The Sandman

Netflix's The Sandman brings Dream and his Endless siblings to life in a way Neil Gaiman and longtime fans could only conjure up in their deepest of sleeps.

Underneath all the darkness, brooding and dark fantasy elements is a story about one of the most powerful creatures in existence learning how complicated, messy, cruel, loving, and selfless humans can be. Netflix’s The Sandman acts as a direct adaptation of the “Preludes & Nocturnes" and "The Doll's House" stories from Gaiman’s The Sandman graphic novel series and, outside of updating the time in which it takes place and a couple key changes here and there, it’s nearly a page-for-page take on the beloved stories. Some of our final moments in hell do showcase the only effect that looks out of place, but what a track record before then! Each one of them is wildly important to the success of the show, but not enough can be said about casting director Lucinda Syson’s work on the project. Armies of people brought The Sandman to life on the small screen. While it’s just about impossible to live up to the kind of expectations that come with such anticipation, Gaiman, Allan Heinberg, David S. Goyer and the team behind the new Netflix series didn’t just meet them – they exceeded them.

Netflix's The Sandman is an adaptation of the iconic and groundbreaking DC Comics series written by Neil Gaiman, and while it sometimes stunningly faithful ...

The Corinthian is supposed to be irredeemable, an unrepentant murderer who kills for fun, but his role in the story (and the amount of screen time he gets) requires him to be at least somewhat understandable, if not outright sympathetic. This is damning with faint praise, but Netflix’s The Sandman, like Zack Snyder’s Watchmen, is one of those “this is as close as anyone could’ve hoped for” adaptations. Morpheus’ realm, the place where he creates dreams and which is supposed to be home to all sorts of incredible fantasy (as in the genre), creatures, and vistas, is typically depicted here as a wasteland with a lot of empty fields. Almost every episode pairs Dream up with a different character, especially early on, which wisely gives Sturridge an opportunity to play his Super Goth against more dynamic personalities, and though that manipulation is heavy-handed at times, Sturridge’s watery eyes do a lot of good work whenever someone works up the nerve to make some emotional plea to the Dream Lord. A brief team-up with a certain British hellblazer is greatly sanitized in the show, not only in its depiction of a dilapidated apartment belonging to someone utterly consumed by their dreams but in that certain British hellblazer herself—who is confusingly stylish and charming for someone who everyone else seems to regard as a…chain-smoking, trench coat-wearing, Sting-lookalike dirtbag, which she is very much not in this incarnation. Narratively, it hews very close to the first two volumes of the books (it starts with Dream’s imprisonment and ends at the “Cereal convention”), but at the risk of trying to be overly cute with it, the most important thing it loses in the transition is the dreaminess of all of it.

To the many fans of Neil Gaiman's comic book series: Relax. The new Netflix show nails it.

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As far as comic books are concerned, there is nothing quite like Neil Gaiman's Sandman saga, a 75-issue, sprawling, dark fantasy epic considered the best of ...

What was true of the comics is true here: for all the mystery, horror, and personified concepts older than the universe, The Sandman is about the lives of ordinary people — the waitress, the kindly woman who offers you a ride, the romantic and the liar, and how they weave a world for such magic to exist, through their dreams and nightmares. But it is David Thewlis’ John Dee, a pyjama-clad, escaped mental patient in possession of Morpheus’ Ruby, who steals the show during the first half of the season, and becomes the centre of the chilling fifth episode, ‘24/7’. It is in John Dee’s pathetically human quest to steal hope from people in order to reveal the truth that The Sandman sees its greatest strength revealed. Morpheus is both the lead and the straight man, which with the wrong actor could make him boring.

Netflix's adaptation of Neil Gaiman's The Sandman stars Tom Sturridge and Gwendoline Christie and starts streaming on August 5th.

Buoyed by trust, wholesomeness, and acceptance, it is a series that at once depicts the horrors of humanity and our place in an unknowable and terrifying existence, but it also shows us how our humanity unites us to confront the failures of the world and our fears of everything else. This is what Sandman is all about as a franchise, and the TV series captures this. For example, Rose Walker is trying to find her missing brother, confronting serial killers and talking ravens, but is also on the verge of destroying the universe. One of the reasons I loved the book franchise was that it is first and foremost a psychological horror story, but it’s one painted on a canvas of the cosmic with a fragile brush made of hope. The second major arc details Dream’s attempt to find an entity called a vortex — a human, named Rose Walker (Vanesu Samunyai) who draws all dreams to herself, collapsing the waking and dream world and thus ending the universe. At the same time, she is discovering her powers as the vortex. So begins the first arc and his adventures with everyone from a blue-collar exorcist to a manchild wielding the powers of the gods. However, instead of capturing Death (Kirby Howell-Baptiste), the Magus and his cult capture Dream, aka the Sandman — along with some of Dream’s powerful tools. To fix the world of Dreams, he must recover the tools his human captors took from him. For more than a century, Dream never utters a word, refusing to provide any details to his captors — whose lives are extended as a result of their proximity to his powerful tools. The Sandman is a dark fantasy horror comic franchise written primarily by Neil Gaiman, who also served as an executive producer and writer on the Netflix adaptation. But “adaptation” is almost an insult to what the creators achieved.

The long-awaited adaptation of Neil Gaiman's iconic comic 'The Sandman' is finally here, even if Netflix has made some changes to the source material.

In other ways, Sandman is a loose collection of disconnected stories, many of which barely feature the alleged protagonist, about people’s faces melting and going to heaven and other things that are very difficult to film. Alex’s wheelchair rubs away some of the protection circle Roderick painted on the floor back in the 1910s, and that’s all Morpheus needs to worm his way into a guard’s daydream and out of his glass prison. The Corinthian helps Roderick build a better mousetrap for Dream, setting himself up to be the Big Bad of the series. The tragedy of Alex is that even after he kills his dad, he can’t kill the dad in his head. And Dream is so stuck in his ways that he can’t guarantee Alex’s safety and get out of bubble jail because he needs to punish Alex for killing Jessamy. So much of Sandman is about people metaphorically tripping over their own dicks, and this episode sets that up perfectly. But beyond the family drama, we’re introduced to what look to be big players in the rest of the series. But let’s get away from complaining about what the show isn’t and back to reckoning with what the show is. That way, the rest of the show will be set in the present day rather than the then-contemporary early-’90s setting of the comics. The decision to update the time period feels like a missed opportunity. Morpheus is stuck in his snow-globe prison for “over a hundred years” instead of the 70 or so he is in the comics. The Sandman comic series, which ran from 1989 to 1996, told the tale of Morpheus, a.k.a. Dream, who is one of the Endless — seven personifications of masters over all the kooky things we mortals do. Although they’re more ageless than gods and more powerful than superheroes, Dream still somehow gets trapped in a glass-bubble prison by creepy occultist Roderick Burgess. Burgess was trying to capture Death and missed, which is lucky for all of creation.

Rose Walker is officially introduced in episode 7. She's a 21-year-old woman who recently lost her mom and is on a mission to find the brother she was separated ...

When they finally make it to the location where the mysterious foundation is, they discover that the place is a private care home for the elderly. If Dream were to kill the child, he’d be killing a member of his own family, which is considered an unforgivable offense. She’s a 21-year-old woman who recently lost her mom and is on a mission to find the brother she was separated from many years ago. In the last episode of the season, we find out that Desire of the Endless ( Mason Alexander Park) was the father of Unity’s child. Who are the mystery people, and how is Rose related to them? There were many shocking reveals in The Sandman, but finding out who Rose was related to definitely took the cake.

THE SANDMAN is on Netflix now and it features the antagonist John Dee, who meddled with Dream's ruby pendant. Who is John Dee in The Sandman?

Who is John Dee in The Sandman? The Sandman has just arrived on Netflix and the series draws inspiration from the comics of the same name. Express.co.uk has all you need to know about the TV series adaptation of the character. Who is John Dee in The Sandman? Dream and John ended up in a fight and John ended up destroying the ruby in the hope Dream would die as a result. Who is John Dee in The Sandman?

Since 1991, when Neil Gaiman was first approached about turning his dark fantasy comic book series into a film, there have been at least three separate attempts ...

But did we? Because the Sandman comic series is, at its core, about the very nature of stories, one can't help but be amused that reviewing this new iteration ...

And on the other end of the spectrum, the show is too obviously a work of fantasy and nerd culture to appeal to viewers just looking for the next great adult drama. Well, this show was his chance, and Gaiman could have spent the extra time and space granted by a different medium to show more of what Dream and Hob discussed over the centuries. While it’s a bit difficult to describe what “The Sandman” is, it’s quite easy to say what it’s not. But TV is a writer’s medium, and despite Gaiman co-running the show with two other veteran writers known for their acclaimed work in comic adaptations— David S. Goyer (who co-wrote “ The Dark Knight” trilogy) and Allan Heinberg (who co-wrote 2017’s “ Wonder Woman”)—they all apparently approached their job as glorified transcription. Sure, there are a few changes, but most of them are just the show eliminating attempts of the comic series to fit into the larger DC Universe of the time, such as guest appearances by John Constantine, Etrigan the Demon, and the Martian Manhunter, or an issue that was partially set in Arkham Asylum. To put it another way: the show changed almost nothing it didn’t need to change. But that doesn’t describe all fans, and presumably more than a few of them will grow weary of just how unimaginative—how sadly undreamt about—this series of dreams really is. In an interview for the 1999 book The Sandman Companion, Gaiman even admitted that he was sad to finish the issue, and he would have loved to carry on the conversations between Dream and Hob “indefinitely.” And that’s what should have happened in the TV series, which absolutely had the time and space to reimagine these conversations for a different medium. It originally began as a DC Comics series in 1988, and it lasted 75 issues before ending in 1996, becoming one of the first ongoing DC or Marvel series to end solely by creative decision rather than by a sales-motivated one. Because the Sandman comic series is, at its core, about the very nature of stories, one can’t help but be amused that reviewing this new iteration of it becomes a debate about the very nature of adapting stories. And both are adapted nearly page for page, word for word, into the sixth episode of the show. Countless diehard fans of the source material are no doubt tempted to think today, “We did it.”

The Netflix adaptation of The Sandman, Neil Gaiman's legendary comics series about Dream of the Endless and his adventures against his siblings and others, ...

And what the TV series leaves out entirely is another, such as the events of issue nine, “Tales in the Sand.” In that story, a younger, more impetuous Dream essentially ruins a human woman’s life when she dares refuse his love, and that dickishness clicks into focus the spontaneity and selfishness of the Endless, an essential theme of the comics that the series gestures toward but doesn’t contextualize. The result is an uneasy mixture of beat-for-beat mimicries of issues like “The Sound of Her Wings” and “Men of Good Fortune,” which are combined in the season’s sixth installment, and other drastic changes that take screen time away from Dream and don’t stand on their own as TV inventions. Dream spends thousands of years as a pouty asshole with some gracefully simplistic goth outfits and some not very empathetic views on people, and the rapidness with which The Sandman tosses off that version of the character to make him more traditionally heroic underserves the comics’ core ideas about the grueling and interrogating work that change requires. What The Sandman as a TV series fails to imagine on its own is one issue: The comics skip over showing Dream rebuilding the world harmed by his ruby, but why not show that process here? The Sandman trade paperbacks that serve as source material for this series — Preludes & Nocturnes, a sort of coming-of-age story for Dream, and The Doll’s House, an expansion of the universe in which he lives and rules — are both exposition-heavy affairs that rely on our attraction to the Sandman himself: to his mysterious regality and his assured haughtiness, his melancholy burden and his strict sense of his own superiority, not to mention the aesthetics of those inky eyes, Robert Smith mop, and all-black outfits. (And now that there is an established DC Extended Universe onscreen that this series is not part of, the comics’ mentions of the Justice League, Gotham City, and Arkham Asylum don’t survive the transfer.) The boundless creativity of drawn illustration can’t always be replicated via visual effects, practical locations, or the budget required for both in TV. Hour-long episodic run times might mean that a plot has to be divided and reorganized differently from how it was in a book.

So who tries to kill Dream, you ask? Well, it all starts with Roderick Burgess, but he dies before Dream could escape captivity. Then, there's the Corinthian ( ...

Initially, John overpowers Dream with the ruby, but then he makes the mistake of destroying it. John had no reason to use the ruby in this way other than for his own amusement since he’s a megalomaniac. Then, Dream shows up at the diner to get the ruby back but John refuses to return it. As soon as John gets the ruby, he heads to a diner. Later in the first season, John is able to retrieve the ruby from a storage facility. Yes! John is the son of Ethel Cripps and Roderick Burgess. When Ethel was pregnant with John, she took Dream’s tools (bag of sand, helm, and ruby) and left Roderick in the middle of the night.

It's been 32 years since the first issue of Neil Gaiman's The Sandman hit comic stands, and fans have been clamoring for an adaptation of the material for ...

It’s as faithful of an adaptation as it could be, and, outside of the fact that it may go over a few new viewers’ heads, it’s just about perfect. Netflix’s The Sandman acts as a direct adaptation of the “Preludes & Nocturnes" and "The Doll's House" stories from Gaiman’s The Sandman graphic novel series and, outside of updating the time in which it takes place and a couple key changes here and there, it’s nearly a page-for-page take on the beloved stories. The series sets up a future with enough small changes that longtime fans won’t know exactly what’s coming at every turn, and it captures every ounce of hope that this wonderful franchise is meant to. Each one of them is wildly important to the success of the show, but not enough can be said about casting director Lucinda Syson’s work on the project. Armies of people brought The Sandman to life on the small screen. While it’s just about impossible to live up to the kind of expectations that come with such anticipation, Gaiman, Allan Heinberg, David S. Goyer and the team behind the new Netflix series didn’t just meet them – they exceeded them.

A bad first episode shouldn't put viewers off The Sandman just as it starts to get good.

To fans of the comic, the first episode gives off the impression that the show is afraid to embrace any of the more uncomfortable aspects of the source material. By the time I got to the penultimate episode, "The Collectors," all the problems I had with the first episode either disappeared completely or had lessened to the point where it was barely noticeable. Most " Sense8" fans will happily tell you to push through the first episode before deciding if you like the show, and they're right to do so. Although the first issues were much stronger than the show's first episode, "The Sandman" series didn't truly become the series we know and love until its sixth issue, "24 Hours." This issue makes up the majority of the show's fifth episode, and comic fans can rest assured the episode very much measures up to the source material. The show also becomes more comfortable with the comics' horror elements, and Tom Sturridge really starts to settle into his role as Dream. He's still the weakest of all the Endless characters cast so far, but that's more of a testament to how effectively Kirby Howell-Baptiste plays Death, Alexander Mason Park plays Desire, and Donna Preston plays Despair. They all have a wonderful otherworldly quality to them that make their appearances throughout the later episodes a treat to witness. By turning Dream's long-sought revenge into a tame, regular coma, the show softens a character who's only supposed to soften slowly, over the course of the series. Although the show gets better with each passing episode, the first episode fails as an introduction to Dream, or as an introduction to the show in general. Volume 1, "Preludes and Nocturnes" is often ranked at the bottom of the list of favorite "Sandman" volumes, and that's because it's a volume that takes a while to fully find its voice. The show dedicates a lot more time to depicting Alex as a sympathetic victim of abuse. Gone is the gradual reveal of the comics. The first two thirds of the opening issue play out like a sort of mystery story, where the reader is invited to figure out for themself what type of person Dream is. Watching the first episode of the Netflix series, however, it feels like the show overcorrected.

It was a project long thought so unfilmable, even its creator didn't want anyone to try to adapt it. But it seems that despite recent quality control issues ...

The Sandman looks like a hit, and could turn into that “40, 50, 60, 70, 80 hours of quality television” over time, that Gaiman is so excited about. The Sandman is not being presented as a limited series, meaning if it does well on Netflix, that it could come back for more. The Sandman is reviewing well so far among both critics and fans.

In the second episode of Netflix's adaptation of the Neil Gaiman comic, Dream meets Cain and Abel and learns where he's going to need to go to get all his ...

In the 90 years or so since she left England, Ethel has become an art thief, or perhaps just a fence, and has taken the time to learn all sorts of languages and get an amulet that can explode her enemies. Just keep one and reuse it, like that one open grave in L.A. that is recycled in every TV show and movie. Maybe the ruby is holding his brain’s development back in the same way it’s delaying his aging. • It’s an LOL that Cain and Abel, two characters that predate Jesus (both in Christian writing and because in Sandman lore, they’ve existed since the first time a one-celled organism killed another one), use crosses in their giant cemetery. Overall, the CGI has been getting in the way of how yucky The Sandman could be texturally. Much in the same way as he was trying to do to the Corinthian in episode one, Dream needs to do the Infinity War Snap on something to reabsorb it into himself. Speaking of that mother and son, we get more of a sense of what Ethel Cripps has been doing with her absurdly long life span. Dream needs to get his tools back, the ones Ethel Cripps stole when she escaped from Roderick Burgess. And to do that, he needs to get stronger by absorbing something he has created. Both Cain and Abel are legacy DC characters, having hosted horror comics from the ’50s to the ’80s. Neil Gaiman added them to his story as a little nod to the past, the same way that Jordan Peele cast Keith David in Nope. In The Sandman, Cain and Abel together represent the first story. They have to reenact that first murder over and over and over. You know the kind: An NPC needs three items, you run around the map getting them, then maybe you get a cool sword or something at the end. I wept for Gregory. If The Sandman were on Does the Dog Die?, the answer would be “yes.” Technically gargoyles aren’t dogs, sure, but then why does this one come when called and play fetch, huh?

The TV adaptation is extremely loyal to Neil Gaiman's original comic books—and that's as enticing as it is frustrating.

Where the series cannot hope to compare to the comics is in its visuals; although the CGI in The Sandman is lavish and ever present, it can’t render a dreamworld in as impressionistic a style as an illustrated comic can. Their showdown is one of the most arresting and horrifying Sandman issues ever published, but I found the TV edition surprisingly grating, hampered perhaps by the attempt to stretch a few dozen pages of comics into an hour of television. During his journeys, he voyages to hell to barter with its ruler, Lucifer (Gwendoline Christie), and meets up with his sister Death (Kirby Howell-Baptiste), the cheerful and levelheaded guardian of all mortality. In the premiere, Dream is kidnapped and imprisoned in the early 20th century by an occultist named Roderick Burgess (Charles Dance). The story develops over decades as Dream escapes and then works to rebuild his kingdom, seeking lost artifacts and gathering up stray nightmares. Devotees of The Sandman such as myself will have much to exult in with Netflix’s version, but I wonder what the show will mean to newcomers. The Netflix adaptation, created by Gaiman, David S. Goyer, and Allan Heinberg, embraces that pacing, letting things unfold with the care of a monthly comic rather than the punchiness of weekly TV. It makes for some very high highs—and a few languorous lows.

The Netflix adaptation of The Sandman has been long anticipated both by early fans of the DC comic and by those who have come to enjoy the many wonderful ...

Soon The Sandman will be added to the list of shows for which they are known and admired. Although Mark Hamill will always be Luke Skywalker and Patton Oswalt has his own resume of guest appearances in nerdy fare across the spectrum, they also both have a rich history of providing their unique voices to animated characters. Boyd Holbrook will play The Corinthian in The Sandman, a nightmare who escapes into the world to become a serial killer. In The Sandman he plays John Dee, who attempts to steal some of Dream’s power, but as Ares in Wonder Woman, he was a god who had plenty of his own. Viewers may also know Thewlis from his role as V. M. Varga in season three of Fargo, or they may have heard his voice in Big Mouth or Human Resources, in which he plays Shame Wizard. Mason Alexander Park is another Broadway heavyweight coming to the small screen, best known for their lead performance in Hedwig and the Angry Inch. You may also remember them from their role as Gren in the short-lived live-action Cowboy Bebop adaptation.

The British actor made his screen acting debut in a 1996 miniseries adaptation of Gulliver's Travels and more recently starred on the Starz drama, Sweetbitter, ...

Look for his name in just about any article related to Batman. Most audiences might remember her best from 1996’s live-action 101 Dalmatians movie, Roland Emmerich’s epic period piece The Patriot, playing Julia McNamara in the Nip/Tuck cast, and the 2020 adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s Color Out of Space, with Nicolas Cage, to name a few. Playing Rose’s friend Lyta Hall, who is also mourning the death of her husband, is Razane Jammal, who last starred on a supernatural, Netflix-exclusive drama called Paranormal in 2020. As Biblical figure and world’s first murderer, Cain — who now loyally resides in the dream realm — we have Sanjeev Bhaskar, whose last time starring in a Neil Gaiman adaptation was on an episode Amazon Prime’s Good Omens in 2019. Sanjeev Bhaskar (Cain) Gwendoline Christie’s fellow former Game of Thrones cast member, Charles Dance, plays Dream’s accidental captor and scheming magician Roderick Burgess, which is far from the English, Emmy-nominated thespian’s first villain role. Kirby Howell-Baptiste (Death) As the ruler of Hell, Lucifer, we have Gwendoline Christie — which seems like an inspired choice considering her great performance as Captain Phasma in the Star Wars movies, although this devil is not inherently evil and even something of a charmer. The versatile performer (he has done everything from irreverent comedies like The Big Lebowski to period epics like Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven) previously worked with Netflix for his reunion with Anomalisa creator Charlie Kaufman on I’m Thinking of Ending Things, as well as the animated comedy, Big Mouth, and its spin-off, Human Resources. Gwendoline Christie (Lucifer) Tom Sturridge (Dream) It almost feels just as surreal as Neil Gaiman’s own seminal writing style to say that Netflix’s series adaptation of his popular comic, The Sandman is finally here after the story spent many, many years waiting for a screen adaptation.

As we watch a raven follow a horse-drawn carriage and then fly off to another, otherworldly realm, Morpheus — aka Dream, aka Lord of The Dreaming, aka King of ...

“I made this world once, Lucienne,” he says as the decrepit, giant doors to The Dreaming draw closed behind them. Elsewhere, The Corinthian — fresh from a kill in which the victim’s eyes have been gouged out — knows exactly what’s happened. One of them is a young London girl named Unity Kincaid; she’ll become important to the story later in the season. We later see that she has a son named Johnny, who’ll also figure into the story in a later episode. When Alex’s wheelchair accidentally rubs away some of the magical markings holding Dream captive, the prisoner is able to make a guard fall asleep, which leads to a series to events that ends with a vortex opening and Dream getting sucked into it. He winds up naked and trapped in a mystical sphere, conjured by a rich man named Roderick Burgess (Game of Thrones’ Charles Dance), who’s attempting to capture Dream’s sibling, Death, instead.

Netflix's 2022 adaptation of The Sandman takes only a few liberties with the ending. But what is next for Dream? And will Lucifer enter new realms with the ...

That’s how Dream met up with the Justice League, and it’s how Will “Shakesbeard” might have something to offer Dream of the Endless. “And we get to do an awful lot of the side stories and interesting byways and diversions along the way.” Though the show has rearranged the storylines a bit to fit into the arc of the season, it seems likely that they could return in season 2 (or beyond). Of course, the root of the word certainly suggests a bit of judgment on the part of the remaining Endless siblings, as opposed to merely an abdication of duty. The answer is slow-played in Sandman season 1; beyond a few mentions, we get little by way of details. With 75 issues in the original run of the series, there’s certainly a lot for The Sandman to get through, should Netflix allow it. But as the comics continued, there was less emphasis on the overall arc of the story and more on the small, almost vignette-like chapters of Dream’s journeys. One of them is to not spill “family blood,” or else bad news will befall you — namely you summon the Furies, who are no joke and will be mad. Lord Azazel pops up to share something on behalf of the “assembled lords of hell.” In episode 10 (or even the full season) we don’t get a sense of what’s so taboo about it. Suffice it to say, there’s a lot of details to keep track of, even if you did read the comics. As Dream learns in the final moments of season 1, Rose Walker’s whole existence is predicated on Desire having impregnated Unity while she was asleep during Dream’s absence.

Here's the ultimate breakdown of The Sandman season 1 finale. What happened to Rose and Jed?! After being saved from Fun Land by The Corinthian, Rose Walker ...

And with Desire and some of the other siblings taking a stand against Dream, things will definitely get harder for Morpheus as he tries to save the lands. Unity tells Rose to pass on her the power of the vortex, which she is able to do. Meanwhile, Dream creates new dreams and nightmares to replace the ones that were lost. Hal says he had a dream of moving back to New York and might join them on the journey back, but he would need to sell the house. Meeting up with the rest of the house members, Rose tells them that they're all planning to move back to New Jersey the next day. Back at Lucienne's library, Unity is seen walking through the stacks and asks to see the book of her life. Dream suddenly appears and tells him that he's disappointed in what he's done, but the Corinthian points out he's only done what he's been made to do. Rose also reveals to Lyta that she has to make a decision before she falls asleep and the only way to protect both worlds is if she sacrifices herself, also killing the vortex in the process. Both the Corinthian and Dream also enter the dream world to convince Rose to join their side. The Corinthian tries to attack Dream with a knife, and the two start fighting. So what exactly happened to Dream and the world of the living? Rose and Jed escape the "cereal convention" and head back home.

The Sandman. Tom Sturridge as Dream in episode 101 of The Sandman. Photo: Netflix. This The Sandman review contains NO SPOILERS and is based on ...

But ultimately, The Sandman belongs to Sturridge, Holbrook, and the showrunner team. In fact, Sturridge’s performance is the place where the difference between the show and the comic is most stark. You see the hurt in his squint of eyes, his uncertainty in the way his shoulders stoop for a moment, his nobility in the way he gathers them back up. Adapting a comic as visually striking and inventive as The Sandman was always going to be complicated. As for capturing the iconic characters, the casting for this show is superlative. The series, adapted for television by Allan Heinberg, David Goyer, and Gaiman himself, follows Dream of the Endless as he is captured by a human warlock and held in captivity for 100 years.

However, for the series, Netflix couldn't use other DC characters, which led them to adapt the villain's origin. So, who is John Dee in Netflix's The Sandman?

Netflix’s The Sandman keeps all the powers of John Dee and his position as Morpheus' first big nemesis. It’s no wonder he becomes one of Morpheus’ greatest enemies, as the King of Dreams' responsibility is to ensure people in the waking world can keep dreaming, so that life can be bearable. Scared about the possibility that Morpheus is coming to take revenge on her and John for stealing his tools, Ethel goes to visit her son in the mental facility. Addicted to the power of the Dreamstone, John steals the tool from his mother and changes its properties so it would only ever respond to his dreams. Instead of picking an existent villain and pitching him against Morpheus ( Tom Sturridge), The Sandman leans over John Dee’s connection to Morpheus's imprisonment. That’s because, in the series, John Dee is the unwanted child of Roderick Burgess, os Magus (Charles Dance), the master of the mystic arts who summoned and trapped Morpheus for over a century.

The enduringly popular comic book series about gods and the afterlife gets the big-bucks, amazing-cast Netflix treatment. And it's good. Very good, in fact.

These two episodes – one set in a diner, one set in the same pub at hundred-year intervals – really show what you can do with one story and one character and one hour of ingenuity, and give the whole series more of an anthology feel than an endless story where someone does hand gestures a lot and magic comes out. I have a potted history with fantasy television: we had a lot of it a couple of years ago, almost all of it bad, because they ignored the two primary rules for fantasy that I have made up and never actually bothered to tell anybody. Boyd Holbrook is having an awful lot of fun playing the Corinthian, a devilish nightmare with teeth instead of eyes. The former is a lot rarer than the latter, sadly, and culturally we are poorer for it. What if a supernatural cabal actually ran the government but started getting nosebleeds and died? So it is with a heavy heart that I must announce that I have watched The Sandman (available now on Netflix), the Netflix x Warner x DC crossover event of the summer.

Morpheus meets (and maybe flirts with?) Joanna Constantine in the third episode of the Netflix adaptation of Neil Gaiman's iconic comic.

• In a fun reference to the source material, one of the security guards’ innards coats the inside of an elevator when John makes his escape. Her hope is that with a different protective amulet on his side, John will see reason and hand the ruby over to Dream. But c’mon, Ethel. You locked your son up for a reason. • Would Dream have let the demon eat the princess in order to get his helm back? Being a magical pain in the arse is dangerous work, and the people who love John often get more of the damage than he himself does. In order to get John on her side, the “let’s not kill Dream, let’s just give the ruby back” side, she gives up her demonic amulet. Also learning that man is not an island and that one’s actions have consequences are John and Ethel Cripps. She is still trying to get John to hand over Dream’s ruby so that she can give it back and seek forgiveness from Morpheus. Ask Alex how that works out, Ethel. Oh, right, you can’t, because he will be trapped in a waking nightmare until he dies. Besides Johanna Constantine, we meet two other recurring characters in the Sandman mythos this ep: Mad Hettie and Matthew the Raven. The former is a centuries-old woman who is too obstinate to die and has knowledge of the occult. Dream and Constantine’s stories intersect and overlap in a way that underscores the episode’s main theme, that you can’t live in a hermetically-sealed bubble. I wonder if she’s still down there and if we’ll meet her when Dream travels to hell in the next episode. Morpheus interrupts Johanna’s exorcism, and she in turn interrupts his attempt to reclaim his helm. And Dream is very much in the same place as Johanna, emotionally: untrusting, hiding their surplus of feelings under a façade of not caring, and going through a trenchcoat era. Johanna’s contact suspects a member of the royal family has been possessed, and what does it say about their current reputation that a possessed princess is honestly an upgrade?

When Gaiman started writing The Sandman series, his comic book story was intertwined with the bigger DC universe, so it was easy to bring many heroes and ...

After helping Dream retrieve his Pouch, Johanna finally gets rid of a recurring nightmare in which she has to witness the loss of life caused by her failures. The second reason for the change is that Johanna Constantine is actually two different people in The Sandman universe. In the series, Dream’s ( Tom Sturridge) fateful encounter with Johanna Constantine also follows the general story of Preludes and Nocturnes, the first volume of Gaiman’s Endless saga. In the comic books, Dream meets Johanna three centuries before crossing paths with her descendent John. So, for the series, The Sandman’s creative team thought it would be more interesting to have the same actress playing both parts. And even if they did, it would be confusing to put classic DC heroes in the middle of the series – there’s a reason why even The Sandman comics became increasingly disconnected from the bigger DC universe. When Gaiman started writing The Sandman series, his comic book story was intertwined with the bigger DC universe, so it was easy to bring many heroes and villains from different comic book series into the pages of The Sandman, such as John Constantine, Mr. Miracle, and even the Martian Manhunter. The same couldn't happen in Netflix’s series because they didn't have the right to use other DC characters.

The Sandman spoilers follow. John Constantine has been knocking around the fictional realm for a while. The occult detective has jumped from DC comic to DC ...

I think that's where the meeting of Constantine and Dream (Tom Sturridge) is so beautiful, because Dream sees straight through to her dreams, where she doesn't open the door to anybody." As mentioned, we've barely scratched the surface with Johanna… Back then we find a Lady Johanna Constantine (John's counterpart) attempting to coerce the King of Dreams into giving her immortality. In The Sandman, this is first hinted at through Johanna's relationship history with ex-girlfriend Rachel (Eleanor Fanyinka). The emotionally stunted Johanna ghosted Rachel by leaving the home they unofficially shared and never coming back. His look was based on Sting, as a way of getting the musician into DC comics (starting with 'Swamp Thing' issue 25). John Constantine has been knocking around the fictional realm for a while. "Because [love] never ends well." She added: "The more vulnerability that she has, the more she has to lock herself up, and armour herself away. She's trading life. During an interview with Digital Spy she said: "No." Point blank – simple. "When we looked at what we were going to do in this whole series, we knew that we were going to have Lady Johanna Constantine meeting Dream in a pub. This latest iteration of the character sees them flip from John to Johanna Constantine in a gender-swap move by Neil Gaiman in the adaptation of his The Sandman.

THE SANDMAN creators have opened up about the decision to cast Jenna Coleman as one of the series' most iconic characters, known in the original comics as ...

The decision to swap out DC Comics’ occult detective John Constantine for his female descendant, Johanna (played by Jenna Coleman) was a divisive move for fans of the original comics. Neil and producer Allan Heinberg have defended their decision to swap out John Constantine for a female version of the character in the first live-action adaptation of The Sandman. THE SANDMAN creators have opened up about the decision to cast Jenna Coleman as one of the series' most iconic characters, known in the original comics as John Constantine.

We sure hope so. The next installment of the source material, 'Season of Mists,' is largely considered Neil Gaiman's finest work on the series.

The 10 episodes of Season One covered just 16 issues of Sandman's original 75-issue-run. Hopefully, now that the important concepts have been established, the creative team can go even nuttier with it. "We’ve got as many [seasons] as they’ll let us have," The Sandman showrunner Allan Heinberg told NME at the show's premiere in London. "If enough viewers show up, we can go for quite a long while.