Season 2, Volume 1 Review – ‘Just enough quality’

Streaming on: Netflix
Episodes viewed: 6 of 6

The first ten episodes (plus a bonus) of The Sandman did a wonderful job of adapting the first few stories of the original ’90s comic-book series. They brought the ultragothy Dream (Tom Sturridge) and a few of his ‘Endless’ siblings (Kirby Howell-Baptiste’s Death, Mason Alexander Park’s Desire) to vivid and convincing life, in a season which literally took us to Hell and back, but was rooted firmly in the ‘Waking World’ of Planet Earth. However, this second – and notably “final” – season has far trickier source narratives to negotiate. It pulls us further away from the reassurance of the everyday and deeper into the realms of gods, demons and anthropomorphic manifestations of human experience, as the rest of Dream’s family (Despair, Delirium, Destiny, Destruction) join the party.

On the pages of a comic book, it’s easy to swallow a story like Season Of Mists (spanning the first three new episodes), in which a whole host of cosmic beings — from Norse gods to faerie folk to a cardboard box representing the Lord Of Order — arrive at Dream’s palace for a banquet. But on the screen, it sadly struggles to engage. The action feels oddly unmoored from physics and jeopardy, while the dialogue becomes too cumbersome for the poor actors, whose baroque deliveries often fall clunking to the floor. Weighed down by pregnant pauses and stilted exchanges, some scenes slow to an interminable crawl, which is painful for a fan of the source material to behold.

Speaking of things painful to fans, there is also the matter of the disturbing allegations levelled at Sandman author Neil Gaiman (which Gaiman has denied). These cannot help but taint the experience, especially at those points when the veil between creator and creation feels thinnest.

Thankfully, there is still a lot of talent on show in this half-season, whether it’s David Buckley’s soaring, emotive score, the occasionally impressive visual effects (such as the eerie floating-mouth-blob rendering of the demon Azazel), or performers new and returning. Barry Sloane, for example, is a welcome addition to the Endless as “the prodigal” sibling Destruction, who brings some much-needed earthiness to the family mix (plus a dog with the voice of Steve Coogan), while Jenna Coleman makes a blissful but all-too-brief return in Episode 6 as the elegantly unflappable Lady Johanna Constantine. The upturn during the last hours of this first volume of six episodes is encouraging for the final instalments (dropping later this month), and you’ll likely be sufficiently intrigued to see how this compressed epic will conclude in Volume 2.