The Sandman

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' finally brings Neil Gaiman's comic book series to life onscreen, with Tom Sturridge playing Dream aka Lord Morpheus.

With enough forward-facing momentum and the might of Gaiman’s ever-complicating lore behind, Netflix’s “The Sandman” justifies its existence — and the potential for so much more story to come — time and time again. Though The Corinthian looms large throughout, the first several episodes send Dream on a hunt throughout the waking world for his beloved “tools,” which acts as a useful introduction to his powers and attitude towards his human subjects; in the back of the season, the show shifts towards explaining Dream’s siblings and precarious place amongst them as the clock ticks down to a potential catastrophe. But one of the smartest aspects of Gaiman’s initial approach to sketching out the series’ enormous mythos is that the story weaves in plenty of other main characters for the audience to latch onto when Dream is too busy moping to be compelling. Knowing this 1989 title had spawned onscreen spinoffs of “Sandman” characters — “Lucifer,” “Constantine,” etcetera — but never one of its own, it was hard not to wonder what about it might have made a live-action version so hard that it never happened until now. For another, the TV show threads the entire season with the lurking threat of “The Corinthian,” a vicious rogue nightmare played by Boyd Holbrook with a chilling, silken smirk. All it has to do to bring us up to speed is explain that The Sandman (aka Dream, played with gravel-voiced gravitas by Tom Sturridge) is one of several siblings who rule crucial aspects of humanity, from Dream, to Death (Kirby Howell-Baptiste), to the twins of Desire (Mason Alexander Park) and Despair (Donna Preston). From there, you’re either in or you’re out, and off it goes.

Netflix's The Sandman brings Dream and his Endless siblings to life in a way Neil Gaiman and longtime fans could only conjure up in their deepest of sleeps.

Underneath all the darkness, brooding and dark fantasy elements is a story about one of the most powerful creatures in existence learning how complicated, messy, cruel, loving, and selfless humans can be. Netflix’s The Sandman acts as a direct adaptation of the “Preludes & Nocturnes" and "The Doll's House" stories from Gaiman’s The Sandman graphic novel series and, outside of updating the time in which it takes place and a couple key changes here and there, it’s nearly a page-for-page take on the beloved stories. Some of our final moments in hell do showcase the only effect that looks out of place, but what a track record before then! Each one of them is wildly important to the success of the show, but not enough can be said about casting director Lucinda Syson’s work on the project. Armies of people brought The Sandman to life on the small screen. While it’s just about impossible to live up to the kind of expectations that come with such anticipation, Gaiman, Allan Heinberg, David S. Goyer and the team behind the new Netflix series didn’t just meet them – they exceeded them.

Neil Gaiman's acclaimed comic The Sandman is finally realized on screen as a 2022 Netflix series. Season 1 is about as good as fans can hope — but it mostly ...

In spite of being the best possible version of a Netflix adaptation, it is still a Netflix adaptation — a project that must hew to the limitations and aspirations of the platform, to create a bingeable experience with potential to become a monster hit. It was a work of alternative art published alongside the heteronormative corpus of DC Comics, growing in estimation until its counterculture leanings effectively became the culture — an ambition that was always there, as Sandman would grow to become a story about all stories, from Shakespeare to ancient Greece to superhero comics. But in reality he is just a brooding, pouty Englishman — which isn’t necessarily a bad thing when you learn (not a spoiler) that he is but one of the Endless, with older and younger siblings that also personify abstractions like Death (Kirby Howell-Baptiste) or Desire (Mason Alexander Park). Ultimately, The Sandman is effective as an alluring and sometimes odd advertisement for the comic book, which sounds like damning with faint praise but may actually be the desired outcome. As Dream gathers relics of his power, The Sandman shows viewers the breadth of the show. And will it prove those who hold the comic, a singular work of the medium, as “unadaptable” correct?

Well, the 10-episode Sandman series is here at last, following a 2019 deal that brought the property to Netflix, shepherded by executive producers Gaiman, David ...

Kirby Howell-Baptiste offers a wonderfully wise, serene twist on Death, who comforts the newly deceased and sends them on a path to the afterlife. The imagery complements storytelling that stays true to Gaiman’s sensibility—a mix of fantasy tropes, literary and pop-cultural references, gothy aesthetics, and archetypes grounded in global mythology that is as thoughtful in its own way about how people use the omnipotent heroes and villains we invent through fiction as Watchmen. At times, the show does seem too eager to make characters explain aspects of Dream’s journey toward a greater understanding of the human experience that are already apparent from the narrative. Dream is something of a straight man amid so much weirdness, but Sturridge possesses just the right combination of baby face and scowl. Whoever thought to cast Hedwig and the Angry Inch mastermind John Cameron Mitchell as a Florida boarding-house owner and drag cabaret singer deserves a bonus. There are great, warped concepts like this everywhere: a convention for serial killers, a Dream Realm Cain (Sanjeev Baskhar) who’s always murdering a self-resurrecting Abel (Asim Chaudhry), a man granted immortality in 1389 who meets up with Dream every hundred years for a beer and some reflections on why he still loves being alive. The Sandman production designer Gary Steele ( Outlander) wields visual effects so much more artfully. Because he’s descended into the waking world in pursuit of a “rogue nightmare,” a.k.a. the Corinthian (Boyd Holbrook), who’s entertaining himself by causing havoc among humans, Dream is the Endless they capture instead. In the first six episodes, which hew fairly closely to the first volume of the comics, Preludes and Nocturnes, the quest will take him back to Earth and, literally, past the gates of hell. The Sandman dates back to DC Comics’ 1930s Golden Age, but Gaiman’s version constituted a complete reinvention. He spends a torturous century in his prison, too proud to buy his freedom by acquiescing to the demands of his mortal captor (Charles Dance). From smart casting and strong writing to exquisitely eerie, noir-meets-horror production design that makes thoughtful use of digital effects, this is easily one of the best small-screen comic adaptations ever made. First it was supposed to be a movie.

Since 1991, when Neil Gaiman was first approached about turning his dark fantasy comic book series into a film, there have been at least three separate attempts ...

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.

For years it was conventional wisdom that an adaptation of The Sandman, the much-celebrated series of graphic novels from Neil Gaiman, Sam Keith, ...

They show that it is possible to capture the story of the comics almost exactly without just feeling like a carbon copy, and that big, sprawling stories with deep themes can be brought to the screen without sacrificing what made them so special in the first place. There will likely be some criticism of the show from comic book fans who wanted to see the art style of the comics translated perfectly to the screen. Yet, as the story goes on, he learns to embrace humanity and see the good in them. The finale also feels somewhat rushed in having to tie up a storyline that didn't get as many episodes to flesh everything out. Clocking in at 10 episodes, Netflix's The Sandman, which was produced in association with Warner Bros., is an absolute home run of adapting comic book storytelling to screen. For years it was conventional wisdom that an adaptation of The Sandman, the much-celebrated series of graphic novels from Neil Gaiman, Sam Keith, and Mike Dringenberg, would be impossible to properly pull off.

As far as comic books are concerned, there is nothing quite like Neil Gaiman's Sandman saga, a 75-issue, sprawling, dark fantasy epic considered the best of ...

What was true of the comics is true here: for all the mystery, horror, and personified concepts older than the universe, The Sandman is about the lives of ordinary people — the waitress, the kindly woman who offers you a ride, the romantic and the liar, and how they weave a world for such magic to exist, through their dreams and nightmares. But it is David Thewlis’ John Dee, a pyjama-clad, escaped mental patient in possession of Morpheus’ Ruby, who steals the show during the first half of the season, and becomes the centre of the chilling fifth episode, ‘24/7’. It is in John Dee’s pathetically human quest to steal hope from people in order to reveal the truth that The Sandman sees its greatest strength revealed. Morpheus is both the lead and the straight man, which with the wrong actor could make him boring.

The long-awaited adaptation of Neil Gaiman's iconic comic 'The Sandman' is finally here, even if Netflix has made some changes to the source material.

In other ways, Sandman is a loose collection of disconnected stories, many of which barely feature the alleged protagonist, about people’s faces melting and going to heaven and other things that are very difficult to film. Alex’s wheelchair rubs away some of the protection circle Roderick painted on the floor back in the 1910s, and that’s all Morpheus needs to worm his way into a guard’s daydream and out of his glass prison. The Corinthian helps Roderick build a better mousetrap for Dream, setting himself up to be the Big Bad of the series. The tragedy of Alex is that even after he kills his dad, he can’t kill the dad in his head. And Dream is so stuck in his ways that he can’t guarantee Alex’s safety and get out of bubble jail because he needs to punish Alex for killing Jessamy. So much of Sandman is about people metaphorically tripping over their own dicks, and this episode sets that up perfectly. But beyond the family drama, we’re introduced to what look to be big players in the rest of the series. But let’s get away from complaining about what the show isn’t and back to reckoning with what the show is. That way, the rest of the show will be set in the present day rather than the then-contemporary early-’90s setting of the comics. The decision to update the time period feels like a missed opportunity. Morpheus is stuck in his snow-globe prison for “over a hundred years” instead of the 70 or so he is in the comics. The Sandman comic series, which ran from 1989 to 1996, told the tale of Morpheus, a.k.a. Dream, who is one of the Endless — seven personifications of masters over all the kooky things we mortals do. Although they’re more ageless than gods and more powerful than superheroes, Dream still somehow gets trapped in a glass-bubble prison by creepy occultist Roderick Burgess. Burgess was trying to capture Death and missed, which is lucky for all of creation.

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.

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.

THE SANDMAN is on Netflix now and it features the antagonist John Dee, who meddled with Dream's ruby pendant. Who is John Dee in The Sandman?

Who is John Dee in The Sandman? The Sandman has just arrived on Netflix and the series draws inspiration from the comics of the same name. Express.co.uk has all you need to know about the TV series adaptation of the character. Who is John Dee in The Sandman? Dream and John ended up in a fight and John ended up destroying the ruby in the hope Dream would die as a result. Who is John Dee in The Sandman?

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

The Netflix adaptation of The Sandman has been long anticipated both by early fans of the DC comic and by those who have come to enjoy the many wonderful ...

Soon The Sandman will be added to the list of shows for which they are known and admired. Although Mark Hamill will always be Luke Skywalker and Patton Oswalt has his own resume of guest appearances in nerdy fare across the spectrum, they also both have a rich history of providing their unique voices to animated characters. Boyd Holbrook will play The Corinthian in The Sandman, a nightmare who escapes into the world to become a serial killer. In The Sandman he plays John Dee, who attempts to steal some of Dream’s power, but as Ares in Wonder Woman, he was a god who had plenty of his own. Viewers may also know Thewlis from his role as V. M. Varga in season three of Fargo, or they may have heard his voice in Big Mouth or Human Resources, in which he plays Shame Wizard. Mason Alexander Park is another Broadway heavyweight coming to the small screen, best known for their lead performance in Hedwig and the Angry Inch. You may also remember them from their role as Gren in the short-lived live-action Cowboy Bebop adaptation.

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.

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 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's the ultimate breakdown of The Sandman season 1 finale. What happened to Rose and Jed?! After being saved from Fun Land by The Corinthian, Rose Walker ...

And with Desire and some of the other siblings taking a stand against Dream, things will definitely get harder for Morpheus as he tries to save the lands. Unity tells Rose to pass on her the power of the vortex, which she is able to do. Meanwhile, Dream creates new dreams and nightmares to replace the ones that were lost. Hal says he had a dream of moving back to New York and might join them on the journey back, but he would need to sell the house. Meeting up with the rest of the house members, Rose tells them that they're all planning to move back to New Jersey the next day. Back at Lucienne's library, Unity is seen walking through the stacks and asks to see the book of her life. Dream suddenly appears and tells him that he's disappointed in what he's done, but the Corinthian points out he's only done what he's been made to do. Rose also reveals to Lyta that she has to make a decision before she falls asleep and the only way to protect both worlds is if she sacrifices herself, also killing the vortex in the process. Both the Corinthian and Dream also enter the dream world to convince Rose to join their side. The Corinthian tries to attack Dream with a knife, and the two start fighting. So what exactly happened to Dream and the world of the living? Rose and Jed escape the "cereal convention" and head back home.