Death: The Gentrification

I watched the true final episode of The Sandman last night, which I figured ought to be discussed separately since it really is more of a short spin-off film. It's based on a spin-off comic, Death: The High Cost of Living, which focused on the personification of Death, who in the Sandman comic universe is a perky teenage goth girl. In the Netflix series, she's a nondescript, thirty something black woman who grins a lot. There's a lot of grinning in this episode. Even the suicidal protagonist, a man named Sexton Furnival, defaults to a smile.

In the whole series, this last episode, and the first episode of the first season, are the only two with teleplays actually written by Neil Gaiman (in this case, with showrunner Allan Heinberg). Maybe that explains why this episode makes so many deviations from the source, some deviations that feel kind of arbitrary. It's been more than twenty years since I read the Death spin-off comics but one of the few things that stuck with me was that Sexton liked honey in his coffee. In the Netflix episode, he prefers three sugars. Did they figure someone putting honey in coffee was too far-fetched?

Sexton is also aged up. Instead of a lonely teenager in New York, he's a Northern Irishman living in London, contemplating suicide after a breakup with his girlfriend, Sylvie. Gaiman and Heinberg also make him a journalist for The Guardian. It all feels like it was meant to vigorously assure the leftist viewer that he is not an Incel. Sometimes I think the real story behind Gaiman's cancellation was that certain people on the left had dirt on him for a long time that they held over his head so that he'd make increasingly pandering screenplays only for the right wing publication Tortoise Media to spoil everything. I suppose it's more likely Gaiman wanted to make Sexton more reflective of who he is now, as an author insert, which used to be considered a sign of good, honest writing. Sexton's dislike of his own oddly sexual name always seemed to me a reference to Gaiman's own name (which is pronounced "Gay Men").

A lot of Sexton's dialogue still seems slightly adolescent, coming oddly from 39 year old actor Colin Morgan, like when he innocently asks Death how long it will take for his lesbian roommate to have sex with her girlfriend (although he lived with his mother in the comic) or when he decides to use marbles to trip the man who holds Death and himself hostage.

It's not bad. I guess the comic seemed better because Sexton felt more genuinely suicidal. This Sexton is a little harder to get a grasp on. Kirby Howell-Baptiste continues to feel nothing at all like her comic counterpart but she's pleasant enough. I suppose she can't be goth now because there are no goths now. Are there? Can there be? Why does it feel like there can't be? Maybe because all the goths grew up, shed their black lipstick, and too few among the next generation took up the mantle. Oh, well. We'll always have the memories, even if we don't have the comic adaptations.