Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy. Look. Listen. I gave this show it’s fair shake. I went in with as open a mind as I, personally, can possibly have about a Netflix live action adaptation of one of the most important comics to me and, yes, it has had its moments of worth, but… woof. This week’s episode is not it, lads.
I’ll be lucky to scrape together five full thoughts over this 45 minute wet fart of an episode and, well, time’s a-wastin’. Let’s do this thing so I can finally wrap up this season next week (not counting that damned DLC episode), shall we? As always, rampant spoilers below.
1. Fallout Of Dreams
Let’s recap for a moment. Since the turning point episode of ‘The Sound Of Her Wings,’ we’ve largely left the focus of Dream in order to follow Rose Walker, a dream vortex, as she searches for her lost brother, who fell through the cracks in the system after their parents separated and their dad died, who Jed was staying with, died. Jed was being kept locked up by Barnaby and Clarice because, I guess, it’s profitable to game child welfare in Florida and Jed had been escaping into his dreams of being a superhero for relief. That all came crashing down last week when Rose lead Dream into Jed’s pocket dreamscape, which was constructed and being maintained by a runaway nightmare called Gault, and Dream dissolved that dreamscape and undid Gault. Cue Jed being cut off from his dreams just as the Corinthian arrived to kill Barnaby and Clarice and take Jed to the serial killer convention that was being put together the episode before last. Meanwhile, Lyta, Rose’s friend whose storyline has been so mangled as to be not worth explain, has been shagging her husband’s ghost in her dreams and is now pregnant with a child conceived in the Dreaming. Because her entire existence in this show has been reduced to the fact that she needs to get pregnant. Also, Stephen Fry is here.
We all caught up? Good. Because this episode is going to spin its wheels for 45 minutes trying to get everyone in place for the finale in the most lifeless arrangement possible. I’m going to dig into this deeper with each point, but it’s incredible to me how little tension there is in this entire episode. I mean, next week is the finale for chrissake! This should be the peak of the entire season’s drama, this should leave me gasping to get to the next episode so I can see how it all plays out and all these threads come together and I just. Do not. Care. The episode before last set up this arc in such a wonderful way, springboarding off of the stellar one-and-done turning point of ‘The Sound Of Her Wings’ to actually bring some life into this whole affair and after two episodes, all of the air has escaped from it. I feel as deflated as the show does right now and, god, let’s just get through this one.
2. Cereal
How do you make a serial killer convention boring? That’s really what I want to know here. Between the incredibly cringe opening where the Corinthian pulls up and we see a slow mo montage of the attendees arriving set to some godawful country rock song to the absolute dearth of dramatic irony to the entire proceeding, I just have to know how you manage to whiff on this whole thing. This is the thing this entire arc is built around and building up to and it sucks. There is, somehow, no tension to the entire sequence of Jed being brought into a, might I remind you, convention for serial killers. He’s wandering in through the lobby and all of the conversations he overhears snippets of are just normal chat with some kind of death or murder pun thrown in and I find myself with the overwhelming need to reach through my screen and throttle Neil Gaiman.
I once again find myself asking: this is the best version of The Sandman you could put to live action? This is the show you spent thirty years trying to perfect? If this is the best we could muster up, I have to imagine the other scripts that he got sent were either secretly brilliant or unfilmable (or, potentially, both) for this lukewarm oatmeal of a show to be what he’s proud to stamp his name on. There are moments of interest sprinkled through like the guy playing Fun Land is clearly into the character in a fun (heh) way that no one else seems to be, but not enough to distract from the ambient white noise that seems to play whenever a character opens their mouth. Not to mention the fact that the show keeps cutting back to Rose and Stephen Fry having the world’s most boring road trip and splicing in, on top of that, the simply godawful excuse for a plotline they’ve given Hector and Lyta here which had me wanting to tear out my hair. Somehow this is even more insulting than the underwritten, half-baked shite that permeated through the first half of the season because even then I could half convince myself that it might build to something worth watch. This is penultimate episode of the show. There is no excuse for the show to be this underwritten and this devoid of tension or drama or stakes this far in.
Continued below3. Breaking The Dreaming
There’s a part of me that cannot believe how quickly and unsatisfactorily this was resolved, but I guess we gotta wrap this shit up here. So Lyta has had her entire character defined by the fact that she has a dead husband and she was, on and off, seen talking to him in her dreams which, sure, lingering trauma and grief and whatnot; I was buying what they were selling in this arc’s first episode. Last week, Hector surprised Lyta with a CGI McMansion he’d built in her dreams so that they could, apparently, do nothing but bone hard for the rest of eternity and, well… here we are. What little we actually see of Dream in this episode (because, I guess, they forgot who the show’s about after finally giving Tom Sturridge some good material to work with) is built around the fact that the Dreaming is being damaged by Hector’s awful, modern architecture eyesore and, because he’s having a big sulk over undoing Gault last episode, his frustrations about how no one respects him as the Lord of the Dreaming anymore because the denizens got used to Lucienne was in charge while he was being he held captive.
These two aspects collide when Dream is inadvertently brought to Hector and Lyta’s dreamscape by Rose and he just… he just ends the entire plotline. He reduces Hector to atoms, he dissolves the dreamscape and that’s… well, that’s that. Because, again, the only reason any of this was included was because Lyta had to get pregnant and it had to be in the Dreaming because the child, Daniel, will be important in… the show’s seventh season. God, it’s so funny to me that they thought they’d ever get to ‘The Kindly Ones’ with shit like this. Anyway, yeah, Hector’s dead. Lyta’s fulfilled her entire role in the story so she’ll probably give birth to Daniel next week and Dream will tell her that he’ll be back for the kid at some point and… yeah. What the hell else do you want from me? The show clearly doesn’t care about giving any of this depth or meaning so why should I bother trying to read any into it? This show reads like they got to the outline stage of each episode and realised filming starts tomorrow. I can’t with this.
4. Chaste
I was almost, almost, beginning to have a bit of fun when the convention got under way and the stuff with the Chaste editor started going down because I remembered that the comic ends this with him being driven out into the woods and strung up in a tree while three serial killers, including the Corinthian, make a mockery of him, but this show had to go and be all this show about it and ruin anything good it could possibly glean from the comic. I swear to god, I feel like I’m writing in circles and saying nothing here, but guess what? That’s exactly what watching this show feels like. There’s an extended sequence where Stephen Fry makes it into the convention and he’s wandering down the hall and poking his head into different panels and it’s a bunch of serial killers talking shop and each time he hears someone say something along the lines of “And I am a serial killer and this is how I make my work/life balance work for me,” he just gurns at the camera and moves onto the next room until finally, excruciatingly finally he makes it to the last room and something finally clicks.
I don’t know if this was intended to be funny, if there was supposed to be any tension here at all, but the idea of going into this season finale with our main human characters being trapped in a convention for serial killers and somehow managing to bleed that dry of any stakes or tension feels like televisual crime. I feel like I’ve been robbed by this show, not because I have had such a personal connection to the comic its based on for the past 14 years, but because I’ve somehow managed to lose an hour a week for the past nine weeks to this godawful mess and this is what I thinks passes for drama. I’m about to take up serial killing and everyone involved in this show is making the list.
Continued below5. State Of This Show
Well, there you have it, folks, I have officially run out of stuff to talk about in this episode. I guess I could mention that the Chaste editor’s death is one of the most embarassing excuses for violent horror I’ve ever seen with my own two eyes. I guess I could say that the episode ending with Fun Land chasing Rose and Jed through the hotel hallways feels like if a mid10s Nostaglia Critic-esque YouTube collab had tried to go a Goosebumps riff while at a con. I guess it’s fun that Merv showed up for all of thirty seconds so I could have the sudden dopamine burst of going “Oh, hey! It’s Merv!” and enjoying that so much I forget that I’m watching this stupid, godawful show. I think what I’ll say instead is: I cannot tell you how glad I am that this season is wrapping up next week. Yes, I’ll do the stupid DLC episode, but this arc will be over in one week’s time and I’ll never have to think about that time they tried to make a Sandman show ever again.
Because, let’s face it, this is not getting a second season. It managed to slip in just in time before the indie-comic-to-Netflix-show bubble truly burst, but the amount of money they put into this for this to be the show they got out of it? I don’t care how many hashtags people get trending, I don’t care how many people clamour over a potential second season, this is it. And it will be a footnote in this trend by the end of the year. In another fourteen years’ time, I’ll still hold dear every memory I have of reading this comic in high school and I’ll still have a full tattoo sleeve of the seven Endless. I will not remember a single frame of this show. And I’ll be happier for it.
