We open on Dream feeding pigeons in the park and doing the world’s biggest-ever sulk. He catches an errant ball without looking, and as its owner retrieves it, KIRBY HOWELL-BAPTISTE!!!!! walks up. (The owner of the ball is called Franklin. He’s adorable, but he’s also a race-bent character who I know is going to die by the end of the episode, which like… agh! This is happening too often! Please, Sandman casting people, contemplate the ramifications of these choices!) KIRBY HOWELL-BAPTISTE!!!!! as Death is the best casting in an altogether well-cast series. She’s warm and funny, and she has an astonishingly dazzling smile. I love her, your honor.
(I guess I should say we don’t know she’s Death yet! It has not yet been discussed at this point in the episode. I am working from advance knowledge)
Death tries to get Dream to open up, so he tells her what’s been going on: revenge (maybe you’d feel better if you’d done more revenge, Dream), McGuffin hunting, etc. What he can’t figure out, he explains, is why he doesn’t feel better now that his quest is finished. He feels like nothing. Death says, immensely sweetly, “You could have called me.” Then she yells at him for being such a whiny baby and not calling her when he should have known she’d be worried about him. It’s Great. Then because she can’t spend her whole life watching Dream tear tiny pieces of bread off his bread loaf and petulantly chuck them at pigeons (affectionate), she invites him to come along while she does her work.
Massive shouts to the chemistry between Kirby Howell-Baptiste and Tom Sturridge. I in general think that one of the strengths of casting Tom Sturridge is that he tends to have good chemistry with the more, shall we say, lively characters, and the same has been true of Kirby Howell-Baptiste in every role I’ve seen her in. They’re fantastic together here. Death is radiantly sincere and cheerful, catching Dream up on the news and gently teasing him for being self-absorbed, and although Dream doesn’t say a lot to her, he does a lot of good being-charmed face acting as she goes about her rounds. As in the comic, Death is absolutely lovely to everyone whose time has come, a kind and personal presence at the end of each human’s life, even as she’s unrelenting in the inevitability of that end.
As they’re going around with Death taking people’s lives, she and Dream chat about The Job and Their Duty, which is very appropriate because His Duty is the primary thing Dream ever cares about. “I am far more terrible than you,” Dream tells his sister, with a hint of a smile on his face. They’re delightful together, truly. Death admits that there was a time when she was really struggling with her die, until she learned that “all they really need is a kind word and a friendly face, like they had in the beginning.” I teared up! Honestly! There has always been something very lovely about the idea that Death is someone who just… likes you.
The thing that really gets to Dream is when Death tells him that the Endless need people as much as people need them, and he thanks her for spending the day with him. He has to go, because he’s late for an appointment, which transitions us into the second half of the episode, an adaptation of a comic a little later in the run called “Men of Good Fortune.”
This one starts with a flashback: Dream and Death (in a wimpley head-dress thing that is An Lot) walk into a bar in 1389, and I screamed FLASHBACK WIGS because of all the bad wigs in all of television, FLASHBACK WIGS are the absolute worst of them all. Remember Stefan and Damon’s FLASHBACK WIGS in The Vampire Diaries? What a time. Anyway, at this bar in 1389, Dream and Death hear a guy talking about how dying is a mug’s game, there’s no good reason for it, and he, this guy, has decided he’s just not going to do it. The Endless siblings are charmed, and Death grants the guy, Hob Gadling, eternal life. The deal is that he and Hob will meet in this bar on the same day every 100 years. Dream is like “lol he is going to REGRET THIS,” and Hob is like “I will never ever ever regret this.”
A hundred years later, Hob is still alive, and Dream is interested. Hob is very excited about chimneys, handkerchiefs, and playing cards, and he’s 100% planning to keep living for another hundred years (slash, forever). You have to admit chimneys and playing cards are pretty good! Think how boring it must have been before playing cards! Anyway, Dream is delighted by this, for a Dream value of delighted (minor mouth quirk). A hundred years from then: Venison! Shakespeare! A knighthood for Hob! A wife and son! (Dream is unimpressed. He liked the chimneys a lot more than the son.) I enjoy the twitchy little weirdo they’ve hired to play Shakespeare, and so does Dream (more to come on this, if Sandman gets renewed).
A hundred years on, Hob’s fortunes have turned, and he’s a starving indigent whom Dream has to prevent from being thrown out of the tavern. He’s lost his wife, been tried as a witch, and hated every second of the last quite-many decades; but as always, he still wants to live. “Death is a mug’s game. I’ve got so much to live for,” says Hob, a very very different person than me. As they’re having this little convo, someone is sketching them from above (ominous), and a hundred years later (we’re in 1789 now, for those keeping track at home), our girlfriend Johanna Constantine shows up with the drawing and an Ominous Plan. It’s of course not our Johanna Constantine, it’s an ancestor, but, whatever. In 1789, Hob is involved in the slave trade, which truly I think they should have just dumped. I can’t fuck with a guy who trades in enslaved people! Dream is all “it’s a poor thing for one man to enslave another” and tells Hob to get into another line of business. Pretty much rooting for Johanna Constantine, our girlfriend, to kill Hob at this point. Can he die if he gets stabbed right in the throat? And if I may, a follow-up: can I stab him right in the throat?
Johanna Constantine, our girlfriend, shows up with two heavies who she says will slit Dream’s and Hob’s throats if they try to do anything she doesn’t like. Having heard that Dream shows up at this tavern every 100 years and shares gifts such as immortality, Johanna Constantine wants in. Accordingly, Hob does a pretty good job of beating up both of Johanna Constantine’s heavies, and then Dream blows sand at her that forces her to see “old ghosts,” which she sounds very upsetting. This is a pretty brutal consequence? I hope it wears off quickly, because I really don’t think threatening them with knives that absolutely cannot hurt them is all that dreadful of a thing to do.
With that, we’re up to 1889, wherein Dream is wearing a top hat. I want a top hat very badly. Don’t you think I’d look good in a top hat? Now that I am a hugely wealthy publishing professional, I feel like I could spend some money on a sexy, sexy top hat? He tells Hob Gadling that Lady Johanna ended up doing a task for him (foreshadowing! it’s a very doomed task for Dream!), and Hob expresses regret for his past mistakes (slave trade! his past mistakes were working in the slave trade!). Then he makes a brand new mistake: he tells Dream that the reason they keep meeting up is that Dream just likes him and wants to be friends. Dream is So Offended. Dream throws a little tanty about it. Dream doesn’t have friends and he doesn’t want friends. What a dumb baby. He’s all, FRIENDSHIP OVER, NOT THAT WE WERE EVER FRIENDS. Hob says, “I tell you what: I’ll be here in a hundred years’ time. If you’re here too, it’ll be because we’re friends. No other reason!”
This is a pretty ill-starred century for Hob to issue an ultimatum! Considering that as of 1989, Dream is imprisoned inside a big glass bubble, which means that when Hob gets stood up, he fully believes it’s because Dream is still in a sulk. No supposition could be more reasonable. Dream is famously a big sulky baby, and after six hundred years, it’s no surprise Hob has noticed.The other shit thing is that Hob learns their special pub has been sold. He’s heartbroken! Their special place! We cut to Dream discovering the same thing, twentyish years on, that their pub has been abandoned. But then it turns out there’s a new pub and Hob owns it. Look. I still want to stab Hob in the throat about the slave trade thing, but this was a rather nice moment.
To close out the episode, we see Desire (Mason Alexander Park, looking sexy as) saying that they have a new plan for how to ruin Dream’s life. Do you think it gets tiresome to be one of the other Endless, and you’ve been around for untold millennia, and Dream and Desire are just constantly bickering with each other? At some point, wouldn’t you just stop coming to family dinners?
Number of things Dream cares about in this episode, other than his duty: 2. Death (fair enough, she’s an angel) and Hob Gadling (can’t get with it).
Does Dream do a sulk? The whole first half of the episode is about Dream being in a big sulk after getting done with his big quest. Then he has another big sulk about Hob thinking he’s lonely. He probably goes home and indignantly rants to Lucienne about it, and Lucienne is probably like “uh-huh” and “sure” and “wow yeah so rude” and then goes into the library and gets a pillow off a window-seat and screams into the pillow for an hour. (I miss Lucienne.)
Fuckboy energy: Oh, absolutely 10/10. Before Sandman came out, they released a clip from the first half of the episode, and Dream’s fuckboy energy simply radiated out of him. It’s great work from Tom Sturridge.