The Sandman Season 2: Endings, Beginnings, and the Nature of Change

After waiting nearly three decades, fans of Neil Gaiman’s magnum opus finally got to watch a TV version of the author’s landmark graphic novel series The Sandman in 2022. In Season 2, the series reaches a long-awaited conclusion and will undoubtedly be heartbreaking for fans who grew up with The Sandman comic books. It is also likely to divide fans who were uninitiated into Gaiman’s Sandman universe until now, and whose views have been formed by the Netflix series.

Season 1 of The Sandman was a love letter to the surreal, dreamy comic book that creator Neil Gaiman had created. Season 2 of the series, which ended last Friday, Jan. 5, goes a step further by focusing less on the anthology format of the comic books and following the grounded arc of Morpheus, the titular Sandman.

Netflix announced in January that The Sandman Season 2 would mark the end of the series. Many fans speculated that Netflix had acted in response to sexual misconduct allegations made against Gaiman, which he has consistently denied. On X, showrunner Allan Heinberg offered a different explanation for why Netflix has chosen to end The Sandman after two seasons. “The way we structured it and when we started was always a two-season project,” he writes, adding, “We didn’t know for sure that it was gonna be two seasons, but when we went in and made our case to Netflix, we said if we’re allowed to do two seasons, this is what we would do.”

The showrunner then compared their creative team to “someone with an 8-ball on a Saturday night”: “They, honestly, felt like we had just enough story for two seasons. I think we were pretty much dead-on,” he added.

Season 1 adapted Gaiman’s Preludes and Nocturnes, The Doll’s House, and two bonus episodes based on Dream Country’s “Dream of a Thousand Cats” and “Calliope.” In contrast, The Sandman Season 2 is mainly based on Seasons of Mists, Brief Lives, The Kindly Ones, and The Wake. Significant parts of Fables and Reflections, particularly “The Song of Orpheus” and the first half of “Thermidor,” and the Hugo Award-winning “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” from Dream Country are included, as is the bonus episode adaptation of the 1993 standalone spinoff, Death: The High Cost of Living. Several stories, most notably the events of A Game of You and some short stories, are not adapted. These changes do not affect the primary arc of the Dream King.

Season 2 begins with Morpheus (Tom Sturridge) on the mend, reconstructing the Dreaming following his victories in the first season, when he escaped imprisonment, recaptured his talismans, faced the rogue Corinthian (Boyd Holbrook), and averted a Vortex crisis. Morpheus and his family are suddenly called to an impromptu and tense family meeting by Destiny (Adrian Lester), one of his seldom-seen siblings, to explain why he called them together with Death (Kirby Howell-Baptiste), Desire (Mason Alexander Park), Despair (Donna Preston), and Delirium (Esmé Creed-Miles).

That meeting will send Morpheus on another road trip to rescue Nada (Umulisa Gahiga), queen of the First People and his former lover, whom he sent to Hell with his dying breath in the past. This time, Morpheus has to outsmart Lucifer (Gwendolyn Christie) again, who has held a grudge against Dream for her Season 1 loss. Lucifer will not resort to fighting Morpheus this time, however. Instead, she resigns from her role as a Lord of Hell and hands him the key to her vacant office while advising him to appoint her replacement from one of several candidates, including Odin, Order, Chaos, and the demon Azazel.

Delirium is also looking for their long-lost brother, Destruction (Barry Sloane), who left his domain centuries ago and has not returned since, and that obsession will lead Morpheus on a journey that will spell his ultimate doom, spilling family blood and inciting the ire of the Kindly Ones.

Famous Scenes, Plotholes, and Curtain Call

The Sandman series has never suffered from a lack of production values, top-notch casting, or excellent visuals that evoke the images fans had in their heads while reading the comics. Some viewers have criticized the series for its slow pacing, but this criticism seems misplaced as The Sandman is not a show meant to be rushed.

Season 2 has one particularly weak episode, “Time and Night,” where Morpheus pleads with his parents, Time (Rufus Sewell) and Night (Tanya Moodie), for assistance. It is canonically accurate for the Endless to have parented a second generation in the comic books, but the dialogue in these scenes is stilted, and even Sewell’s typically solid performance is not enough to prevent them from reading like a group therapy session rather than a cosmic opera.

Highlights of the series include Lucifer offering to cut off her wings to Dream, the goddess Ishtar (Amber Rose Revah) casting aside all her illusions to dance one last time as a goddess, Dream having to explain to the great poet William Shakespeare why he must write The Tempest, and a reformed Corinthian finding love with Johanna Constantine (Jenna Coleman). Other indelible images feature Orpheus’ beautiful lullaby in the Underworld, Dream mercifully killing his son, and the Furies’ visitation to cleanse the world of spilled family blood and how they gut Fiddler’s Green (Stephen Fry), Mervyn Pumpkinhead (Mark Hamill), and Abel (Asim Chaudhry).

Season 2 of The Sandman ends with Dream taking Death’s hand one last time as he dies, and the door opens for the new Dream incarnation to arrive, Daniel Hall (Jacob Anderson), the only human ever to be lonceived in the Dreaming. He is confused and overwhelmed in the real world, but his life as Dream is only beginning as his Endless siblings mourn their old brother while welcoming Daniel to the family.