Rebuilding a kingdom of infinite possibility, it turns out, was the simple part. After the restorative work of the first season, Dream of the Endless (Tom Sturridge) finds his most significant task is not external construction but internal demolition. The real rot is within. A family gathering—the kind of cosmically dysfunctional affair that makes mortal squabbles look quaint—serves as the catalyst, forcing Morpheus to confront a wrong he committed ten millennia ago. This sends him on a bleak pilgrimage to Hell to free his former lover, Queen Nada, from a damnation of his own making.
That personal quest for absolution quickly spirals into a second, more enigmatic journey: a search for his estranged brother, Destruction, who long ago abandoned his post.
The season poses a question that feels particularly resonant in our own age of public reckonings. Can an eternal, god-like being, a literal personification of a fundamental concept, truly evolve? Is genuine atonement possible when your very nature is static? The stakes are not merely personal; they threaten the delicate balance of existence itself.
Gods, Just Like Us
The season’s engine is a family meeting. Called by the solemn, book-toting Destiny (Adrian Lester), the gathering of The Endless plays out like a celestial board meeting where millennia-old grievances are the only items on the agenda. It is here that the cosmic is rendered painfully domestic. These beings, who govern the very fabric of reality, bicker with the same petulance as any mortal family forced together for a holiday. It’s a reminder that power does not preclude pettiness.
The primary instigator, as always, is Desire. Mason Alexander Park portrays them not merely as a villain but as a beautifully polished agent of chaos, their every word a silken dagger aimed at the tenderest parts of Dream’s ego. Their provocations about Nada are what set the entire plot in motion, a perfectly executed bit of emotional manipulation that feels both deeply personal and cosmically significant. They are the beautiful, terrible sibling who knows exactly which buttons to press.
In stark contrast is the introduction of Delirium (Esmé Creed-Miles), the youngest of the family. She is a whirlwind of erratic energy and profound, childlike sadness—a necessary splash of neon in a world painted in shades of charcoal. Her road trip with Dream to find their lost brother is the season’s most compelling dynamic, a pairing of absolute order and joyful entropy. Their shared scenes have a strange, magnetic chemistry.
The others orbit this central drama. Death (Kirby Howell-Baptiste) remains the stable center, the empathetic anchor in a sea of dysfunction. And then there is the prodigal, Destruction (Barry Sloane), the one who simply walked away. He is the family’s great philosophical crisis, a being who rejected his fundamental nature to pursue a quiet life of creation. His contentment is an affront to his siblings, a quiet rebellion that suggests even the eternal can choose to change their fate. He found peace by quitting, a concept his duty-bound brother cannot begin to comprehend.
Portrait of the Artist as a Ponderous God
At the center of this cosmic drama is Morpheus himself, embarking on a forced march toward self-awareness. This is not a willing spiritual journey; it is an arc of atonement imposed upon him by circumstance. The quest to free Nada is the first, staggering step—a public acknowledgment of a private failing that has festered for ten thousand years. It’s a reckoning of almost geological scale. His subsequent travels with Delirium push him further, forcing the rigid king of nightmares into situations that require a flexibility he simply does not possess. He learns empathy the hard way: by being annoyed into it.
This entire emotional pilgrimage rests on the narrow, velvet-clad shoulders of Tom Sturridge. His performance is a deliberate, and divisive, choice. He embodies Dream with a posture of perpetual melancholy (the look of a man who just discovered his favorite obscure band is now playing stadiums) and a voice that rarely rises above a conspiratorial whisper.
The question is whether this creates a compelling portrait of eternal ennui or just a profoundly inert protagonist. Is his sullenness a mask for immense depth, or is it simply a lack of it? The performance is a tightrope walk over a chasm of boredom. At times, it feels like a perfect representation of a being weighed down by eternity. At others, you wish someone would just give him a cup of coffee.
His trials are not tests of strength but of character. When Lucifer (Gwendoline Christie) simply hands him the key to Hell, she saddles him not with a war but with a political and administrative nightmare. He becomes the unwilling landlord of the damned, forced to mediate disputes between gods and demons.
His power is not challenged by force, but by responsibility. He must confront his failures with his abandoned son, Orpheus, and face the women he has wronged. This is a story about a god whose greatest challenges are, for the first time, emotional. He has to learn humility. It’s a slow, painful process.
Velvet and Void
There is no denying the sheer opulence of the production. The budget is on the screen, lavished on impossible architecture that seems to defy physics and on a menagerie of mythological beings rendered with imaginative detail. When the hopeful inheritors of Hell gather in Dream’s castle, the sheer variety of creature design—from Norse gods looking like refugee rock stars to angels and demons in their celestial finery—is a testament to the artisans behind the scenes. It is a world built with immense care and a clear affection for the source material’s boundless imagination.
It is a world you often wish you could see. The series continues its commitment to a visual palette best described as “aggressive gloom.” This is not merely atmospheric shadow; it is a pervasive, ink-black void that smothers the very details the designers worked so hard to create. The effect moves past moody and into the realm of the frustrating, as if the entire cosmic order is suffering from a system-wide power outage. It’s a trend in modern prestige television, this idea that visual clarity is somehow less serious than squinting at silhouettes.
This visual philosophy mirrors the show’s relentlessly solemn tone. Every event, no matter how absurd on paper, is treated with the gravity of a state funeral. A gathering of treacherous gods vying for control of the underworld could have been a biting satire of power. A road trip with the literal embodiment of delirium should, by definition, have moments of levity. Instead, the show is cloaked in a C-SPAN-like seriousness, terrified that a single laugh might shatter its carefully constructed veneer of importance. It drains the fantastical of its fun.
A Sprint Through a Marathon
To make this sprawling epic digestible for television, the showrunners perform a feat of extreme narrative compression. Several major arcs from the graphic novels are collapsed and fused into a single, linear plot, primarily following Dream’s emotional arc. This choice is understandable, a clear attempt to provide a coherent throughline for viewers who haven’t spent years poring over the source material. It transforms a meandering, philosophical text into something more akin to a conventional television season.
But this expediency comes at a cost.
The narrative hurtles forward like a bullet train, hitting all the required plot points but rarely allowing a moment to breathe. The strange, contemplative detours that defined the comics are ironed out in favor of a relentless “and then” structure. What should feel like a weighty pilgrimage feels more like a frantic race to the credits. This rush to get on with it leaves a trail of underdeveloped characters in its wake.
Figures who should be central to Dream’s transformation—his spurned lover Nada, his tragic son Orpheus, the various gods vying for dominion—are reduced to brief cameos in his story. They become narrative functions, catalysts for his pain, rather than fully realized beings whose fates resonate on their own. Their tragedies are footnotes in his journey.
An Incomplete Dream
What, then, is the ultimate point of this somber, beautiful pageant? The season’s primary argument seems to be that nothing is immutable. Not even the anthropomorphic personification of dreams himself. His evolution is the story’s defiant, central thesis—a slow, painful, and often clumsy metamorphosis from a remote concept into something resembling a person.
His growth is not a sudden epiphany but a grueling process of chipping away at ten thousand years of habit. It is, in its own strange way, one of the more realistic depictions of personal change, just writ on a cosmic scale. The show succeeds in translating this core journey. It offers a visually ambitious, thematically heavy exploration of duty, regret, and the possibility of becoming better than we were.
It captures the essence of Morpheus’s painful education. Yet, in streamlining the narrative for the screen, it sands down the eccentricities and shears off the wonderfully weird detours that gave the source its unique soul. What remains is a magnificent, serious, and perhaps slightly hollowed-out version of the original. It is the dream, but not the whole dream.
The Sandman is a fantasy drama television series based on the DC comic book series of the same name written by Neil Gaiman. The first season of the show premiered on Netflix in August 2022. The second season is scheduled to be released in two parts, with the first volume having been released on July 3, 2025, and the second volume scheduled for release on July 24, 2025. The series is available for streaming exclusively on Netflix
Full Credits
Director: Jamie Childs, Andrés Baiz, Louise Hooper, Hisko Hulsing, Mairzee Almas, Mike Barker, Coralie Fargeat
Writers: Neil Gaiman, Sam Kieth, Mike Dringenberg, Allan Heinberg, David S. Goyer, Ameni Rozsa, Heather Bellson, Lauren Bello, Jim Campolongo, Austin Guzman, Vanessa Benton, Catherine Smyth-McMullen, Alexander Newman-Wise
Producers and Executive Producers: Neil Gaiman, Jenna Coleman, Allan Heinberg, Patton Oswalt, Stephen Fry, Sam Donnelly, David S. Goyer, Heather Bellson, Jamin Bricker, Samson Mucke, Jim Campolongo, Andrew Cholerton, Austin Guzman, Alexander Newman-Wise, Ameni Rozsa, Erin Vitali, Vanya Asher, Iain Smith, Ann-Marie Fitzgerald, Jo Mance, Janneke van de Kerkhof, Jamie Childs, Mike Barker, Bruno Felix, Femke Wolting
Cast: Tom Sturridge, Jenna Coleman, Mason Alexander Park, Gwendoline Christie, Boyd Holbrook, Vivienne Acheampong, Razane Jammal, Kirby Howell-Baptiste, Charles Dance, Donna Preston, David Thewlis, John Cameron Mitchell, Vanesu Samunyai, Cassie Clare, Mark Hamill, Melissanthi Mahut, Patton Oswalt, Joely Richardson, Stephen Fry, Richard Fleeshman, Esmé Creed-Miles, Adrian Lester, Indya Moore, Jack Gleeson, Ann Skelly, Douglas Booth, Clive Russell, Laurence O’Fuarain, Freddie Fox, Garry Cooper, Steve Coogan, Spike White, Paul Brennan
Director of Photography (Cinematographer): Will Baldy, Sam Heasman, George Steel
Editors: Daniel Gabbe, Kelly Stuyvesant, Shoshanah Tanzer, Jamin Bricker, Eva Krispijn
Composer: David Buckley
The Review
The Sandman Season 2
The Sandman Season 2 is a work of breathtaking ambition and frustrating contradiction. It is a visual marvel, anchored by a thematically rich story about the painful evolution of its protagonist and the compelling dysfunction of his cosmic family. However, its relentless solemnity, murky cinematography, and rushed narrative pacing drain much of the life from its source material. The season successfully adapts Dream's core emotional journey but sacrifices the supporting characters and whimsical strangeness that made his world so special. It is a beautiful, serious, and ultimately incomplete vision.
PROS
- Spectacular production design and imaginative world-building.
- Compelling family dynamics among The Endless.
- A thematically focused and resonant character arc for Morpheus.
- Standout performances from Esmé Creed-Miles (Delirium) and Mason Alexander Park (Desire).
CONS
- Overly somber tone that lacks the source material's wit.
- Frustratingly dark cinematography obscures the lavish visuals.
- A rushed, compressed plot leaves many supporting characters underdeveloped.
- Feels less like an epic journey and more like a sprint through plot points.