Welcome, welcome, welcome, one and all, to our continuing coverage of Netflix’s The Sandman. Last week saw Dream and Matthew venture into Hell to challenge Lucifer for Dream’s helm while John Dee hitched a ride with Rosemary to be reunited with his ruby. This week, we’re tackling an episode adapting one of the most infamously controversial and dark stories to be published by a major comic book company, and one that also happens to be a personal favourite of mine. With the series’s rocky start hopefully out of the way, can this episode do justice to ’24/7?’
Well, there’s only one way to find out. As always, spoilers abound below.
1. A Man Walks Into A Diner
This is David Thewlis’s show, everyone else is just living in it. Coming off of his episode-stealing turn last week, one that completely overshadowed all of the Hell stuff, this week’s episode finally turns the spotlight on Thewlis’s John Dee and is all the better for it. From the jump, there is that quiet, creeping dread that, for the uninitiated, must have been excruciating, but as someone who knows what’s coming, the way the show plays Dee like a predator watching in the grass was intoxicating. He starts off just to the side, sitting in his corner, but with a view of the entire diner and its patrons. And he watches. And he waits. We sit with him and watch, almost through his eyes, as this cast of characters assembles themselves before him and he starts to glimpse into their lives, their wants and their dreams.
There’s an unsettling sense of voyeurism to the camera as it lingers on these people and their sad, constructed lives that play out before John. He almost takes a back seat to the episode once he’s settled down in order to let the rest of the patrons shine. The waitress, Bette, so desperate to be liked just to have a modicum of control over her life. The lesbian, Judy, who can’t stop pushing away the one person who cares about her. The couple, Kate and Garry, who quietly resent each other behind the artifice of their pleasantries. The Big Pharma interviewee, Mark, who hopes a six figure paycheck’ll fill the emptiness in his heart. This cast comes in fits and spurts and, before their know it, they’re trapped in John’s web. It’s a perfect use of television’s capability to live in the scene for far longer than a comic, generally, can and so constructs these characters in a far more fleshed out and lived in way than the archetypal sadsacks of the issue this is based on. By stripping away the use of narration that was used to dive in and out of their respective heads, the episode has to rely on the actors to give a sense of what’s going on internally through what they say and what they don’t say and how they act and everyone pulls it off remarkably. After the previous four episodes feeling like stilted cutscenes from a bad “The Sandman” video game, this finally feels like the show I was promised it would be.
2. The First Act
Once the cast is assembled before John, we start to see the net tighten around them as he goes from passive viewer to active manipulator. In the comic, John is far more megalomaniacal than we see here. He almost immediately finds himself in a position to play God with these people and jumps at the chance to rule them and debase them and have them worship him in a way that the world outside, which only ever shunned and feared him, refused to do. Smartly, the show lets Thewlis play on a far lower key than that. He’s interested simply in stripping these people of the lies that they have built up to surround themselves with. The first active use of the ruby in the entire episode is of John using it to see through Bette’s artifice. She calls him handsome and he balks at that. He wants to know the truth behind the lie. He wants to her to admit how pathetic she is, that she uses base flattery and her purported matchmaking skills in order to exert some modicum of control over the world around her. He sees right through the smile and the compliment to the scared woman who’s not ready to accept her lot in life.
Continued belowAnd, from there, it all begins to crumble so fast. Garry, trapped in a loveless relationship with Kate, who continually controls his eating habits, defiantly scarfs down a heart stopping burger. The annoying lesbian and the boring job interviewee get into a spat when uncomfortable truths bubble past their lips. Bette and Marsh, the cook she’s been shagging, can’t even look at each other. It does become, I’ll admit, a little too on the nose when Judy, the annoying lesbian, tries to leave and John stops her; a little too spelled out for the audience when that creeping, quiet dread could have been played out a little longer. However, what does work for me here, is that we then see John come out of his corner for the first time in the episode. He moves from simple observer to active participant in this gruesome play. He starts to pry into the cracks he’s observed and it’s just so intoxicating to watch him peer into and then pry apart these broken, sad people. I knew there was no real way the show could lean on the debasement as horror angle that defined the issue and it instead leaning on how dreadfully creepy it is for John to be doing this in the first place and how horrific the build up is, is simply perfect.
3. The Turn Of The Wheel
I’ve been hard on this show thus far, and fairly, I reckon, but this is finally the show as it should be. We start to see the recursion begin, the pseudo-Groundhog Day cycle as Kate and Garry try to leave only to turn back and have it all play out again. Not quite verbatim, but with the stressors piling on each time. It’s circular, but not a perfect circle. It’s closing in on itself with each passing moment as the tensions begin to spike. This is the first time I’ve felt the show has felt as mature as the themes and material that they’re handling. As things start to break and that true feeling of entrapment begins to set in, as Kate pulls Mark into her game and Marsh admits his infidelity with Bette’s son, we feel, as the audience, just as much at the whims of John’s prying eyes as these characters do.
The lighting grows ever darker as time passes and, as the world outside grows more and more distant, we see sharper highlights pop in from neon lighting and the grill burners. The psychosexual underpinnings are laid bare as these horrific shells of what used to be people find comfort in one another in wildly differing orientations. Everyone needs to find someone in whose arms they feel whole and everyone arrived broken and alone in some way and has found something of what their looking for in someone else who was in the diner and it’s here that John finally reappears after having disappeared for most of the middle of the episode, just to observe all the animalistic rutting these scared, broken people are engaging in against the closing of their world and I have to commend the show for actually nailing this.
There was, I would say, a rather juvenile quality to the show’s prior episodes. None handled material half as mature or complex as what’s on show here, but in order to feel cohesive with this massive shift in tone, we had what felt like shoehorned in swearing and violence that felt like it was taking this epic in scope, wide fantasy horror and was paring it down for the young adult crowd that still watch Netflix shows. Here, though, the production feels just as mature as the material it’s handling. Thewlis leads this cast of one-off characters that are more well rounded and fleshed out than anyone we’ve seen in the show so far and the use of a single, real world location makes the set design and dressing feel far more tactile and practical than anything so far. This is a hard issue to adapt and, if there was any issue of “The Sandman” I would have guessed would suffer in being adapted to TV, it would be this one, but this is a triumph amidst a sea of thus far mediocre and half baked efforts.
Continued below4. The Truth Is A Cleansing Fire
And now that our poor souls have felt the comfort of each others’s arms, the walls come crashing down. Truths are laid bare. The animalistic rutting becomes animalistic posturing as the slow descent in madness picks up the pace and we fall faster and faster. It’s here that the full scope of just what John has done to these people is laid bare, the full horror of the situation is shown to the people wrapped up in it. We see Judy finally admit to herself how much she has pushed the people in her life away. We see Mark stab Garry in throat after Garry kicks off over seeing Mark with Kate. Bette burns her novel. Mark drives a nail through his hand just because Kate told him too. Marsh cleaves his fingers from his hand. And John, at the heart of it all, is revelling in this self-inflicted torture. He see in them their want to suffer and he obliges them. The truth, at the heart of it all, when all else is stripped away, is that these people want the pain. They wrap themselves in lies to shield themselves from the truth and the truth is pain.
This is the show as it should have been from the start. Embracing the material of the comic and bringing it to a new level by the merits of the strength of television. By having actors, by having real people, embody these characters and by the virtue of us, the audience, being confined to this diner with them, we become a part of the torture. We are complicit in our voyeurism. We wanted to see just as much as John did and now he has them wrapped around his fingers, he can make them do whatever horrific thing he finds the most fitting. It’s gruesome and unpleasant in a way that few stories dare to embrace and stands in stark contrast to the flat, empty effort presented in the prior episodes. There’s an energy here that’s hard not to get wrapped up in, all lead by Thewlis, and it makes me wish for a show in which this level of care and dedication was on display in every hour instead of just in this one.
That is, until Dream reappears and the episode completely falls off the rails.
5. Empty Dreams
By the virtue of this episode needing to wrap up the first half of this season, we get a curtailed version of issue #6, ‘Sound And Fury,’ tacked on to the end of ’24/7.’ Dream finally reappears just as everything boils over and just rips the life out of the proceeding. It’s a bold move to have Dream show up to counter John’s thesis that these pathetic people are lying to themselves and everyone around them because they can’t face the base, animalistic truth of their unhappiness by telling John that, actually, no, there is purity in suffering through meagre lives because your dreams of something better keep you alive. Is that not the same torture that Dream told us the demons go through last episode? What power has Hell if those who linger there cannot dream of heaven? Well, what power has this empty, meagre, middle of the road existence if those who linger there cannot dream of success? It’s an empty platitude at best and, at worst, makes Dream out to be the villain John has cast him as. He would shackle these people to misery for the sake of their empty dreams because… hope. Because Neil Gaiman writes fairy stories and wants to claim that there is virtue in adults escaping into fantasy to avoid the hardships of reality.
It’s not just that the show’s attempts to bring Dream in to counter John’s outlook fall flat, but the entire episode just deflates as soon as he walks on screen. Thewlis was such a quietly commanding presence that Sturridge can scarcely compare with his flat drawl, his attempt at this detached affectation. It all culminates in a horrific recreation of one of the most iconic pages of the entire comic run as a gargantuan Dream, at the pinnacle of his return to power, holds a minuscule John Dee in the palm of his hand. This would-be tyrant is nothing more than a speck to Dream and it undercuts everything he wanted by showing how little that would have even granted him, in the full scope of things. Here, it’s an embarrassing wrap-up to an otherwise stunning episode that seeks to quickly and quietly wrap up John Dee’s storyline so the show can move on to other things.
You have no idea how much I wanted this episode to be as good as it was all the way through. You have no idea how much I wanted to eat crow and for the show to turn around and actually be good, but by the time the episode ended without giving John so much as a second thought and instead bringing in Desire to be this empty stinger for the season’s second half, I was just fed up. I don’t know what this show wants to be. I don’t know who this show was for. Maybe this is my torture, my truth laid bare. That I can never return to what I found in these stories at fourteen, that it really is folly to try to find escapism from reality within fantasy. That I have to keep doing this every week and it’s not getting any better. This glimpse at greatness was just enough to keep me from completely giving only for it to be snatched away in the final moments. Well. I guess I’ll see you all back here next week. Let’s hope the show doesn’t completely ruin Death.
