Here we are again. Despite the first season officially ending with last week’s episode, I still somehow have an hour of The Sandman to trawl through in order to find something to talk about. Given that this is a bonus episode smushing together two of the more interesting single issue stories of the comic, I’m hoping that won’t be too hard, but I’m hoping also that they haven’t been too pared down by the Netflix filter. Either way, this, my friends, is it. This is the last episode of The Sandman I’ll be covering here, whether it comes back for a second season or not.
So, let’s dive into this one, shall we? This is The Sandman‘s last episode, for now, “Dream Of A Thousand Cats/Calliope” in Five Thoughts. As always, spoilers below.
Dream Of A Thousand Cats
1. A Dream Unlike The Others
In the interest of transparency, I feel I have to mention that I fully went into this with the intention of doing a full Ten Thoughts write up, splitting them in half between the two stories. I wasn’t sure exactly what the timing of the episode split would be, but figured it would have to be roughly 50/50. Turns out, ‘Dream Of A Thousand Cats’ is something of a prologue to this whole affair, which, strangely, helps it to be one of the more enjoyable stories in the entire show. I know I shit on the season a lot and I came away from last week’s finale entirely deflated, but this? This is what The Sandman should have been from the start. I don’t expect them to have animated the entire thing, but this animation does so much work in making this story palatable. The parable of it all comes to the fore thanks to not just solid technical animation, but a strong sense of visual and artistic direction that was found nowhere throughout the main body of the season.
Someone, somewhere gave a shit about this story. That’s the primary feeling I get from this short. Whether it was Neil Gaiman finally hitting on the show this should have always been or it was director Hisko Hulsing delivering something that no one else working on the show could, something clicked here. The animation on each of the cats is so measured and considered, giving each of them an authentic character built out of movement and blocking that adheres to the movements and natures of real cats. There’s so few moments of fudging the animation to anthropomorphise the cats in anyway because it’s so important for the story that the audience buys into the secret inner lives of these everyday cats. There’s no way this could have been done any other way and it’s kind of a miracle it came out of The Sandman at all.
2. A Dream Shared
‘Dream Of A Thousand Cats’ is a parable. It’s a story of the unfairness of life, of the tragedy that comes with your choices being outside of your control. As domesticated animals, cats have control over only their interior lives, not their exterior circumstances and at the heart of this story is pain. The pain of one particularly cat. Sandra Oh does a fantastic job of voicing the Prophetess and bringing a measured sense of both pain and pride in the telling of her story. She is unearthing the deepest wound she ever received, night after night, to groups of strangers that will see her as little more than an oddity passing through. All for the hope that one more dreamer will be listen to her story, will hear her words, will know her pain, and will dream. Dream of a better world for every one of them.
I don’t want to be the “This story about cats is actually about capitalism” guy right now because, honestly, I’d rather talk about that for the rest of my word count than bothering with ‘Calliope,’ but the thing is that it is. This story is about us. Our lives. Our pain. The unfairness and tragedies of our lives. Just… through the lens of cats. When was the last time you really made a decision? I don’t mean about what you had for breakfast, but about life. Did you ever choose where you wanted to live for the rest of your life? Who you wanted to spend that life with? What you wanted to spend that life doing? Most people don’t. They make fragmentary choices within a system that pushes them forward, ever forward, to produce. Consume and produce. We are all the cats, looking up at the faceless humans deciding our fates. We are all the cats, dreaming of a better world without them. All it takes is enough of us.
Continued belowCalliope
3. The Perils Of Inspiration
It’s incredible how immediately this story felt different to the main body of The Sandman. I don’t know what happened with that season, but they’ve managed to fire out a true banger in between some of the worst episodes of television I’ve ever had to sit through. ‘Calliope’ is a tough story to tell. Much like ‘Dream Of A Thousand Cats,’ it’s about the push and pull of an interior life lived free when exterior circumstances are outwith our control. Arthur Darvill is pitch perfect here as a writer who is on the brink of losing everything and is ready to give himself over to the darkest desires in his heart just for a fleeting glimpse at success. It’s insane to watch an episode of The Sandman with solid directing after a season of bland gruel. The difference that any amount of dramatic tension makes to a story after a series of half baked Goosebumps rejects is palpable from the offset, all centred around Darvill’s twitchy and evasive rendition of Madoc as a man hiding his true self from everyone around him.
There’s a moment, after Madoc goes to see Erasmus Fry and procures himself a muse, when he’s sitting ready for the ideas to come. He’s staring at a blank page and waiting. Waiting for the inspiration that he has purchased in the form of a woman to come flooding in and it just won’t. And so he googles himself. He peruses his own subreddit, his tags on Twitter and Instagram, perhaps a reliving of the glory days surrounding his first novel’s release. There’s something that makes you want to sympathise with him. In amongst his search history of social medias sites is almost exclusively porn. When he gives up on starting the novel, he sits on the couch idly flicking through a dating app on his phone, barely looking at the screen. There is no pretence that Richard Madoc is a good man. He just bought a woman, after all. But what’s interesting is the layer upon layer of acceptability he’s plastered over the festering, awful desperation at his centre. This is an interesting character written well and played by someone who gives a shit. Shame the rest of the show couldn’t be so inspired.
4. Courting A Muse
Like I said, ‘Calliope’ is a tough story. While “The Sandman” dropped its early attempts at outright horror rather quickly and moved to a softer, almost uncanny sense of fantastic dread and mystery, this is one of the more affecting tales in the run. Far more so, I think, than the exploitation schlock (which I’m not averse to, mind you) of ’24/7′ or the comedy of expectation of the serial killer convention in ‘The Doll’s House,’ ‘Calliope’ is an exploration of pain. Melissanthi Mahut is, again, pitch perfect here. So many of the actors, especially in the main body of the season, felt emotionally and intellectually disengaged from the material that the more fantastic characters fell flat. I’m thinking of the phoned in performances for Cain and Abel, Chronozon, and, honestly, The Corinthian. That’s not the case here. Mahut embodies this role fully, committing to the conjured life of Calliope with an earnestness that’s actually refreshing coming off the tail end of that season. Compare and contrast the vitality and presence Calliope has throughout this one episode with the half assed pretention at a backstory given to Lyta Hall.
What works here is also the care given to the deciding moment that this entire story hangs upon, when Madoc finally gives in to his base desperation and rapes Calliope. What I’m glad to see is that the episode does not shy away from the gravity of the moment when the decision is made and also that it does not use the act gratuitously to drive him the aversion felt in that moment. It’s a shot held on Madoc’s empty, blank page. The cursor ticks and ticks and ticks as the camera pushes in and the screen goes out of a focus. A knock on the door. He calls her name. Black. And then next we see of him, he is typing like a man possessed. A scratch on his face. He’s so proud of himself. That he wrested this perfect, pure idea from the fountainhead of inspiration. We know the implication. We know what was always going to happen to her. The same thing she has been suffering for decades. There was no need to show it, but the way the episode hangs upon Richard‘s decision to continue that suffering is a moment of genuine revulsion I was not expecting this show to nail. This is what this show should have always been, this is the care it should have always had.
Continued below5. A Voice Ensnared
It’s incredible to me not just the fact that this show managed to handle material like this not only with a certain measure of grace (I will not be discussing the Rowling mention) or with a level of competency rarely shown, but also that the episode didn’t fall apart as soon as Morpheus appeared. This is the most engaging Sturridge has been in the role and certainly the most the show has been able to convey the totality of his power. The pain and rage, barely held together, behind his eyes is captivating in a way that nothing in the early parts of the show was. His own personal pain felt so distant, but this pain he feels over someone he cares about, someone he loves, is so present in his person and in his actions. This is who Morpheus is. This is how he moves through these stories. Only the first arc is truly about him, while the rest of the stories use him as an anchor point, evoking a wilder and more mythic life than even what we see on the page.
Morpheus brings the catharsis sorely needed in this tale. While Calliope does forgive Madoc – the man, not the action, as she puts it – it’s Morpheus who evokes a punishment in order to push him to free her. It’s harrowing, but not undeserved. Horrific, but you don’t sympathise with his suffering. When, in the last, he finally admits he has no idea, it slams like a shockwave over him and yet we leave him. His life after this does not matter. He goes back to being just a man, who almost had everything, but who only got it by meddling in the life of another. It’s really good stuff and I feel no small amount of irony that this stupid bloody DLC episode managed to put together probably the best stories this show managed to tell. Not that I’m turned around on not wanting a second season, but if this show had been more like this from the start? Now, that would be a different story.
