The final episodes of “The Sandman” Season 2 are all about ending one Dream and starting a new one.
After Season 2 Part 1 ended with Dream (Tom Sturridge) killing his son Orpheus (Ruari O’Connor) after being begged to for thousands of years, his choice to spill that family blood sparks the ire of The Kindly Ones. Familicide is a big no-no for the Endless — even when the one dying spent lifetimes asking for it — and the only punishment is death.
“The Sandman” showrunner Allan Heinberg told TheWrap that Dream welcomed his end because coming back from killing your child just isn’t feasible, but he needed to make sure his dream kingdom and its residents were safe before accepting his fate.
“I think he’s in a really tough spot, because once you kill your own son I don’t know how you get over it,” Heinberg said. “I just don’t think you ever do. The Dream in the comics sort of stays in the kingdom, knows he can’t leave under penalty, and sort of waits for death to come to him. We knew at the outset that our Dream had to get over himself and his grief and his guilt and try to save his kingdom and save his people and do the best for his realm.”
He continued: “He gets his ass kicked in that first episode trying to do everything he possibly can to save his kingdom, to the point where he ends up in Despair’s (Donna Preston) realm and it sort of wakes him up in a way that enables him to get through the rest of the fight for who he loves and to say his goodbyes and to really make an informed decision, by the end of it, that what he’s doing when he’s on the stony cliff with Death is the best thing for the realm possible. He could not be the Dream he wanted to be, or even thought he was, the Dream that we need right now, and so he allows himself to be reborn.”
That rebirth comes in the form of Daniel — a mortal newborn who Morpheus selects to be the new Dream. The selection creates its own problems, mostly from the child’s mother Lyta Hall (Razane Jammal), but once Morpheus dies in the penultimate episode Daniel is aged to an adult and becomes the new Dream of the Endless.
Heinberg said casting for Daniel was daunting because the character had to win viewers over in essentially just the series finale. He struck paydirt though when he heard “Interview with a Vampire” star Jacob Anderson was not only available but a fan.
“I never even considered Jacob because I thought he was unavailable because of ‘Interviewed with a Vampire,” he said. “So when our incredible casting directors told me that he was available there was no question in my mind, having seen the range of his performances and his fierce emotional intelligence throughout no matter who he’s playing, and he’s beautiful. Just the idea of Jacob is Daniel, I was in.”
Heinberg added: “Then the challenge became, how am I gonna sell him on this role? Because it’s like you’re a toddler, but you’re a man, you’re Tom Sturridge, but you’re not doing an impression of Tom Sturridge. I was dreading that meeting, and then we got on with Neil, and he says, ‘I just want you to know I love the comics. I’ve been reading them forever. I loved season one. I’m so flattered that you could even think of me as this character.’ And I was like, he already knows who the character is. Everything worked out exactly the way it was supposed to work out. It was pure magic.”
The finale revolves around Morpheus’ funeral and Daniel grappling with his first real day as Dream. Speeches are given, memories shared, and the final moments show Daniel meeting his other Endless siblings for the first time. Heinberg said that this Dream benefits from being part human meaning there is hope he is able to create connections with his siblings in a way Morpheus never could.
“Like Lucien says to him, ‘you never know, you might actually enjoy them this time,’” he said. “To me, when the camera comes around and Jacob smiles you’re like ‘he is going to enjoy them this time,’ it ended on that sort of joyful, hopeful note.”
Fans of the show need not mourn its ending entirely. “The Sandman” Season 2 was given a 12-episode order and one final entry drops on July 31. The one-off focuses on Kirby Howell-Baptiste’s fan favorite Death in an adaptation of one of her most iconic stories from the comic — “Death: The High Cost of Living.”
“Neil had developed a version of it as a feature much more faithful to the comic than our version was with Guillermo del Toro, and he had a script for it which he sent me,” Heinberg explained. “Because our Death is not a teenage girl and that storyline deals with teen suicide — which after ’13 Reasons Why’ is not something we were we were in the mood to explore on Netflix — it meant sort of aging everybody up to mid-late 30s, and what would ‘Death: The High Cost of Living’ be today.”
He finished: “This is an episode about ‘well is it even worth living in this world.’ It became an important episode for me to to write right now about this moment and our Sexton Furnival is an investigative journalist dealing with the climate emergency and wondering if he’s not he’s not making the world better what is his purpose and is it better to just check out and not be part of the problem.”
“The Sandman” Season 2 is now streaming on Netflix.
