"The Sandman," Year Two (With Spoilers)

All the spoilers ahead, including for the comics.  And if you're looking for the Neil Gaiman caveat, it's in the previous post.  

I think I've heard just about every criticism of the second season of "Sandman" now, from Wanda being fridged to having the Corinthian reformed via a straight romance.  Both of these issues seem to have been the totally inadvertent result of a rushed and budget-conscious production, where creative compromises (replacing Ruby with Wanda, and pairing up the new Corinthian and Joanna to save on Matthew CGI) had unintended results.  A lot of the second season is like this, where the production seemed to be juggling way too much, and managed to get something wrong for everything that they got right.  

Let's focus on the positives first.  I love all the new additions to the cast.  Esme Creed-Miles as Delirium, Freddie Fox as Loki, Jack Gleeson as Puck, Barry Sloane as Destruction, Jacob Anderson as Daniel, Douglas Booth as Cluracan, Ruairi O'Connor as Orpheus, Umulisa Gahiga as Nada, and Ann Skelly as Nuala made me so glad that the second season of "The Sandman" finally made it to our screens.  I love this version of Nuala in particular, who is so much smarter and more assertive than the version in the comics, and who is not a doormat in her relationship with Cluracan.  I like the kinder, more human Daniel.  I actually liked both the Loki/Puck and the Corinthian II/Johanna pairings, which made "The Kindly Ones" storyline much more tolerable this time.  I didn't mind that Thessaly got booted and Nada got a bigger role.  And whoever decided to bring in Rufus Sewell and Tanya Moodie as Time and Night, the Endless's terrible parents, wins all the marbles.

Some of my biggest disappointments really boil down to the show's visuals not being able to get anywhere close to the work of Mike Dringenberg, Kelley Jones, Matt Wagner, Jill Thompson, Michael Zulli, and the other artists who contributed so much to the comic.  Dream's castle was rebuilt with darker interiors, possibly to help with all the CGI needed for the "Season of the Mists" sequences, and it ends up making everything look dim and difficult to see properly.  Delirium has her mismatched eyes and a few locks of rainbow hair, but she's far too sane and coherent compared to the source material.  There are some visuals in this season that are absolutely arresting, like the starlit appearance of Night, and the seaside meetings of Dream and Orpheus.  Then you have the final appearance of Lucifer, which only seems to take place on a beach because it did in the comics.  Except, there wasn't the budget for a properly balmy Australian beach, so they had to settle for one in the UK where everyone looks like they're freezing.  There were more creative workarounds, like the meeting with Time taking place in an almost monochromatic, Brutalist environment, instead a psychedelic one, to reflect his terrible relationship with Dream, but this kind of departure didn't happen often enough.      

The more difficult changes involve the storytelling.  Due to the nature of the accelerated plots, there are some episodes that feel like a "Greatest Hits" version of the original stories.  A large amount of "Brief Lives" is squashed into a single installment, where Dream spends too much time talking about characters who never show up onscreen.  Poor Wanda is shoehorned into a role she was never supposed to occupy.  However, it was the right decision to give over the lion's share of the time to the Orpheus story, which is the high point of the season.  For better or for worse, this "Sandman" adaptation is all about Dream, and getting him to the point where the choice between change and death feels inevitable.  Western media is not in the habit of making shows with tragic endings, especially not on this scale, and not in the context of a genre program, so I applaud the show's creators for fully committing to the idea.  But that said, I wish that more capable hands had been involved.  The back half of the season really needed to be more intense and violent, and the episode adapting "The Wake" is so leadenly paced that I was relieved when it was over.  It was all very cathartic, but enough was enough.        

I've had a very long relationship with "The Sandman," and tracked all of the various attempts at an adaptation for years.  I really never thought that we would get to this point, where the better part of the series has been more or less faithfully translated to screen.  It's not anything close to perfect, but I'm satisfied.  And thank goodness, because I don't expect anybody else will take another stab at it for a long, long time.  

   

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