The Sandman Dream A Little Dream Of Me Television 

Five Thoughts On The Sandman‘s “Dream A Little Dream Of Me”

By | August 19th, 2022
Posted in Television | % Comments

Mr Sandman, bring me a good episode of your television show. Make it worth watching for about an hour. Give it the attention it needs to be both a good hour of standalone television and an interesting adaptation of the comic book issue it’s using as its inspiration. That’s not too much of an ask, is it? After two episodes establishing the world of The Sandman and introducing both Dream and Dream’s quest to regain his stolen vestments, the show finally puts boots on the ground to get this story moving along as Dream goes on the hunt for pouch of sand and runs into a couple of familiar faces along the way.

Let’s hope I enjoy this one a bit more than the opening two episodes, eh? Well, without further ado, let’s dive into The Sandman‘s “Dream A Little Dream Of Me.” Oh, as always, spoilers are abound below.

1. J Constantine

We’re never going to get a truly great live action evocation of John Constantine. Now, I know, there were some rights shenanigans that prevented this show from actually using the John Constantine of the comics and I really was going to try and compartmentalise how much that disappoints me and instead focus on the show’s presentation of Jenna Coleman’s Johanna Constantine in and of itself. The trouble with that is that, right off the bat, the show saddles Johanna with her own half-baked iteration of the Newcastle Incident that involved the damnation of Astra Logue. It’s, I’ll admit, a little hard to compartmentalise my disappointment that the show couldn’t just use John Constantine when the first minutes of this episode is ripping content from “Hellblazer” just to make Coleman’s Johanna Constantine seem legit. I don’t really know what I was expecting from here, honestly, but it’s a bit strange to see the show lean so heavily on material introduced and expanded upon in another comic entirely instead of using John’s introduction in “The Sandman” itself to explore who Johanna is in her day to day life.

Because the problem with hanging Johanna’s character on the brief flashback we get to Astra’s damnation is that the scope of her character within this show could not possibly do justice to that material. In “Hellblazer,” Astra being sent to Hell is entirely John’s fault and it’s a guilt and a trauma that hangs over him for the rest of his days. It breaks him. Hell, even that NBC Constantine show I reviewed a few (eight?!) years back understood that Astra can be played as the defining trauma hanging over the self-destructive narcissism that plagues who John is. John is a character constantly careening towards the brickwall of ultimate self-destruction with just enough presence of mind to keep going whenever he crashes through. Here, Johanna is… kind of just Jenna Coleman? She’s a it rough and tumble, sure, and, as we’ll see, is not one to appease authority, but none of that grit or depth or even charm is really captured in either the writing or the performance. It’s like they had a giant, John Constantine shaped hole in the episode and managed to fill it with Clara Oswald instead.

2. Can’t Keep God Waiting

Which brings us to the big setpiece of the episode’s first half: a very tame exorcism. Now, I’ll admit, I liked the effect of the demon emerging from the poor fitbaw player’s mouth and I would have appreciated the bait and switch of him being the possessed as opposed to the princess if it hadn’t been signposted from miles off thanks to the dreadful banter between JC and Meera Syal (who’s a fucking darling of British TV and given absolutely nothing to do)’s Reverend, but the overall construction here is a tame as anything. I still stand by my point that this episode would have gotten off to a far better start if it had leaned on John’s introduction in “The Sandman” issue this episode is basing itself on where we briefly get to see a day in the life of John Constantine. We see him wake up and immediately start smoking himself to an early grave. We hear his internal conversations with his projected personification of the rainy, downtrodden London in which he lives and we get to see him frequent his local café for some grub before Mad Hetty and then Dream crash into his life. With Johanna, all we get to see is her in action and, frankly, it’s not exactly pulse pounding.

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I don’t know if the goal was to play this exorcism like a run of the mill job for Johanna and what I took to be disaffected boredom was actually an attempt at confident aloofness, but, either way, I was ready to fast forward through this. Coleman’s Constantine spends more time throwing out dreadful lines about the royals as if to invoke some kind of conspiracy about their involvement with the worlds of demons and dreaming than she does actually instigating the exorcism and, when she does, it goes off without a hitch. Once revealed, the demon poses no threat to Johanna or her surroundings. He just kind of stands about and has a wee chat with Morpheus once he finally arrives because the demon knows who’s got Dream’s hat.

Then Johanna just dispenses with him against the commands of Dream, as if that bloody means anything. They just have Tom Sturridge stand there and give a big “No!” as if we, the audience, expect anybody to bloody to listen to him. They play it like it’s some big affront to the cosmological order of things for Johanna Constantine to disregard a command from Dream of the Bloody Endless and not only do we have no real context for what that’s supposed to mean within the fabric of the show, but it makes Dream feel so anemic in all of his scenes here. There was a wit and a personality to the back and forths between Dream and John Constantine in the comic where JC confronts of the overt, stuffy formality of the Prince Of Stories and sees it as a hollow disconnect from the dreamers as individuals with interiorities to be respected and cared for. Here, there’s nothing. No charm, no play, nothing. And when it does come down for Johanna to dress down Dream’s lack of care for the dreamers, well, we’ll get to that in a second.

3. Meanwhile, Back At (Not) Arkham

Weirdly, the thing I enjoyed the most about this episode is the scenes that were not only entirely new material, but also built on some of the stuff I was genuinely really down on the past two episodes. The rearranging of Ethel Cripps’s story in the first episode only baffled me and then her whole dealing with the Corinthian as a lead-in to introducing her son, John, last week felt like a particularly lazy way of tying up a series of loose ends caused by ripping this story out of its moorings in the DC Universe. Yet, in stark contrast with the stuff going on between Dream and Constantine elsewhere in this episode, this continual cutting back to Ethel and John just talking in John’s hospital room was riveting. Maybe it’s because David Thewlis is the only actor in this entire ensemble to really care about the material he’s been given and is putting in the effort to elevate with his skills as a performance and, as an extension, Joely Richardson is there matching him beat for beat or maybe it’s because this is the only scene in the show far to have two characters talk about their thoughts and feelings.

We delve deep into John’s childhood here and the strange, liminal experience he’s had in life thanks to his mother’s machinations. Thewlis does a fantastic job of not characterising John as your generic evil psychopath nor as a sympathetic victim of his mother’s callous actions, but somewhere more nebulously between the two. You can see in him the scared little boy and also all of the pain and the hurt that has been layered on top over the years to create this compelling motivation for the kind of man who will enact the events of ’24/7′ in a couple of episodes and that is what I wanted from this show. To be able to see the moments in between the big beats of the comics that make us understand the human emotions and motivations at play underneath the surface. By getting into the nitty gritty of John and Ethel’s relationship and their mangled history that is so unlike anything any other person is able to experience and how it’s left them with one foot in the real world and another in a world so vast and out of their control that all they can really do is hunker down and disappear into pseudonyms and moving around for their own protection, we see a human cost to what being involved in these stories entails.

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It’s pitch perfect throughout the episode and culminates in a gruesome escape sequence that towers head and shoulders over the stuff with Johanna and Rachel that we’ll be talking about in a second. It’s a highlight of the episode that actually made me believe for a moment that the show could make up for all of the material they had to discard in ripping out the DC Universe foundations of the story by coming up with stuff that’s just as good if not better to fill the gaps and smooth everything over. Then the Corinthian appeared just to piss me off. I mean, Christ, lads, is Holbrook being paid by the hour? This is the exact kind of shit I complained about last week! And the week before that! You can have these complex, interesting characters act upon their own agency to cause and perpetuate the chaos that resulted from Dream’s imprisonment without having them be poked and prodded into place by this increasingly annoying presence in the show. I was so ready to finally give this show a wholly positive stamp on something it did, but it just had to slip up right at the end.

4. On Ravens

I don’t think I managed to mention her in the first episode, but I really did like the show’s inclusion of Jessamy the raven. Jessamy only ever appeared in one issue of “The Sandman” (coincidentally, the same issue that introduced the comic’s Johanna Constantine) and had all of two lines of dialogue. She was a cute reference to the idea that even in 18th Century France, Dream still had the trappings of who he is now with subtle differences. She never really came up again, though, so it through me for a loop that the show would make such a big deal of her and give her such a tragic death in the first episode. Looking back on it from here, I can see how it was another element the show added that was stripped away from Dream during his imprisonment not to mention addressing the very silly question that if Dream always has a raven, why didn’t he use one to get out? Either way, it goes some way to lend weight to Matthew’s introduction in this episode, an introduction far earlier in the story than he was introduced in the comics.

I was not expecting to, but I do like Patton Oswalt as Matthew. There’s a certain charm to the performance that captures the strange disconnect of being a human consciousness in the brain and the body of a raven. Because, let’s face it, it’s a pretty messed up thing to do to a guy, even a dead one, and it puts Matthew out of sorts a bit. For most of the comics, Matthew is something of a voice of sanity and reason when Dream is out about because, in his own way, he’s the most disconnected to this world of dreams and demons despite being so firmly entrenched in it. There’s something of a mirror between Matthew and John that could be worth exploring for the show. The real charm of Dream as a character is that he makes his profession his entire being. He is not only conceptually the King of Dreams and the Prince of Stories, but has the duties the regality that that position entails. He uses staunch, unwavering formality to hide the inner turmoil he has at wanting to be able to enjoy his existence despite it always ending in tragedy. Matthew is one of the keys of keeping Dream right when around humans, of cutting through that formality and right to the empathetic and deeply emotional being underneath. It’s done really well here and I really do want to see the kind of rapport Dream and Matthew can build as the show continues.

5. What’s The Point Of You?

“The Sandman” may not have continued in the same vein as it went on, but it started as a horror comic. Its first arc of seven issues, in particular, being what this half of the season is primarily based on, is almost all horror with an underpinning of mythical fantacism to tie it all together. It’s such a shame, then, that so much of that horror has been leeched out of the show. When Dream and John Constantine finally make it to Rachel Moody’s house, it’s a harrowing experience. We get to see through the relatively normal eyes of Constantine as he follows in Dream’s wake upon entering the house and, through that perspective, we get to see how uncannily unphased Dream is by what takes place. Walls of flesh and pus melting all around them. Dead bodies and a liminality that means walking out of one room and into a whole other dream. It’s a series of barriers meant to keep them out, keep them away from the pouch because the sand likes where it is. It’s needed. It’s being used. It doesn’t want to go back. So it’ll keep them out anyway it can.

The show’s way of interpreting this is to have a scene of Johanna going to Rachel’s flat and… seeing Rachel. She’s perfectly normal, if ticked off at Johanna for, well, being Johanna. There’s a terse apology before they start making out and then, prompted by Matthew, Dream shows up to simply wake Johanna up. They go into the bedroom and there’s Rachel. No bedsores. No flaking, brittle nails. None of the horrific descriptions that Gaiman himself peppered throughout the issue’s narration to truly drive home how awful an experience this has been to Rachel’s mind and body. It’s that that sells John’s distressed yell that Dream can’t leave her like this. That this is his fault, in one way or another, and that he has to put it right. Almost like…

Instead, the show present Johanna with this awful monologue before wrapping everything up in a nice, hollow bow. Rachel’s happy ending of slipping into a pleasant dream where she’s reunited with Johanna doesn’t have any of the horrific existence she was trapped in before to play off of and so comes across as empty and saccharine. And Johanna wandering off into the rain has none of the relief of finally being able to be rid of the dreams of Newcastle because she doesn’t wear any of the trauma and self-destruction caused by it. It’s yet more adaptation by numbers with none of the feeling and I am getting so, so tired of it.


//TAGS | The Sandman

august (in the wake of) dawn

sworn to protect a world that hates and fears her, august has been writing critically about media for close to a decade. a critic and a poet who's first love is the superhero comic, she is also a podcaster, screamlord and wyrdsmith. ask her about the unproduced superman screenplays circa 1992 to 2007. she/they.

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