Well, here we are again. I came away from last week’s premiere (I know Netflix dropped this whole season at once, but I only have so much time in the day) of The Sandman more than non-plussed about the whole affair. While it was certainly a serviceable introduction for the masses to the world of The Dreaming and its ruler, there was a certain spark of life or charm of storytelling or whatever you might want to call it missing in the translation from comic to television. What we were left with was some fantastic actors inhabiting hollow characters being pushed around the stage by the whims of the storytelling. I wish I could say that in this, the show’s second episode, things were different, but, if anything, that problem has only worsened.
So, let’s dive into Netflix’s The Sandman‘s sophomore effort, “Imperfect Hosts,” in Five Thoughts. As always, there are rampant spoilers down below. You have been warned!
1. The Weirdness Has Been Getting Worse
We open, rather unsurprisingly, right where we left off last week. Dream has returned to his realm of the Dreaming and been reunited with his faithful servant Lucienne and here were see them enter the castle of the Dreaming, particularly Dream’s throne room, and ruminate on the destruction and disarray caused by Dream’s imprisonment. What works for me here is the glimpse we see into the relationship between Dream and Lucienne. Lucien, in the comics, was as much a shoulder for Dream to lean on as much as he was a word in Dream’s ear. Whenever Dream struggled under the weight of his position and duties, Lucien was there serve and offer what advice he could. Vivienne Acheampong’s Lucienne (I only just saw what the did there) wonderfully plays off of Tom Sturridge’s morose and desperate Dream, providing an anchor when things feel at their most hopeless. She’s even the one to push for Dream to lean on his family in this time of crisis to which his stubbornness to keep his affairs to himself prevents. It’s a lovely little scene, especially to see the hurt Dream is harbouring in his heart that he felt at his family’s seeming abandonment of him during his imprisonment. It’s just a glimpse, one I’d love to see more of as the series develops, that brings an undercurrent of understandable emotion to the ineffable presence of the Dream Lord.
However, what doesn’t work for me here, and this becomes a problem throughout this episode, is the need to rearrange events into a causal system of need. Let me explain: Dream needs his stuff back, right? So, in the comic, he needs to talk to the Hecatae to get it back. In order to summon the Hecatae, he needs even a meagre amount of his power returned to him. In order to get that power back, he needs something which he has created that is still intact so that he may reabsorb it. Which is where Cain and Abel comes in. Therefore, the episode presents this sequence of events as Dream having the realization in the castle that he must summon the Fates and then has him walk the audience through this causality of needs to explain why he is going to see Cain and Abel. The problem with this is that it’s more of that same storytelling hand-holding present last week. Instead of allowing the audience to follow in the wake of Dream as he returns to his world in an incredibly weakened state and watching him go through the steps needed to restore his power, we’re simply told that he’s weak and that these are things he needs to do in order to be strong again and then we see him do exactly that.
In the comic, Dream wanders through the infinite mass of nightmares and rather washes ashore in the Dreaming only to be found by Cain and Abel. Here, he rests and requests of them their initial contracts with him, which he absorbs in order to regain strength enough to make the journey to his castle where he meets Lucien. It’s only then that he sees the full scope of the Dreaming’s deterioration and then makes the decision to meet with the Fates in order to learn where all his stuff has gone that he might be able to restore order to his realm with the tools he created to shape and govern it. It felt like it was building blocks of storytelling, continually taking us to the next step by the actions of the character, but this feels like it has to pre-empt every level by front loading the need. They have to say all of it Out Loud for the dummies watching at home to get it because I’m sure they’re so wowed by the sheer, unimaginable scope of the fanaticism and worldbuilding on screen that they need Dream to hold their hand as they wander through it; instead of feeling like Dream is taking charge of his own story and we’re following in his wake. It’s tiring, paint by numbers writing that had me emotionally switched off in the first five minutes of the episode.
Continued below2. To Kill A King
Remember last week when I made a big to-do about how the cut out Sykes and Ethel’s affair in order to focus on Ethel leaving Roderick on her own volition after finding out that she’s pregnant with his child? Well, it seems that that was all in service to her returning this episode in order to explain that when she took Dream’s vestments, she also stole Roderick’s longevity and has become something of a rare collectibles and arts dealer. That’s fine, in and of itself, but then guess who shows up? The bloody Corinthian. I’m honestly a bit sick of seeing this lad, to be honest with you. The Corinthian’s containment to the second arc of the comic, in a story that’s not even really about him, is one of the reasons he feels so enduring. He’s a fantastic character concept with a chilling design who’s only ever in less than a half dozen issues of the series, right at the beginning, and then barely seen again.
Bringing in Ethel in this episode is really only servicing The Corinthian’s role as the Big Bad of the season. Every time the episode cut back to their conversation, which spins its wheels for the entirety of the episode’s rather short 37 minute runtime, I zoned out more than I already was. It’s yet more narrative hand-holding, of having characters talk about things that are required by the narrative to be explained to the audience somehow and instead of weaving them in organically to what characters learn through their actions and interactions with and in the world, they just stand around and spout exposition at one another. It really rips away a lot of what makes ‘Preludes & Nocturnes,’ the first arc of the comic which this first half of the season is supposedly based on, so interesting and engaging.
The chaos caused by Dream’s imprisonment in the comic felt natural; it felt organic to the world that it would fall into disrepair and disarray because one of the cosmological constants had been removed. We not only got to see what that imprisonment did to Dream, but to the world in his absence, and we get to follow him upon his return to the Dreaming and through his quest to return what is his into his power so that he can set things right. Each step of that journey took us to a different corner of the world to be explored through the people he met there. Here, they’re making it so the chaos is specifically caused by the Corinthian in order to make him The Bad Guy and it neuters that feeling of following Dream as he re-enters this fantastical world without the edge he has of being a powerful cosmological constant as one of The Endless, all in order to prop up an aspect of ‘The Doll’s House’ that didn’t need expanding because it didn’t need to be woven into the prior story in the first place. It’s muddying a really clean story with these additions that only serve to bring The Corinthian up to this dastardly nemesis for Dream when he was never in that mould to begin with.
3. My Kind Of Brother
When I tell you I was so excited for this episode, I cannot overstate the disappointment I am feeling right now. First, Asim Chaudry and Sanjeev Bhaskar are staples of British television and fantastic performers and when I saw that they were cast as Cain and Abel, I was over the moon. They would be perfect, I thought, to capture the bleak gallows humour of seeing the world’s first murderer and victim caught in a cycle of perpetual violence and fratricide throughout the cosmos. They are the characters of the first story, as it is said in the comic, and their presence in the Dreaming has made that story so fundamental to human nature that touches every dream of every human who has ever slept. How could the show mess that up?
Well, for one, as I’ve mentioned, this episode’s re-arrangement of events has left Cain and Abel a little out of dry. You see, in the second issue of the comic, Dream is brought to the door of Cain and Abel by Gregory when he is found, weakened and desperate, trying to claw his way through dreamstuff in order to return home. We get to see what Cain and Abel are up to briefly, for a page, and experience the back-and-forth of their eternally locked pseudo conflict. A constant Wile E. and Roadrunner skit in which Cain gleefully attempts, and largely succeeds, in killing his soft-spoken, naive and idealistic brother only for him to continually return. This rearrangement of events, putting the cart before the horse, robs of that moment of getting to see what the lives of these two are like, what this everyday cycle has come to. Instead, Cain and Abel are played as a pretty standard double act when Dream rocks up to absorb Gregory in order to regain a modicum of his power.
Continued belowGregory’s death is done and played rather well, but it’s the decision to change what Dream absorbs from his contracts with Cain and Abel to the gargoyle companion that confounds me. It makes the whole sequence rather morbid, but in the opposite direction. There’s no comedy here, black or gallows or otherwise, simply tragedy and bringing in Cain and Abel just to be sad about their friend dying neuters the very essence of what Cain and Abel contribute to Dream’s story. They’re operating here on the same dramatic level as Dream instead of their gallows humour being allowed to be contrary to it. It’s such a shame because Cain and Abel are two of my most beloved aspects of the comic and Chaudry and Bhaskar are choices that I delighted in, but this material does them such a disservice.
4. The Three Who Are One
I saw someone comment on Twitter the other day that this show is plagued by a lot of Standing On Marks. That you can see in the fiction the reality of the actors being told to stand here and don’t move and say all your lines on this spot. This is, I think, the worst I’ve seen of that particular complaint as the Hecatae’s summoning and their conversation with Dream feels so… stagnant. In the comic, the Hecatae are shown to be working over a bubbling cauldron, constantly shifting spaces and faces as they talk, and there’s a sense of their integration into the world through their interaction with it. There’s a tactile quality to them that sells the idea that they are a physical presence in this world of dreams and nightmares, that there’s a more tangible quality to be expressed through the art than can be expressed simply through prosaic description. I was really hoping to see more of the same here as the show benefits from having real actors present, but instead they’re all posed and static; immovable presences shot in their own closed off coverage, never truly feeling like they inhabiting the same space.
There is something that I quite like in this sequence, and it’s something that was sadly cut from last week’s episode, which is the sequence of Dream reaching into the dreams of the sleeping to gather the appropriate set dressing with which to summon the Fates. It’s a pretty solid rendition of what was presented in the comic, but there’s still little in the way of panache. The real magic of Morpheus as a character is his ability to manipulate dreamstuff. The fictions of the sleeping mind are entirely his realm to control and shape and so, naturally, I had hoped that the show would present those dreams with some kind of flair. I did love the big hand coming down to rip the crossroads out of the ground, but the rest feels so very flat. With the series emphasis on using visual effects to extend the scope of the Dreaming, it’s such a shame that everything’s in this pallid, muted palette. Being able to walk with the Dream King through the dreams of the sleeping should be this exhilarating rush of an experience with sights and sounds beyond our wildest imaginings and this show just does not seem to be interesting in showing us something genuinely new, just telling us roughly what happened in the comic by the virtue of having people act it. It still has all the same inorganic, vision-less stagnation where no one really seems to be having fun embodying these roles in this world or even in showing us, the audience, this world that, literally, we could only dream of.
5. The Days Are All The Same
And, continuing this episode’s problem of having to tie all these disparate, sprawling threads of chaos and fate into one, tight, self-contained narrative, we have John Dee in a fairly generic, if overly fancy psych ward. Now, I feel like I should have seen this coming, that John is being presented as Ethel and Roderick’s son, but it didn’t truly dawn on me until this point and, honestly, all I could do was sigh. I know that this is something that was presented in that Audible adaptation that I didn’t bother listening to, but in terms of how it’s presented here, so much has been shifted around in order to make John Dee a direct successor to Roderick Burgess in terms of his station as a human antagonist playing at forces far larger than he can handle. It’s a fair way, I suppose, of textually linking their thematic similarities, but it just feels so hollow to me. I suppose it’s what they get for ripping the material away from its intrinsic links to the DC Universe in its opening stories. It started off grounded in this established universe and leant heavily on that in order to feel expansive from the very beginning and eventually grew in its own direction and largely outgrew that level of connectivity.
Here, everything feels so tight, so condensed. We had to change how Ethel left Roderick not just so she could be the one to disperse Dream’s vestments into the world so there’s a sense that someone stole from him and there is a personal vendetta to be had, but also so we could play up Ethel’s connection to John Dee because we can’t lean on the fact that Doctor Destiny already had an established history in the DCU before being in “The Sandman.” Instead of allowing the show to evoke the sense of this narrative taking place in a word that has its own history, a sprawling world of dreams and stories, all taking place alongside and atop one another, we get all these loose ends left over from its connection to DC’s history tied up and flattened, boiling it down to a streamlined, causal narrative with only a dozen players. The whole thing feels, ultimately, neutered.
