romantic and yearningly sincere, and it has more tangible feeling than nearly any other conversation this season. There are actual stakes here, for Corinthian’s future as a good guy and Johanna as someone who builds up boundaries to protect herself, and their dynamic has texture that Morpheus’s long and inevitable march toward a martyrlike end doesn’t.

It’s honestly a relief when Morpheus dies in penultimate episode “Long Live the King,” not just because The Sandman really lays on thick the foreshadowing that he would, but because it allows the series finale to reset Dream and the Dreaming. In “A Tale of Graceful Ends,” Jacob Anderson plays a grown-up Daniel, whom Morpheus forces into being his successor, and who fumbles to find his place in the finale. Watching Daniel figure out how to be Dream — which aspects of the realm he wants to maintain and which he wants to revamp, which of Morpheus’s allies he chooses to trust and which he allows to move on — gives the character interiority that Morpheus rarely had. Anderson is particularly good at playing a baby immortal (he’s had two seasons of experience on Interview With the Vampire, after all), and he provides this new Dream with a believable mixture of rigidity and hesitancy, an upright bearing and vulnerable line deliveries. It’s frustrating how abridged this all is, how Morpheus got ten episodes of moping and Daniel got only one to self-actualize; for as earth-shattering as Dream’s death and rebirth are supposed to be, The Sandman doesn’t give us much time to process either.

Series co-creator David Goyer has said The Sandman was always going to end with two seasons, and that the accusations against Gaiman had nothing to do with it; respectfully, that’s probably not exactly true, given the long list of canceled Gaiman projects that this series joins. But if that’s actually the case, then it’s even more unfortunate that The Sandman, in its final go-round, couldn’t find a way to incorporate Anderson for a longer period of time, or structure the plotting so that the ensemble surrounding Dream got more opportunities to shine. Maybe that wouldn’t be faithful to Gaiman’s comics, but it would have been better TV. “The time you have left may be limited, but you get to choose how you spend it,” Morpheus’s librarian, Lucienne (Vivienne Acheampong), says to him as he realizes his end is near. The Sandman should have taken that advice and given us less of the Dream we knew and more of the Dream we didn’t.