The Sandman

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After killing The Corinthian, Lord Morpheous believes that he must now kill Rose Walker. And that’s almost what happens. In what could be the season’s best episode, Jonathon, who is now in control of the ruby, goes to a diner where he wants everyone to live their truth. After a brief stand-off, The Corinthian gets turned to dust by Lord Morpheous. But when Ethel learns that Lord Morpheous has escaped, she fears for the safety of herself and Jonathon. As a result, she pays a visit to Jonathan and gives him the amulet of protection, which results in her age catching up with her, and she dies in her son’s arms. After stealing the ruby when she fled from Roderick, who had wanted her to abort their baby, Ethel became wise to the hidden darkness within her son, Jonathon. So, to keep herself and others safe, Ethel keeps Jonathon locked up in a secure hospital. And whilst you may have thought this is the kind of show that would bring Roderick back from the dead, it doesn’t happen!

Netflix's adaptation of Neil Gaiman's graphic novel series, "The Sandman," has an excellent cast and some stand-out moments, but they risk getting lost in ...

Making him a bigger presence earlier on is one of The Sandman's smartest adaptation choices. One of The Sandman's best qualities is its cast, which delivers strong, committed performances across the board. Similar to the comics, the initial arc of the show is how Morpheus can get his things back once he is free, and also how he must go about setting the Dreaming back in order, as well as rectifying the chaos in the waking world his absence allowed. However, when The Sandman's characters are constantly reminding us of who they are and what they do — sometimes even unnecessarily recapping the previous episode's events — we lose valuable time getting to know them. Dream is one of the Endless, a family of powerful forces that includes Death (Kirby Howell-Baptiste) and Desire (Mason Alexander Park). Unfortunately, when we first meet him, he's been captured by mortals dabbling in powerful magic. The result isn't a snooze by any stretch of the imagination.

Netflix's adaptation of Neil Gaiman's "The Sandman" had so much potential, but it's wasted on a dull, dragging show.

The series is beautifully shot, and faithful to the Gothic art of the comics. I tried because I love fantasy and I love much of Gaiman's other work, both on the page and on screen. He's among a family of anthropomorphic concepts, like Desire (Mason Alexander Park) and Death (Kirby Howell-Baptiste, whose episode is the best thing about the series by far). At the start, Dream (sometimes called Morpheus) is captured by a lucky human sorcerer (Charles Dance), imprisoned and silent in the waking world for over a century. The series (now streaming; ★½ out of four) is a middling series, made worse by wasted potential and Netflix's dollars. Excruciatingly slow and dull if not outright boring, "Sandman" is a perplexing failure. Years in the making, and painstakingly brought to life through what looks like very expensive computer imaging and intricate costuming and set design, "Sandman" has the potential to be very good, even great.

Netflix's The Sandman is an adaptation of the iconic and groundbreaking DC Comics series written by Neil Gaiman, and while it sometimes stunningly faithful ...

The Corinthian is supposed to be irredeemable, an unrepentant murderer who kills for fun, but his role in the story (and the amount of screen time he gets) requires him to be at least somewhat understandable, if not outright sympathetic. This is damning with faint praise, but Netflix’s The Sandman, like Zack Snyder’s Watchmen, is one of those “this is as close as anyone could’ve hoped for” adaptations. Morpheus’ realm, the place where he creates dreams and which is supposed to be home to all sorts of incredible fantasy (as in the genre), creatures, and vistas, is typically depicted here as a wasteland with a lot of empty fields. Almost every episode pairs Dream up with a different character, especially early on, which wisely gives Sturridge an opportunity to play his Super Goth against more dynamic personalities, and though that manipulation is heavy-handed at times, Sturridge’s watery eyes do a lot of good work whenever someone works up the nerve to make some emotional plea to the Dream Lord. A brief team-up with a certain British hellblazer is greatly sanitized in the show, not only in its depiction of a dilapidated apartment belonging to someone utterly consumed by their dreams but in that certain British hellblazer herself—who is confusingly stylish and charming for someone who everyone else seems to regard as a…chain-smoking, trench coat-wearing, Sting-lookalike dirtbag, which she is very much not in this incarnation. Narratively, it hews very close to the first two volumes of the books (it starts with Dream’s imprisonment and ends at the “Cereal convention”), but at the risk of trying to be overly cute with it, the most important thing it loses in the transition is the dreaminess of all of it.

To the many fans of Neil Gaiman's comic book series: Relax. The new Netflix show nails it.

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Netflix's adaptation of Neil Gaiman's The Sandman stars Tom Sturridge and Gwendoline Christie and starts streaming on August 5th.

Buoyed by trust, wholesomeness, and acceptance, it is a series that at once depicts the horrors of humanity and our place in an unknowable and terrifying existence, but it also shows us how our humanity unites us to confront the failures of the world and our fears of everything else. This is what Sandman is all about as a franchise, and the TV series captures this. For example, Rose Walker is trying to find her missing brother, confronting serial killers and talking ravens, but is also on the verge of destroying the universe. One of the reasons I loved the book franchise was that it is first and foremost a psychological horror story, but it’s one painted on a canvas of the cosmic with a fragile brush made of hope. The second major arc details Dream’s attempt to find an entity called a vortex — a human, named Rose Walker (Vanesu Samunyai) who draws all dreams to herself, collapsing the waking and dream world and thus ending the universe. At the same time, she is discovering her powers as the vortex. So begins the first arc and his adventures with everyone from a blue-collar exorcist to a manchild wielding the powers of the gods. However, instead of capturing Death (Kirby Howell-Baptiste), the Magus and his cult capture Dream, aka the Sandman — along with some of Dream’s powerful tools. To fix the world of Dreams, he must recover the tools his human captors took from him. For more than a century, Dream never utters a word, refusing to provide any details to his captors — whose lives are extended as a result of their proximity to his powerful tools. The Sandman is a dark fantasy horror comic franchise written primarily by Neil Gaiman, who also served as an executive producer and writer on the Netflix adaptation. But “adaptation” is almost an insult to what the creators achieved.

Neil Gaiman's hugely influential comic series "The Sandman" gets a Netflix adaptation that illustrates the challenges of translating its complexities for ...

And yet the overall results are so shaggy and uneven, with characters and incidents from the comics that add little to the story on screen, that the reasons to adapt “The Sandman” never exceed the reasons not to have done so. You’ll have to already believe that the delirium and detritus that haunt us in our sleep matter; “The Sandman” certainly won’t convince you of it. It’s not surprising, then, that it’s taken so long for “The Sandman” to make it to screen (in this version, shorn of all references to DC characters and settings). The fleeting, peripatetic plots seldom yield emotional revelations, and there’s no shortage of characters — many with multiple names — to keep track of. Kingsley exhibits an avuncular, life-savoring charm that builds to a vulnerable gravitas, while the storyline broaches the most compelling (if ultimately underdeveloped) aspect of Dream’s rule over the collective unconscious: that he does not understand the joys or miseries of “the waking world” despite his power over it. The sole exception is an absconder of one of the magical objects, played by David Thewlis, who wrings some Freudian pathos from his damaged character, a wronged man who has yet to realize he’s become a monster. Godlike beings guiding the dreams, desires and deaths of mankind mingle with Satan, Shakespeare, Barbie and serial killers in the mythological and pop-cultural hodgepodge of “The Sandman.” Not unlike a reverie, the 10-part adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s seminal comic book series brooks no borders.

But did we? Because the Sandman comic series is, at its core, about the very nature of stories, one can't help but be amused that reviewing this new iteration ...

And on the other end of the spectrum, the show is too obviously a work of fantasy and nerd culture to appeal to viewers just looking for the next great adult drama. Well, this show was his chance, and Gaiman could have spent the extra time and space granted by a different medium to show more of what Dream and Hob discussed over the centuries. While it’s a bit difficult to describe what “The Sandman” is, it’s quite easy to say what it’s not. But TV is a writer’s medium, and despite Gaiman co-running the show with two other veteran writers known for their acclaimed work in comic adaptations— David S. Goyer (who co-wrote “ The Dark Knight” trilogy) and Allan Heinberg (who co-wrote 2017’s “ Wonder Woman”)—they all apparently approached their job as glorified transcription. Sure, there are a few changes, but most of them are just the show eliminating attempts of the comic series to fit into the larger DC Universe of the time, such as guest appearances by John Constantine, Etrigan the Demon, and the Martian Manhunter, or an issue that was partially set in Arkham Asylum. To put it another way: the show changed almost nothing it didn’t need to change. But that doesn’t describe all fans, and presumably more than a few of them will grow weary of just how unimaginative—how sadly undreamt about—this series of dreams really is. In an interview for the 1999 book The Sandman Companion, Gaiman even admitted that he was sad to finish the issue, and he would have loved to carry on the conversations between Dream and Hob “indefinitely.” And that’s what should have happened in the TV series, which absolutely had the time and space to reimagine these conversations for a different medium. It originally began as a DC Comics series in 1988, and it lasted 75 issues before ending in 1996, becoming one of the first ongoing DC or Marvel series to end solely by creative decision rather than by a sales-motivated one. Because the Sandman comic series is, at its core, about the very nature of stories, one can’t help but be amused that reviewing this new iteration of it becomes a debate about the very nature of adapting stories. And both are adapted nearly page for page, word for word, into the sixth episode of the show. Countless diehard fans of the source material are no doubt tempted to think today, “We did it.”

The Netflix adaptation of The Sandman, Neil Gaiman's legendary comics series about Dream of the Endless and his adventures against his siblings and others, ...

And what the TV series leaves out entirely is another, such as the events of issue nine, “Tales in the Sand.” In that story, a younger, more impetuous Dream essentially ruins a human woman’s life when she dares refuse his love, and that dickishness clicks into focus the spontaneity and selfishness of the Endless, an essential theme of the comics that the series gestures toward but doesn’t contextualize. The result is an uneasy mixture of beat-for-beat mimicries of issues like “The Sound of Her Wings” and “Men of Good Fortune,” which are combined in the season’s sixth installment, and other drastic changes that take screen time away from Dream and don’t stand on their own as TV inventions. Dream spends thousands of years as a pouty asshole with some gracefully simplistic goth outfits and some not very empathetic views on people, and the rapidness with which The Sandman tosses off that version of the character to make him more traditionally heroic underserves the comics’ core ideas about the grueling and interrogating work that change requires. What The Sandman as a TV series fails to imagine on its own is one issue: The comics skip over showing Dream rebuilding the world harmed by his ruby, but why not show that process here? The Sandman trade paperbacks that serve as source material for this series — Preludes & Nocturnes, a sort of coming-of-age story for Dream, and The Doll’s House, an expansion of the universe in which he lives and rules — are both exposition-heavy affairs that rely on our attraction to the Sandman himself: to his mysterious regality and his assured haughtiness, his melancholy burden and his strict sense of his own superiority, not to mention the aesthetics of those inky eyes, Robert Smith mop, and all-black outfits. (And now that there is an established DC Extended Universe onscreen that this series is not part of, the comics’ mentions of the Justice League, Gotham City, and Arkham Asylum don’t survive the transfer.) The boundless creativity of drawn illustration can’t always be replicated via visual effects, practical locations, or the budget required for both in TV. Hour-long episodic run times might mean that a plot has to be divided and reorganized differently from how it was in a book.

The Sandman is a huge, ambitious, complex adaptation of Neil Gaiman's beloved comic. How does the Netflix show fare? Let's break it all down.

In order to restore The Dreaming, he needs his tools of office, which are stuck in the Waking World. He begins a quest to reclaim them for his own. The Sandman is a show that will throw a little of everything at you. With Roderick Burgess long dead, he goes after Alex. When Alex is asleep, Dream haunts him and condemns him to “eternal sleeping.” This is one of the only times we see stars in Dream’s eyes like he has in the comic. He takes a blow to the head and is almost instantly pronounced dead. The simplicity of it is quite funny. Many of the residents of his palace have abandoned their posts. With everything going on, it’s easy to forget what is perhaps the key part of the premiere: Roderick Burgess’ lover Ethel Cripps sweeps into his life, gets close to him, and then abandons him after he demands that she abort her baby. The episode opens with a little exposition for newcomers to the series; through narration, Dream tells us who he is and introduces us to his realm, The Dreaming. They get the basics out the way early. We learn that Burgess wants to bargain with Death to bring his son back from the dead, which isn’t the case on the page. The Corinthian warns Burgess that he’s being watched, pointing to Jessamy, a raven and one of Dream’s loyal messengers. There’s a cool sequence when Jessamy attempts to infiltrate Burgess’ home of Fawny Rigg to release Dream from his cage… Hathaway is keen to bring his son back from the dead, too.

The Sandman season 1, episode 1 on Netflix – easter eggs, comic book accuracy, and more.

In the 1926 sequences we see a couple of adverts for Kincaid Sugar on the newspaper that Alex is reading and the one that Jessamy sets fire to. The actual headline that day was the far less exciting LITTLE MIX LEIGH-ANNE ROBBED OF £40k RING. The other guard is reading a copy of IT by Stephen King. Dream is ultimately as much of a universal function and an observer of events as he is a traditional protagonist. This is an unusual start to a series, in many ways, focussing more on the impact of Morpheus's absence on our world and on Alex than on who Dream actually is – but that's just the nature of this story. There’s no mention of his dead son in the comics, where he’s manipulating those around him. Both Hathaway and Burgess have lost sons to conflict and the magicians aim to invoke Death in the hope of bringing them back to life (along with a few nice optional extras like wealth, power, immortality, that sort of thing). Instead, they end up with Death’s brother, Dream (Tom Sturridge). Unsure what to do with him, Burgess imprisons Morpheus in his mansion and leaves him to rot for the next several decades. We’re not going to fret about the slight name-changing or gender-swapping of some characters – honestly, why would you? We don’t see much of the Dreaming itself – there’s more of that in the next episode – but “Sleep of the Just” does a fine job of setting up the world(s) of the show, laying out numerous paths that we’ll follow over the next nine – often very odd! The rest of "Sleep of the Just" follows the effects of Dream's imprisonment on our world. Or so we thought, because here we are, with the first episode of Netflix’s much anticipated new show and not only is it pretty good, it's also very close to the comic that inspired it. He comes close to setting Morpheus free several times, but the fear of his dad stops him, even after Burgess eventually dies. Neil Gaiman's masterpiece – and the saga remains, for this reviewer's money, his finest work in any medium – is such a tangled knot of plot threads, stories within stories and allusions to literature, mythology, art, and other culture that it defies easy translation.

So who tries to kill Dream, you ask? Well, it all starts with Roderick Burgess, but he dies before Dream could escape captivity. Then, there's the Corinthian ( ...

Initially, John overpowers Dream with the ruby, but then he makes the mistake of destroying it. John had no reason to use the ruby in this way other than for his own amusement since he’s a megalomaniac. Then, Dream shows up at the diner to get the ruby back but John refuses to return it. As soon as John gets the ruby, he heads to a diner. Later in the first season, John is able to retrieve the ruby from a storage facility. Yes! John is the son of Ethel Cripps and Roderick Burgess. When Ethel was pregnant with John, she took Dream’s tools (bag of sand, helm, and ruby) and left Roderick in the middle of the night.

A bad first episode shouldn't put viewers off The Sandman just as it starts to get good.

To fans of the comic, the first episode gives off the impression that the show is afraid to embrace any of the more uncomfortable aspects of the source material. By the time I got to the penultimate episode, "The Collectors," all the problems I had with the first episode either disappeared completely or had lessened to the point where it was barely noticeable. Most " Sense8" fans will happily tell you to push through the first episode before deciding if you like the show, and they're right to do so. Although the first issues were much stronger than the show's first episode, "The Sandman" series didn't truly become the series we know and love until its sixth issue, "24 Hours." This issue makes up the majority of the show's fifth episode, and comic fans can rest assured the episode very much measures up to the source material. The show also becomes more comfortable with the comics' horror elements, and Tom Sturridge really starts to settle into his role as Dream. He's still the weakest of all the Endless characters cast so far, but that's more of a testament to how effectively Kirby Howell-Baptiste plays Death, Alexander Mason Park plays Desire, and Donna Preston plays Despair. They all have a wonderful otherworldly quality to them that make their appearances throughout the later episodes a treat to witness. By turning Dream's long-sought revenge into a tame, regular coma, the show softens a character who's only supposed to soften slowly, over the course of the series. Although the show gets better with each passing episode, the first episode fails as an introduction to Dream, or as an introduction to the show in general. Volume 1, "Preludes and Nocturnes" is often ranked at the bottom of the list of favorite "Sandman" volumes, and that's because it's a volume that takes a while to fully find its voice. The show dedicates a lot more time to depicting Alex as a sympathetic victim of abuse. Gone is the gradual reveal of the comics. The first two thirds of the opening issue play out like a sort of mystery story, where the reader is invited to figure out for themself what type of person Dream is. Watching the first episode of the Netflix series, however, it feels like the show overcorrected.

In the second episode of Netflix's adaptation of the Neil Gaiman comic, Dream meets Cain and Abel and learns where he's going to need to go to get all his ...

In the 90 years or so since she left England, Ethel has become an art thief, or perhaps just a fence, and has taken the time to learn all sorts of languages and get an amulet that can explode her enemies. Just keep one and reuse it, like that one open grave in L.A. that is recycled in every TV show and movie. Maybe the ruby is holding his brain’s development back in the same way it’s delaying his aging. • It’s an LOL that Cain and Abel, two characters that predate Jesus (both in Christian writing and because in Sandman lore, they’ve existed since the first time a one-celled organism killed another one), use crosses in their giant cemetery. Overall, the CGI has been getting in the way of how yucky The Sandman could be texturally. Much in the same way as he was trying to do to the Corinthian in episode one, Dream needs to do the Infinity War Snap on something to reabsorb it into himself. Speaking of that mother and son, we get more of a sense of what Ethel Cripps has been doing with her absurdly long life span. Dream needs to get his tools back, the ones Ethel Cripps stole when she escaped from Roderick Burgess. And to do that, he needs to get stronger by absorbing something he has created. Both Cain and Abel are legacy DC characters, having hosted horror comics from the ’50s to the ’80s. Neil Gaiman added them to his story as a little nod to the past, the same way that Jordan Peele cast Keith David in Nope. In The Sandman, Cain and Abel together represent the first story. They have to reenact that first murder over and over and over. You know the kind: An NPC needs three items, you run around the map getting them, then maybe you get a cool sword or something at the end. I wept for Gregory. If The Sandman were on Does the Dog Die?, the answer would be “yes.” Technically gargoyles aren’t dogs, sure, but then why does this one come when called and play fetch, huh?

Neither a dream nor a nightmare, "The Sandman" is like a weary walking tour of fantasy realms, built on dream logic and led by a drab guide.

And “The Sandman” isn’t an arduous watch — it churns out curious cast members or creative concepts regularly enough to stir a kind of baffled fascination. There’s a lingering animosity between the creators and the created, or at least between Dream and the dreamers he oversees. Had it shed thin storylines stretched across the season and fully embraced a more episodic approach — something more akin to reading a comic book — these issues wouldn’t loom so large. One minute, he’s chiding a man granted immortal life for making money off the slave trade, the next he’s sentencing a nightmare to 1000 years of darkness for choosing to become compassionate. The place they visit when sleeping, dully called The Dreaming, plays just as consequential a role in their lives, and he’s in charge of keeping it in order. Lending the dastardly father a helping hand is The Corinthian (Boyd Holbrook), an escaped nightmare living in the waking world who sees Dream’s imprisonment as an opportunity for free reign. There’s a continued questioning and reaffirming of their duty to serve humanity, contrasted by the rebellious nightmares and other wayward entities that seek to harm them. Getting right to the exposition, “The Sandman” starts with Dream (first introduced as the The King of Dreams) informing his audience of “mortals” that the world they “insist on calling the real world” is only half of their existence. But as soon as we’re told most dreams can’t survive in the waking world, it’s clear these are rules made to be broken — and wouldn’t you know it, one soon breaks. His ambitions change as frequently as his established beliefs, seemingly steered more by the need to introduce Lucifer (Gwendoline Christie), Death (Kirby Howell-Baptiste), and Constantine (Jenna Coleman) than any consistent internal wants or desires. (Though this is another production with too many scenes set in big, flat, open spaces, where CGI can be easily conjured for a bland kind of grandeur.) But anyone yet to be converted may grow tired of sifting through all this glimmering sand for greater meaning — or, you know, any sort of genuine feeling. Dream himself (played by Tom Sturridge) is little more than a tour guide.

The TV adaptation is extremely loyal to Neil Gaiman's original comic books—and that's as enticing as it is frustrating.

Where the series cannot hope to compare to the comics is in its visuals; although the CGI in The Sandman is lavish and ever present, it can’t render a dreamworld in as impressionistic a style as an illustrated comic can. Their showdown is one of the most arresting and horrifying Sandman issues ever published, but I found the TV edition surprisingly grating, hampered perhaps by the attempt to stretch a few dozen pages of comics into an hour of television. During his journeys, he voyages to hell to barter with its ruler, Lucifer (Gwendoline Christie), and meets up with his sister Death (Kirby Howell-Baptiste), the cheerful and levelheaded guardian of all mortality. In the premiere, Dream is kidnapped and imprisoned in the early 20th century by an occultist named Roderick Burgess (Charles Dance). The story develops over decades as Dream escapes and then works to rebuild his kingdom, seeking lost artifacts and gathering up stray nightmares. Devotees of The Sandman such as myself will have much to exult in with Netflix’s version, but I wonder what the show will mean to newcomers. The Netflix adaptation, created by Gaiman, David S. Goyer, and Allan Heinberg, embraces that pacing, letting things unfold with the care of a monthly comic rather than the punchiness of weekly TV. It makes for some very high highs—and a few languorous lows.

In Neil Gaiman's The Sandman comics, several extremely powerful beings take center stage. Which among them are the strongest?

His only real limitation is that he cannot create something out of anything without the help of his brother Michael. With the help of his brother, Lucifer can create anything he wants, including new universes, if he so chooses. The Presence can do whatever he wants, which is something that no other character in the comics can say. The Presence is the closest thing that The Sandman and the DC Universe have to an all-powerful monotheistic God. Omniscient, omnipotent, and without any equal, there are essentially no material restrictions on the Presence's power. Fortunately, Dream is not evil, though he is flawed and tremendously complicated, so the power of the Dreaming rarely becomes the power of pure nightmare. Surviving things that no other Endless could and ending life wherever she must without any restriction, it's easy to recognize Death as the strongest comic character of all time. The most powerful of the seven Endless siblings, Death surprises many by being upbeat and empathetic, two qualities that seem counterintuitive for a creature ruling over so grim a thing as death itself. Further, she is the only member of the Endless who is not bound by extensive rules governing her power. Unlike some of this Endless's other siblings, Desire is actually inclined to do so, using their power in whatever selfish way they want, which is part of what makes them so powerful and dangerous. Whereas Destiny's power is restrained by unknowable cosmic forces and Despair's power is restrained by her own sadness, the only thing really holding Destruction back is his peaceful nature, which is fortunate for everyone. Delirium's wild imagination can make virtually anything come true, which makes her far more powerful than almost any other being in The Sandman and would let her stand toe-to-toe with some of Marvel's strongest characters. Despair is depression incarnate, feeding upon the suffering of others. Chained to his book of fate, Destiny watches events transpire throughout the universe but does basically nothing to intervene.

It was a project long thought so unfilmable, even its creator didn't want anyone to try to adapt it. But it seems that despite recent quality control issues ...

The Sandman looks like a hit, and could turn into that “40, 50, 60, 70, 80 hours of quality television” over time, that Gaiman is so excited about. The Sandman is not being presented as a limited series, meaning if it does well on Netflix, that it could come back for more. The Sandman is reviewing well so far among both critics and fans.

Rose Walker is officially introduced in episode 7. She's a 21-year-old woman who recently lost her mom and is on a mission to find the brother she was separated ...

When they finally make it to the location where the mysterious foundation is, they discover that the place is a private care home for the elderly. If Dream were to kill the child, he’d be killing a member of his own family, which is considered an unforgivable offense. She’s a 21-year-old woman who recently lost her mom and is on a mission to find the brother she was separated from many years ago. In the last episode of the season, we find out that Desire of the Endless ( Mason Alexander Park) was the father of Unity’s child. Who are the mystery people, and how is Rose related to them? There were many shocking reveals in The Sandman, but finding out who Rose was related to definitely took the cake.

As we watch a raven follow a horse-drawn carriage and then fly off to another, otherworldly realm, Morpheus — aka Dream, aka Lord of The Dreaming, aka King of ...

“I made this world once, Lucienne,” he says as the decrepit, giant doors to The Dreaming draw closed behind them. Elsewhere, The Corinthian — fresh from a kill in which the victim’s eyes have been gouged out — knows exactly what’s happened. One of them is a young London girl named Unity Kincaid; she’ll become important to the story later in the season. We later see that she has a son named Johnny, who’ll also figure into the story in a later episode. When Alex’s wheelchair accidentally rubs away some of the magical markings holding Dream captive, the prisoner is able to make a guard fall asleep, which leads to a series to events that ends with a vortex opening and Dream getting sucked into it. He winds up naked and trapped in a mystical sphere, conjured by a rich man named Roderick Burgess (Game of Thrones’ Charles Dance), who’s attempting to capture Dream’s sibling, Death, instead.

Netflix's 2022 adaptation of The Sandman takes only a few liberties with the ending. But what is next for Dream? And will Lucifer enter new realms with the ...

That’s how Dream met up with the Justice League, and it’s how Will “Shakesbeard” might have something to offer Dream of the Endless. “And we get to do an awful lot of the side stories and interesting byways and diversions along the way.” Though the show has rearranged the storylines a bit to fit into the arc of the season, it seems likely that they could return in season 2 (or beyond). Of course, the root of the word certainly suggests a bit of judgment on the part of the remaining Endless siblings, as opposed to merely an abdication of duty. The answer is slow-played in Sandman season 1; beyond a few mentions, we get little by way of details. With 75 issues in the original run of the series, there’s certainly a lot for The Sandman to get through, should Netflix allow it. But as the comics continued, there was less emphasis on the overall arc of the story and more on the small, almost vignette-like chapters of Dream’s journeys. One of them is to not spill “family blood,” or else bad news will befall you — namely you summon the Furies, who are no joke and will be mad. Lord Azazel pops up to share something on behalf of the “assembled lords of hell.” In episode 10 (or even the full season) we don’t get a sense of what’s so taboo about it. Suffice it to say, there’s a lot of details to keep track of, even if you did read the comics. As Dream learns in the final moments of season 1, Rose Walker’s whole existence is predicated on Desire having impregnated Unity while she was asleep during Dream’s absence.

The British actor made his screen acting debut in a 1996 miniseries adaptation of Gulliver's Travels and more recently starred on the Starz drama, Sweetbitter, ...

Look for his name in just about any article related to Batman. Most audiences might remember her best from 1996’s live-action 101 Dalmatians movie, Roland Emmerich’s epic period piece The Patriot, playing Julia McNamara in the Nip/Tuck cast, and the 2020 adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s Color Out of Space, with Nicolas Cage, to name a few. Playing Rose’s friend Lyta Hall, who is also mourning the death of her husband, is Razane Jammal, who last starred on a supernatural, Netflix-exclusive drama called Paranormal in 2020. As Biblical figure and world’s first murderer, Cain — who now loyally resides in the dream realm — we have Sanjeev Bhaskar, whose last time starring in a Neil Gaiman adaptation was on an episode Amazon Prime’s Good Omens in 2019. Sanjeev Bhaskar (Cain) Gwendoline Christie’s fellow former Game of Thrones cast member, Charles Dance, plays Dream’s accidental captor and scheming magician Roderick Burgess, which is far from the English, Emmy-nominated thespian’s first villain role. Kirby Howell-Baptiste (Death) As the ruler of Hell, Lucifer, we have Gwendoline Christie — which seems like an inspired choice considering her great performance as Captain Phasma in the Star Wars movies, although this devil is not inherently evil and even something of a charmer. The versatile performer (he has done everything from irreverent comedies like The Big Lebowski to period epics like Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven) previously worked with Netflix for his reunion with Anomalisa creator Charlie Kaufman on I’m Thinking of Ending Things, as well as the animated comedy, Big Mouth, and its spin-off, Human Resources. Gwendoline Christie (Lucifer) Tom Sturridge (Dream) It almost feels just as surreal as Neil Gaiman’s own seminal writing style to say that Netflix’s series adaptation of his popular comic, The Sandman is finally here after the story spent many, many years waiting for a screen adaptation.

Here, find Vogue's picks of the very best of TV and film to head to theaters for—or stream from the comfort of your sofa—this weekend.

Early reactions signal that Gaiman’s fervent fans, who long feared the formidable work unadaptable, are thrilled by the result.” Finally, if you like your action movies with a twist, check out the latest flick in the Predator franchise, Prey, featuring breakout star Amber Midthunder—an Indigenous actress who is Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota—as a hunter battling the threat of the monster that lurks at the edge of her community. All 10 episodes of The Sandman are now streaming on Netflix.

The Sandman is streaming now only on Netflix. What is the relationship between Dream and Hob in The Sandman? We explained their relationship here.

Fast forward to the present in the 21st century, Dream meets with Hob and tells him that he was always told it was impolite to keep one’s friends waiting, confirming their friendship. Dream and Hob meet once again, but Hob makes the mistake of suggesting to Dream that the real reason he meets with him is because he’s lonely and seeks companionship. Hob chases after Dream and tells him that if he meets with him again in 100 years, that would mean they’re friends. Dream then proposes that they continue to meet every 100 years at the same tavern to discuss what’s going on in Hob’s life at the time. Hob’s beliefs entertain Death and Dream. Dream can’t comprehend why a mortal would want eternal life on Earth. Death tells Dream that he could find out why if she grants Hob eternal life. Dream and Death visit the waking world and decide to go to a tavern in London. While walking around the tavern, they listen to the conversations between people.

The enduringly popular comic book series about gods and the afterlife gets the big-bucks, amazing-cast Netflix treatment. And it's good. Very good, in fact.

These two episodes – one set in a diner, one set in the same pub at hundred-year intervals – really show what you can do with one story and one character and one hour of ingenuity, and give the whole series more of an anthology feel than an endless story where someone does hand gestures a lot and magic comes out. I have a potted history with fantasy television: we had a lot of it a couple of years ago, almost all of it bad, because they ignored the two primary rules for fantasy that I have made up and never actually bothered to tell anybody. Boyd Holbrook is having an awful lot of fun playing the Corinthian, a devilish nightmare with teeth instead of eyes. The former is a lot rarer than the latter, sadly, and culturally we are poorer for it. What if a supernatural cabal actually ran the government but started getting nosebleeds and died? So it is with a heavy heart that I must announce that I have watched The Sandman (available now on Netflix), the Netflix x Warner x DC crossover event of the summer.

Diehard fans of the dark fantasy comic book series by Neil Gaiman are already expressing their love of the Netflix adaptation on social media. With 10 full ...

Lucifer is almost like a spin-off of The Sandman, though decidedly different tonally. Based on the fantasy novel by Neil Gaiman, American Gods is a fascinating and unique show that aired for three seasons on Starz. The first season is basically perfection but your mileage may vary with seasons 2 and 3. A second season is also in the works. Neil Gaiman has a very distinct creative style, so the best thing you can do after finishing The Sandman is to go check out his other shows. The Sandman has finally started streaming on Netflix after decades of development and fans could not be happier.

A man holding a helmet superimposed over comic book pages. Neil Gaiman's "Sandman" comics come to life. Credit: Mashable Composite: Netflix; DC Comics / Vertigo ...

His role in the comics is contained to The Doll's House arc, which is effective as we move from issue to issue. I also appreciated the connection between Lyta and Rose, as it pulls together characters from important early threads of The Sandman and gives us another chance to see the effects of Rose's role as the dream vortex. They prop him up as their own version of the Sandman in an attempt to create a new head of the Dreaming. Hector visits his pregnant wife Lyta in the dream realm so the two have more time together, and occasionally Lyta is visited by Jed Walker (Eddie Karanja), the little brother of Rose Walker (Kyo Ra). However, when Dream finds out about what Brute and Glob have done, he casts Hector back to the land of the dead and declares he will return for Lyta's child — who, by virtue of its time spent gestating in the Dreaming, is now his. It might not be bursting at the brim with Justice League references, but The Sandman is still a DC comic. In the show, Ethel gives John the amulet directly and then dies onscreen as the protections fade away. The show takes that opportunity for new material and runs with it, incorporating several of Hal's numbers into the show and casting Hedwig and the Angry Inch writer/director/star John Cameron Mitchell as Rose Walker's drag-performing landlord. The second half of the episode is an extremely faithful adaptation of issue 13, Men of Good Fortune. There, we learn about Dream's once-a-century meeting with the immortal human Hob Gadling (Ferdinand Kingsley). But that's not the only way in which The Sandman diverges from its source material. Upon his escape decades later, he must restore order to the Dreaming while contending with the chaos that ensued both in his world and the waking world while he was gone. The first half of the episode is an extremely faithful adaptation of the comic issue of the same name, which sees Dream and Death (Kirby Howell-Baptiste) walking around and having a conversation about humanity. Having the stories play out simultaneously gives us a solid A plot and B plot as our protagonist and our antagonist hunt down Dream's magical tools, teasing the inevitable showdown. Showrunner Allan Heinberg and executive producers David S. Goyer and Gaiman have adapted the first 16 issues of the comics into a 10 episode-long season that, while most certainly not perfect, clearly works hard to do justice to and maintain the spirit of the originals.

I do find it somewhat ironic that this is a DC comic adaptation and a Warner Bros. on Netflix in an era where WB is finding it difficult to get consistent ...

While it’s perhaps unwise to predict what Netflix will or won’t renew, given how random those decisions seem sometimes, I am pretty confident in saying this kind of performance from Sandman, both in terms of these scores and this initial top 10 placement, indicate to me that they will continue investing in a second season, even if the midst of cutbacks elsewhere. Other indicators are promising for The Sandman as well, as we wait and see if it will be granted a second season after this debut here. Netflix has scored a much-needed hit with a project that many thought was going to be unfilmable.

Neil Gaiman's series is filled with distorted images and odd aspect ratios. It's not your TV settings — it's a deliberate creative choice.

Tom Sturridge stars as Dream — aka Morpheus. He lurks in a realm called the Dreaming and, when he’s captured, his absence triggers events that change both the sleeping and waking worlds. However, a spokesperson for Netflix confirmed that image distortion is a deliberate creative choice on “The Sandman.” “Sandman” viewers first noticed the skewed images in trailers for the series, sparking some trepidation among fans of the original comic book series.

Tom Sturridge as Dream 'The Sandman.' Laurence Cendrowicz/Netflix. How do you adapt the unadaptable? Neil Gaiman's beloved fantasy comic book The Sandman ...

You were able to crack the Wonder Woman mythology and story, something that a lot of people were concerned was also impossible. Having read all of The Sandman and knowing where it goes has really influenced how we’ve shaped Season One. Knowing where we’re heading at the beginning of the story really helps you set a tone that can accommodate where you end up. So we knew the audience was going to be waiting and watching to see how faithful we were going to be. And now I’m having early talks with production design and VFX and getting everything into position, so that if we are lucky enough to have a Season Two, we’re ready to go, ideally with the same team who made Season One. To have Dream, a.k.a. Morpheus — a sort of stoic, godlike lead character — at the center of a story is a challenge in itself. One of the challenges in the narrative, if you’re following the book, is to start with your lead character speechless and trapped in a bubble for quite some time. So we had a blast, and Jenna is so amazing in it that it left us all just hungry for more of both Lady Johanna and contemporary Johanna Constantine. And so we always had to sort of craft a cliffhanger for Dream at the end of every episode, to make people want to press that button. So as much as the character is not the same, I felt like we were very faithful to the spirit of the book. In the earlier iterations of that episode, we had the whole Hellblazer supporting cast — Chas and Renee were both in it, gender-swapped, like so. Well, the biggest concern I had was The Doll’s House [the story arc that became the second half of Season One]. Because I knew that we were going to have to sell this as a serialized drama about Dream of the Endless and his extended family, and essentially make it a relationship drama. But it actually was a blessing, because we were able to spend more time with Dream and get into his head more and dig into those stories, and his relationship with Lucienne [Vivienne Acheampong], which is really the emotional spine of the entire season.

Morpheus meets (and maybe flirts with?) Joanna Constantine in the third episode of the Netflix adaptation of Neil Gaiman's iconic comic.

• In a fun reference to the source material, one of the security guards’ innards coats the inside of an elevator when John makes his escape. Her hope is that with a different protective amulet on his side, John will see reason and hand the ruby over to Dream. But c’mon, Ethel. You locked your son up for a reason. • Would Dream have let the demon eat the princess in order to get his helm back? Being a magical pain in the arse is dangerous work, and the people who love John often get more of the damage than he himself does. In order to get John on her side, the “let’s not kill Dream, let’s just give the ruby back” side, she gives up her demonic amulet. Also learning that man is not an island and that one’s actions have consequences are John and Ethel Cripps. She is still trying to get John to hand over Dream’s ruby so that she can give it back and seek forgiveness from Morpheus. Ask Alex how that works out, Ethel. Oh, right, you can’t, because he will be trapped in a waking nightmare until he dies. Besides Johanna Constantine, we meet two other recurring characters in the Sandman mythos this ep: Mad Hettie and Matthew the Raven. The former is a centuries-old woman who is too obstinate to die and has knowledge of the occult. Dream and Constantine’s stories intersect and overlap in a way that underscores the episode’s main theme, that you can’t live in a hermetically-sealed bubble. I wonder if she’s still down there and if we’ll meet her when Dream travels to hell in the next episode. Morpheus interrupts Johanna’s exorcism, and she in turn interrupts his attempt to reclaim his helm. And Dream is very much in the same place as Johanna, emotionally: untrusting, hiding their surplus of feelings under a façade of not caring, and going through a trenchcoat era. Johanna’s contact suspects a member of the royal family has been possessed, and what does it say about their current reputation that a possessed princess is honestly an upgrade?

Neil Gaiman says Jenna Coleman gives the best on-screen portrayal of Constantine. Here's what you should know about the character and the actress.

You know that if you fall in love with her, you are dead and demon-fodder. And you also know that you can't help falling in love with her." While in the show Dream puts her to sleep, in the comics he proposes a secret deal with her. It was big and obvious that we were going to [cast a woman]." For fans of the comic, it may be a little confusing, but below we have a clear explanation of how Johanna Constantine and John Constantine fit into Netflix’s ambitious new fantasy show. A great adaptation makes it so that fans barely even think about changes made along the way; poor attempts to bring concepts to the screen make any changes appear like a gross oversight from what fans actually wanted.

Jenna Coleman plays two versions of Johanna Constantine in The Sandman. We explain the differences and why there are two Johannas in the show.

Meanwhile, Lady Johanna Constantine also appears in The Sandman comics (and now in the Netflix series) because she is Neil Gaiman's creation in tribute to Alan Moore. In the comics, Lady Johanna is John's 18th-century ancestor. This will likely be depicted in a future episode of The Sandman, but the story was also told in Neil Gaiman's comics. Although John Constantine appears in The Sandman comics, the 21st century Johanna Constantine replaces John entirely in Netflix's The Sandman. Either way, Lady Johanna is John Constantine's (and Johanna's) ancestor. In turn, The Sandman has replaced John entirely with Johanna, who is essentially the female version of the same character with some notable tweaks. Ingeniously, Lady Johanna is also played by Jenna Coleman, making Lady Johanna the spitting image of her namesake in the 21st century. While American audiences are accustomed to hearing it pronounced "Con-stan-TEEN," thanks to Keanu Reeve's 2005 Constantine movie and Matt Ryan's John Constantine in DC's Legends of Tomorrow, when Alan Moore created the rogue British mage in the pages of Swamp Thing, he originally intended John's surname to be pronounced as "Con-stan-TYNE." Both incarnations of Johanna Constantine in The Sandman announce their last name as the proper "Con-stan-TYNE."

Netflix's The Sandman debuted this week and it seems are taking a liking to Jenna Coleman's performance as Johanna Constantine. Johanna fills the role ...

Gaiman previously admitted that the Constantine rights are complicated, but said that having the same person play both the present-day Constantine and their antecedent was always part of the plan for the television show. The Sandman team has taken Dream's comics and crafted a worthy adaptation of a story that is, after all, about how we take the stuff of dreams and apply it to our lives, our art, and our relationships. Among the fans watching The Sandman on Netflix, one tweeted at Gaiman to say they think a Johanna-focused spinoff would be "cool." Gaiman retweeted and added "You are not alone in this thought," suggesting he shares similar feelings.

The Sandman stars Tom Sturridge as Morpheus, lord of dreams. Kirby Howell-Baptiste also stars in the series as Death, with Mason Alexander Park as Desire, Donna ...

In other words, the Dreaming can — and is supposed to — make things look distorted. Variety got the answer directly from Netflix. “As you’ll note many of the environments are surreal in the series and we often say it’s quite what a dream would feel like,” a spokesperson said. In many scenes, actors’ faces and bodies look stretched, like the way a TV can sometimes show a widescreen image compressed at the sides in the wrong aspect ratio.

Here are some image galleries from Netflix's The Sandman spotlighting Kirby Howell-Baptiste's Death & Jenna Coleman's Johanna Constantine.

So who are we not to feed into your needs, here's a look at the official looks at Constantine and Death that have been released so far. Here's a look at the key art and image galleries for Howell-Baptiste's Death, followed by the same for Coleman's Constantine: That's right because, in a series filled with stand-out performances, Kirby Howell-Baptiste's Death and Jenna Coleman's Johanna Constantine have developed strong "why can't they have a spinoff"-levels of fan support.

Don't skip the end credits of Netflix's 'The Sandman' — they were created by artist Dave McKean, who designed the multimedia covers for every issue of Neil ...

McKean's innovative, genre-defying art was a big part of what made The Sandman so iconic and unique back in the day. He was like, 'Okay, can I stop now?' I was like, 'Yes, you can stop.' But [then] I called Dave and said, 'We're doing the TV show — you have to do something.' So every episode has end-title credits, and it's a different sequence for each episode — these amazing, flowing, kaleidoscopic little films that Dave McKean made. "When The Sandman show began, people kept asking me, 'Is Dave McKean going to do something for it?'" Gaiman said. No, these credits are worth watching simply because they are beautiful — and that's because they were designed by Dave McKean, who also created the cover art for all 75 issues of The Sandman comics. Why? Well, even though The Sandman was originally published by DC Comics, it is not a superhero story, so the reason to stick around is not to look for Marvel-style teases of future installments. Since The Sandman is on Netflix, as soon as the show's credits start, viewers have five seconds before the streamer automatically skips ahead to the next episode.