In the premiere episode of “The Sandman” Season 2, Dream (Tom Sturridge) asks his loyal subject Cain (Sanjeev Bhaskar) to take the express train to Hell so he can deliver a message to Lucifer (Gwendoline Christie). But before Cain can read his ruler’s carefully chosen words, Lucifer cuts him off: “No, not the message,” she says. “Just the content.”
Rarely has a series so succinctly summed up its defective attitude toward storytelling, and rarer still has such a fast-tracked approach to plowing through narrative felt more welcome. As Season 2 swiftly makes evident, the sooner we put Netflix‘s adaptation of “The Sandman” behind us, the better.
Why? Well, first and foremost, the series is deeply unpleasant to sit through following the credible allegations leveled against its author Neil Gaiman, who remains an executive producer and co-creator on Season 2. The first season’s bonus episode was stomach-turning enough — in which a self-described feminist author imprisons and rapes his muse not only for inspiration, but so he can better understand women(?!) — and the new batch of episodes only double down on unwelcome parallels between “The Sandman” and its author.
In Season 2, Volume 1, Dream learns how to better empathize with humans (and his siblings, aka the Endless, which are personified forces of nature more powerful than gods). But in doing so, he also struggles to recognize his own fallibility — such as that time he confused love for “desire” and ended up banishing a woman to Hell for 10,000 years. Past mistakes like this one invite reality-invoking questions of consent and manipulation, while a fixed focus on Dream’s absent compassion calls to mind Gaiman’s continued denials of any wrongdoing and the legal action he filed against women accusing him of sexual misconduct. Ostensibly, Dream is slowly coming to realize even the Endless can change — that he, too, may care about people — but the evidence is so scant, so vague, and so hollow, it’s all but impossible to separate the art from the artist, even if you can stay awake long enough to try.
Which brings us to the second key drawback: It can’t be overstated, sans any outside context whatsoever, that “The Sandman” is a terrible show. Dreams spends these first six episodes examining old mistakes, moping around like an emo sad boy, and then proceeding to do whatever he wants. Season 2 again tells largely self-contained stories without sound episodic structure, yet it also lacks enough specifics to justify its main character’s fitfully serialized development.
Netflix’s adaptation is maddeningly inert, and lest you think I’m just piling on now that Gaiman has made himself an easy target for criticism, I’ve got the receipts. “The Sandman” has always been a barren slog; now, it’s just an upsetting one, too.
Side quests aside, the ongoing story dwells on two basic plots: 1. Dream hooked up with a mortal and must deal with the consequences, and 2. Dream goes looking for his lost brother, Destruction (Barry Sloane), who abandoned his realm, with his oddball sister Delirium (Esmé Creed-Miles). (In essence, he’s on an apology tour, even if he doesn’t always seem to know what he’s apologizing for.) Along the way, he looks in on Hell, hosts a banquet, produces “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” stalks his ex, and seeks out the son he abandoned. (You can probably guess where the apologies come in.)
Some episodes rely on flashbacks, others plow full steam ahead, and none leave much of a mark. Interacting with various anthropomorphic gods and animals, Dream’s dilemmas are so devoid of friction there’s nothing to grasp onto; if the rest of the show introduced engaging ideas to contemplate or whisked us away to a world worth admiring, perhaps “The Sandman” could work as an effective head trip. As is, it’s not. Showrunner and co-creator Allan Heinberg prioritizes recreating what’s already on the page while stitching those pages together to form a discernible plot. If that means everyone just kind of comes and goes, with no room for significant conflict, so be it. (It’s staggering how little resistance Dream faces to any of his plans.)
Dream’s discoveries about himself, his relationships, and his outlook on humankind are so basic and broad it’s as if he’s never once looked at any one of them until now, despite being older than the gods. Meanwhile, the season’s overarching theme is focused on quitting and why it’s OK to take a little time off (or a lot of time off).
Who cares that pondering early retirement is at odds with Dream’s previous plotline (he just got his realm back in Season 1 after being held captive for over a century), or that none of the other aspiring retirees ever seem to do any work? So long as Season 2 takes shortcut after shortcut in order to include as many of Gaiman’s comic books as possible, it doesn’t matter what other ugliness he’s put into the world or that these stories feel as faint as a day-old dream; the fans can say they saw Delirium and Destruction on TV! Hooray!
Apparently, the content is all that counts.
Grade: D+
“The Sandman” Season 2, Volume 1 premieres Thursday, July 3 on Netflix. Volume 1 is made up of six episodes, which will be released at once, but Volume 2 (made up of five episodes) will premiere July 24, and the series finale will premiere July 31.