The Long Dream

I finally managed to finish watching Sandman season 2 last night (not including the Death special). Sadly, it got to be a slog after the Season of Mists portion. The decision not to adapt A Game of You and most of the short story anthologies doesn't seem to have corresponded with a shorter episode order. So there's padding. Piles of plodding, ponderous, padding. It's filled with Netflix's notorious excessive exposition designed for people who are looking at their phones with the show playing in the background.

Still, I'd say the primary flaw is that Dream is too humanised. It flattens the story out into a more conventional drama. That was the great thing about A Game of You and the shorts in which Dream barely appeared. It augmented the sense of him as a force of nature who could appear at any time, whose ways and motives were a little mysterious. A few other changes I suspect were due to corporate feminism, like the idea to make Despair just a normal lady instead of a naked wreck clawing at her face constantly with a little fish hook. Or the decision to make Nuala's glamour just a different hair style, a little more makeup, and received pronunciation. I often complain about people seeming to be against beauty, but there seems to be an equally fervent effort to deny the existence of ugliness. But I guess if you have to eliminate one, you have to eliminate the other. Like one of the good lines in the last episode suggests, one opposite defines the other.

The last episode was pretty good, once I settled into its mournful pace. I think this is the first time I truly appreciated Jacob Anderson who places Daniel, the second Dream. His performance somehow conveyed the strange experience of somehow being simultaneously filled with knowledge and being slightly bewildered. The return of Boyd Halbrook as a new version of the Corinthian was also nice but the show's attempt to build chemistry between him and Joanna Constantine was a little lopsided. As much as I like Jenna Coleman, something about her performance wasn't giving enough in their interactions. Even when they were plainly in the same room, it felt a little like she recorded everything remotely.

I wonder if the season would've been better if Neil Gaiman hadn't been cancelled. The story being about the death of the title character, whom many people take as an avatar of the author, couldn't help but resonate slightly with the real life story of Gaiman's disappearance from public discourse following allegations and lawsuits. I felt a bit like I was watching the final death throes of '90s indie comics fantasy and community making way for a new kind of communal dream. Watching a reel of tiktokers gloating over the death of Charlie Kirk this morning, I can't say I'm feeling optimistic for the new one.

The Sandman is available on Netflix.