[This story contains major spoilers from season two, volume one of The Sandman, as well as from the comics.]
At the start of the second season of Netflix’s hit fantasy drama series The Sandman, the Fates — a trio of goddesses consisting of the Maiden (Dinita Gohil), the Mother (Nina Wadia) and the Crone (Souad Faress) — delivered an ominous, ambiguous prophecy to the eldest Endless sibling, Destiny (Adrian Lester): “A king will forsake his kingdom. Life and death will clash and fray. The oldest battle begins once more.”
That prophecy will seemingly be fulfilled by the Sandman himself a.k.a. Dream of the Endless (Tom Sturridge), the powerful cosmic being who controls all dreams. After reclaiming the powers he had previously lost in captivity, destroying the dangerous dream vortex and unmaking the Corinthian at the end of the first season, the moody Morpheus has been quietly rebuilding his kingdom, the Dreaming, with an eye towards the future. But the past will always come back to haunt the King of Dreams.
In the first half of the second and final season of The Sandman (now streaming), largely adapted from the creator Neil Gaiman’s comic collections Season of Mists and Brief Lives, Dream is forced to come to terms with the fact that his actions have hurt the people he loves most. While he is not able to make amends with everyone — who could blame an ex-lover for holding a grudge against him after he condemned her to Hell for 10,000 years? — Dream is able to heal some rifts in his own immediate family.
Three hundred years ago, Dream’s brother, Destruction (Barry Sloane), abandoned his realm, and now the only person who can locate him is Orpheus (Ruairi O’Connor), Dream’s estranged son with the Greek muse Calliope (Melissanthi Mahut). Thousands of years ago, Orpheus had gone against his father’s wishes and accepted a life of immortality in exchange for a trip to the Underworld, where he was unable to rescue his new wife Eurydice (Ella Rumpf). In a last-ditch attempt to be killed and reunited with Eurydice in the Underworld, Orpheus put himself in the path of the Sisters of the Frenzy, a vicious cult of the Greek god Dionysus, who attacked and dismembered him, reducing him to only a severed head.
Desperately wanting to be put out of his misery, Orpheus begged his father to kill him, but Dream could not bring himself to commit the act — in part because the Endless are not allowed to “spill family blood.” Instead, Dream left Orpheus’ head in the care of priests on an uncharted island and told his son they could never see each other again. But centuries later, in exchange for Orpheus’ help in locating Destruction, Dream agrees to grant Orpheus the one boon he has always wanted: the sweet release of death. It’s a loving gift that could very well cost Dream everything.
“When you pared The Sandman comic down to Dream’s emotional arc, it really is so clear that this is a man who has gained some self-knowledge and some self-awareness through his imprisonment, through having to live in the waking world and the mortal world and having to reflect on his past behavior and sins,” showrunner Allan Heinberg tells The Hollywood Reporter.
“In Dream’s mind, he’s the hero of his story. I think he’s very surprised to realize in season two that he is the villain in several people he loves’ stories,” Heinberg continues. “At the end of episode six, the choice is, ‘Do you sacrifice your life for your son?’ And there’s no other choice [but yes] for him — not just because of his own honor, but because he didn’t love his son well thousands of years ago. And now, he has a chance to be a good father, brother and former lover, even though it costs him everything to do so.”
Below, Heinberg unpacks his decision to end The Sandman after two seasons (despite initially conceiving of a three-season adaptation), what Dream’s interactions with his Endless siblings and estranged son reveal about his evolution as a character — and why viewers should not expect Dream to take his fate lying down in volume two. He also teases the final bonus episode centered around Kirby Howell-Baptiste’s Death. (Stay tuned for part two of THR’s conversation with Heinberg, which will be released after the final episodes drop later this month.)
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You’ve maintained that the second season of The Sandman was always meant to be its last, even as fans began to speculate that those reasons weren’t purely creative. Can you walk me through the rationale behind that decision? And on a macro level, how did that affect the structure of this final run of episodes?
We learned making season one that we were only going to focus on the stories where Dream was the protagonist. In the comic book, it has more of an anthology structure. There are long story arcs where he may appear in one or two scenes, but there are other people’s stories. We realized that the audience, for a serialized drama, needs a character that they can follow and root for throughout the entire run of the show. Anthologies are very difficult to pull off [because] every time you introduce a new cast of characters, you have to earn the audience’s trust, love and rooting interest. And with this show, we watched the audience reaction to the first episode and then the second episode, and their interest was always held when Dream was either onscreen or the subject of the scene. But anytime we drifted into other people’s storylines, they got confused and lost interest because it’s called The Sandman and they thought the show was about the Sandman, which we all understand.
So, by the end of season one, we started looking at the stories that were going to be part of a proposed second season. The biggest question mark was around a graphic novel called A Game of You, where Dream has two or three appearances, but it’s not his story. It’s Barbie’s story, who we introduced in season one. So there was some debate about how we would do it. The writers and I actually spent two months, because it was a three-episode arc, building a story for Dream to be part of A Game of You that was not in the comics. In order to tell that story, it would have to become a Dream story, and we labored a long time over it.
In the end, Netflix came to us and said, “What if we skipped it storywise? Since we are focusing on Dream, what if we went straight from the end of Season of Mists into Brief Lives [for volume one]?” It was a proposal. They asked me, “How do you think you would do that?” And because Dream isn’t in A Game of You, it was fairly easy [to adapt]. So, from the comics, we substituted his affair with the witch Thessaly, and we concentrated on Nada — Season of Mists is all about Nada [the Queen of the First People who Dream condemned to hell for 10,000 years after she rejected his proposal to be with him]. So him proposing to Nada again and Nada rejecting him took the place of Thessaly’s rejection, and it was a very seamless way of transitioning into Brief Lives.
I had always thought of The Sandman as a three-season show with 11 episodes in each season, and initially I had crafted season two to end with Orpheus’ death and Dream’s response to it. And then the third season was going to be The Kindly Ones [the ninth and penultimate installment of the original Sandman comics], and everything that comes after. And when we took A Game of You out of the mix, it created all the space we needed for The Kindly Ones and everything that came after. So it was a very organic process of looking at the comics and saying, “If we’re just telling Dream’s story, what are those elements, and can we do it in the 11 episodes that we had? And then [we’ll have] the additional Death episode at the end.”
You’ve always said that your adaptation of The Sandman, at its core, is a family drama centered around Dream. What new facets of Dream did you want to reveal through his interactions with the other Endless siblings? How did you want to humanize him in this second batch of episodes?
Death [Kirby Howell-Baptiste] is really honest with him about his behavior in Season of Mists and Destruction basically tells him several times, “I could not handle it. I could not handle my responsibilities.” Throughout season one, we discovered that Dream has a curiosity and a longing to do things that are outside of his calling, outside of his realm. And every time we see him with another member of the family, it brings out a different side of Dream.
For me, watching his progress over season two, he just becomes more and more and more vulnerable and more emotionally present to the point where — well, you haven’t watched it yet — by the end of the season, he’s so authentically himself with Death at the end. He’s so raw and so naked, and so the opposite of who we met at the beginning of season one. I don’t want to spoil anything for you, but it is profoundly moving. We were able to tell the story as we have because of Tom Sturridge’s phenomenally nuanced, intelligent, deeply felt performance.
Dream is an impossible character to play, especially if you look at the comics, because he reveals nothing. He doesn’t have eyes; he’s got black pits with stars in them. So it’s impossible to tell what he’s thinking or feeling. And the biggest shift for me, as the primary storyteller of the show, is that I had to allow myself in script to let the reader know everything that Dream was thinking and feeling along the way, which was a huge leap for me. Neil Gaiman created this character. I am doing my interpretation, but it took a certain amount of chutzpah, as they say, to put down on the page what I think is going on in the scenes and hope that the writer who created this character agrees and is OK with it.
So that’s the way we were able to tell Dream’s story and focus on it. Tom and I, together with the director Jamie Childs, were constantly transparent about what moments mean, how he’s feeling, and how his feelings dictate his next action in a way that is not in the comic. He is a mystery in the comic; he’s opaque. There are times when in the comic Neil gives him a voiceover and he gives you some insight, but you’re not tracking him emotionally the way that we have had to because we’re a television show. So the bones of the story are the same, but the way we tell the story is very different because we’re telling it from the inside out as opposed to the comic, which is very outside in, I guess. I don’t know if that makes sense, but I’m articulating this for the first time!
Ruairi O’Connor as Orpheus with Barry Sloane as Destruction in season two, episode five.
Courtesy Of Netflix
Dream’s relationship with Orpheus is such a key part of the comics — and, for me, the relationship that humanizes Dream the most in this adaptation. What was your take on the complexity of their relationship? Why are they both unable to realize that they are more alike than they’re willing to admit until it’s too late for Orpheus?
I love Ruairi’s performance so much. Dream and Orpheus don’t live together. Their time together before [Orpheus’] marriage is limited, but Orpheus clearly adores him. They adore each other. I think that with Orpheus, Dream is warmer and more unguarded than he is even with Calliope. But I think with a young man in love, you watch Dream try to parent him as best he can. You watch him try to put his foot down. He does what I think any protective parent would do in that moment. And Orpheus’s passion, his youth, and maybe some resentment that he didn’t have a full-time father there — there’s something in him that forces him to rebel and need to seek his own course. He’s the hero of his own story. And as a parent, you are powerless to stop your child from doing enormous harm to himself. And at every turn, Dream isn’t evolved enough in that moment to make an emotional appeal to Orpheus, right?
The way that Dream and Orpheus speak to each other at the end of episode six is very different from the way they speak to each other in episode five. You’ve got hundreds of years of regret and recrimination in episode five. They’re very much father and son — “I tell you what to do and how to behave, and you do it because I am your father, and I know more than you.” By the end of it, there are just two people who love each other enormously. In some ways, Orpheus is a much wiser soul by the end of episode six than Dream is and knows so much more about humility and patience and gratitude. Dream is just learning these things now, and his son’s been ahead of him for hundreds of years and you see it in their interaction.
There are two one-on-one scenes between Dream and Orpheus which absolutely gutted me as a viewer: the first being when Dream refuses to kill Orpheus post-decapitation, and the second being when they come face-to-face for the first time at the temple. What did you want to accomplish with those two bookends in the characters’ relationship? How did you want to show the way they’ve evolved or not evolved during their time apart?
It’s interesting because I had to look at that scene on the beach in episode five where Orpheus has been decapitated and he’s begging for his own death. Our dialogue is very similar to the dialogue in the comic. Dream, as a comics reader [myself], always seemed very much like an Old Testament God: “I gave you an order, you disobeyed me, and now you must be punished.” And I couldn’t find a way into writing the scene in a way that made sense to me with Tom’s Dream.
I just thought to myself, “[Dream’s] behaving this way because his heart is broken.” The reason he says we will not see each other again is that Dream can’t handle [seeing him like that]. It is too much for him. From that point of view, as Dream’s walking away from Orpheus, we can see that he is absolutely shattered instead of stone-faced and punishing. You understand how hard this is for him.
And then in the last scene that you referred to, Dream says, “Do you know why I said those things to you? I couldn’t kill you because I couldn’t imagine living in a world without you. There’s no way that I could kill the person I love most in this world and have tried so hard to protect.” Interestingly, that scene doesn’t exist in the comic. There’s an omission, and I was hoping I wouldn’t have to write the scene where Dream and Orpheus face each other for the first time [in a long time]. (Laughs.) In the comic, Dream leaves Delirium [Esmé Creed-Miles] outside the temple, and we stay with Delirium. Dream comes back out and says, “It is done.” So I thought it was a perfect opportunity.
Orpheus, at that point, is so philosophical about his fate and trying to spend his days as best he can. Even though he longs for the peace of death, he’s not an unhappy man. He’s not suffering, and Dream is suffering and has been suffering since he left him on the beach. So there were a lot of ways to go in that scene. Orpheus could have been angry or resentful, but casting Ruairi made it so easy to just have him be loving, accepting and forgiving: “Let’s not waste another minute fighting. Let’s just start loving each other as best we can right now.” It’s such a relief for Dream in that moment because he’s been dreading having to face the biggest mistake he’d ever made.
How did you decide to write Orpheus’ death scene? And what stands out to you about the way Tom chose to play the aftermath of Orpheus’ death?
That’s very much from the comic. I think I added some dialogue, but how difficult it is for [Dream] in the moment and the breakdown in the palace — that’s from the original comic. I think Tom’s performance is absolutely staggering all the way through and so moving. I love that scene in the library with Lucienne [Vivienne Acheampong], the way it was staged. He hides behind a bookcase and Lucienne doesn’t see him, and it was not scripted to have him like that. It was our DP Will Baldy’s idea in the moment, like, “What if it’s too much for him and he can’t face her? And his not showing himself to her shatters her.” It was such a lovely collaborative idea and it sets up that scene in his private quarters where he’s washing the blood off his hands in such a beautiful way. I’m absolutely indebted to Will for having suggested that and to Jamie for the way that it’s shot.
At the end of volume one, Dream is able to reconnect with not only Orpheus but also Destruction. You’ve previously described Destruction’s story as “a soul that’s in conflict.” He doesn’t want to destroy; he wants to create. Can you unpack Destruction’s decision to abandon his realm and his final conversations with Dream before vanishing?
I love that Destruction has the same sense of honor and responsibility about his realm and what his job is that Dream has. But in the end, it became too much for him. He could no longer be the destroyer of lives and universes, and he could not handle it anymore. It really broke him. And he did what no Endless had done previously, which was to essentially just abandon his realm. Dream has been livid with his brother making that decision for 300 years, but I also think that Dream was resentful because he’s jealous. What Dream does takes an enormous toll on his soul and his psyche, and to be able to just leave and pursue a life outside of one’s calling — it’s everything he has wanted and it’s unthinkable to him. In some ways, I think he knows that this job is too much for him.
(Major spoiler alert!) So by becoming more human himself and allowing himself to be reborn through Daniel, which is obviously a spoiler [from the comics] for the end of the series, he understands that the new Dream has to be more human and less Endless in order to serve mankind the right way, in ways that he was not able to. So I think Destruction teaches him that.
What I find so compelling about Barry’s performance is you see Destruction, who is Dream’s younger brother, has also evolved more than Dream has. Having fallen in love with humanity before Dream did, he knows so much more about his own heart — and he wishes he could help Dream. You saw it in episodes five and six, especially in episode six. He’s trying so hard to help Dream out of this prison that he’s created for himself. I think he does get in, obviously, but in that moment, Dream can’t really hear it or respond to it. So I find it really powerfully moving where Destruction is basically saying to him, “I have been here. I have felt these things. I know exactly what you’re going through, and you don’t have to.” Dream obviously shuts down and isn’t ready for that advice at that moment.
Volume one ends with the Fates seemingly divided about taking action against Dream, but regardless of how they personally feel about him, the fact that Dream has spilled family blood means that he will now have to face the consequences of his actions. What can you preview about the final five episodes of his story and the bonus episode involving Death?
In the back half, Dream is going to do everything he possibly can to keep his life and his kingdom, and the people who work with him, whole and safe and alive. He’s not just going to give up. He’s not just going to resign himself to his fate. He’s going to fight for the next five episodes, because that’s who he is. So it’s not over, and there are lots of surprises along the way.
That final episode is a very interesting episode for us. It’s freestanding. It doesn’t really have anything to do with the 11 episodes prior to it, but it’s a continuation of all the themes that we’ve been exploring the entire time. It’s especially topical now — I mean, I guess it’s always going to be topical — because the world is a very dark place at the moment, and we are all trying to figure out how to live in it with love and with hope. That’s what Dream is trying to do the entire time in the body of the season, and that’s what Death is trying to convey to Colin Morgan’s character, Sexton. So that’s our goodnight kiss to the audience, and our thank you to the audience for staying with us through these two seasons.
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The Sandman is now streaming on Netflix. The next five episodes, which will conclude Dream’s story, will drop on July 24, with a bonus episode centered around Death set to drop on July 31.
