When I was eighteen years old, my godmother gave me $100 as a graduation present, and I very excitedly used that $100 to purchase the entire run of Sandman in trade paperbacks. This was a huge and terrifying investment for me. It was one of my first online purchases, and it must have been one of the most expensive purchases I’d ever made for myself to that point in my life. I had never read graphic novels before. I had tried to read Preludes and Nocturnes once and couldn’t figure out the mechanics of reading it even, because if you haven’t read comics before, you do sort of have to teach yourself how to read them! I gave myself the rule that I would read one installment per day, and I would do that until I had read the whole thing. That was my summer.
Sandman is a very comics-y comic. It’s epic in scope, and it does that thing to which comics are uniquely suited where it just abandons its lead for big chunks of issues at a time in order to tell different, small, weird stories in the same world. One of the volumes is just about a bunch of people stuck in a hotel together during a storm, and each issue in the volume is a story that one of the people at the hotel is telling the others. Sandman is weird, and it’s one of these foundational comics that taught the form what it could be, and I have loved it for half my life, and it’s in my fucking veins, so it has been hard for me to be cool about the new Netflix adaptation, which I so dearly want to enjoy and even dearly-er want to tell the entire run of the comics. I fucking need Brief Lives. I need it. I NEED IT.
All of that is to say that I do not think the first episode of Sandman took the correct lessons from Peter Jackson’s Fellowship of the Ring, for my money the best book-to-movie adaptation there has ever been. The lessons Sandman took from Peter Jackson’s Fellowship of the Ring were that people really dig voice-overs and long swooping camera shots. The first part is simply untrue. People hate voice-overs. They are terrible. Fellowship gets away with it because they put it over good and interesting visuals, and also you just really can’t start the story without the exposition about what the Ring is and why we should care.1 The long swooping camera shots are fine if what you’re swooping over is God’s own country of New Zealand,2 but if you’re swooping over a CGI version of Dream’s realm, it just gives a lady flashbacks to the early Harry Potter movies, which is a bummer because JKR is a TERF supervillain now, and also cinema has advanced since the turn of the millennium when those movies were made.
But, whatever. Fine. We start with Dream doing a mopey, portentous voiceover as we pan through his realm. He’s got a librarian called Lucienne (not sure why gender-swapping her necessitated a name change, but Vivienne Acheampong really captures the character’s nervy intelligence from the comics, and also she is very very pretty), a pet raven, and an escaped dream called the Corinthian who you definitely remember from the comics because he fucking has teeth for eyes and that’s so fucked up and nobody should have to live with that. Thanks for the nightmares, Neil Gaiman! Just as Dream is about to stop the Corinthian from going out into the mortal realm and doing evil, he’s trapped by a spell cast by a two-bit Aleister Crowley knock-off, Roderick Burgess. Burgess is played by Charles Dance. Charles Dance eats it. Charles Dance was made for this role.
I felt so frustrated with all the interstitial voiceovers in this episode! We don’t need this. If the show would trust its audience a little more, we’d be fine! Like, we get it! Dream has been imprisoned in this glass bubble and he’s mad about it! He’s the king of dreams, and stuff is going wrong with sleep. That makes perfect sense and does not require further explanation! Tom Sturridge can dedicate himself to what he does very well in this episode, which is resentful seething while looking ropy and dead in his glass bubble. Charles Dance has a queer son called Alex who feels deeply uneasy with all this imprisoning of Dream, and I have to say that every moment where he makes eye contact with Dream is electrifying. The silent, desperate chemistry between these two people whose lives Roderick Burgess has ruined is by far the best thing about the episode. (After seeing more episodes of this show, I would like to report that one of Tom Sturridge’s gifts is having truly excellent chemistry with just about everyone.)
Time goes on, and we catch a few glimpses of how life has changed. Now that he has control over Dream’s helmet, focus stone (a ruby), and pouch of dream sand, as well as a working grimoire, Burgess prospers. Alex meets an ambitious blonde woman called Ethel who becomes his father’s mistress. Niamh Walsh makes the most of her limited screen time, imbuing Ethel with a core of steel that makes me wish we might see more of her. Pretty soon she gets pregnant, and when Burgess proposes to abort the child, she makes off with Dream’s things and the bulk of Burgess’s fortune. We’ve had the fuck around portion of Burgess’s life, and we have now proceeded to the find out. Burgess goes down to the dungeon to taunt and entreat Dream to give him what he wants — his favored older son’s life back, and/or wealth and prosperity beyond Burgess’s wildest dreams — and in the course of a scuffle with his unfavored younger son, Alex…. kinda kills him. Nobody seems to care, which, fair enough.
Alex meets a hot gardener who becomes his boyfriend. His hot gardener makes quite a face upon seeing Dream imprisoned in the basement, and honestly I would not stay in a relationship with someone who had a naked, seething, dead-looking man in a glass bubble in his basement. That would be a deal-breaker for me. Paul, the gardener, grows old with Alex (again, I would not). We see him wheeling Alex down to see Dream one last time, and as he wheels him away, the wheelchair smears the line of the summoning circle that’s keeping Dream captive. Paul glances back at Dream meaningfully. Thanks, Paul! Like I think you should have done this decades ago, but hey, you came through in the end. I want good things for you, Paul, old chum.
Dream escapes. It’s quite a cool, stylish sequence that makes better use of visuals than any of the big swooping establishing shots. But I don’t think Dream kills the guards? I don’t think Dream kills anyone, and what really grinds my gears is that they defang the truly quite horrific punishment Dream metes out to Alex in the comments, which is that he’s perpetually inside of a nightmare, and every time he wakes up, he just wakes up into a new nightmare. In this version of the story, Dream just puts Alex to sleep forever. It’s very anticlimactic.
After meting out no punishment at all (disappointing), Dream heads back to his own realm. Lucienne is there, but the realm is in ruins. Dream vows to rebuild.
How I’d Fix This Episode: This entire episode should have been from Alex’s perspective, and he should have received his creepy-ass canonical punishment as a climax. His miserable complicity in Dream’s decades-long captivity is genuinely interesting and emotional. To retain the necessary exposition, Alex could have had a sort of mental connection with Dream that results in his dreaming things about Dream’s realm, the Corinthian, etc., which would also have heightened the uneasy connection he feels to Dream and made his refusal to let Dream go even more unforgivable.
Does Dream Do a Sulk? Yes. This episode is one giant Dream sulk. Tom Sturridge does a great job.
Fuckboy Energy: 1/10. Dream tears up when Alex shoots his raven right when the raven’s coming to try and rescue him. I’m sorry, but that would never happen.