Morpheus, AKA Dream, AKA the Sandman (Tom Sturridge) might be the immortal overlord of a magical netherworld and the director of all our subconscious visions, but he is not immune to relationship problems. “Ten thousand years ago, I condemned you to hell,” he says to his other half, having sensed that she is annoyed about something. “I think perhaps I should apologise.”
Damn right! We’re back in the chilly, clammy grasp of The Sandman, the show that looks at the fantasy genre and says: what if we got rid of nearly all the lush landscapes, epic struggles, pointed political allegories and delicious, disgusting monsters, and replaced them with a moody bloke in a long black coat who goes around annoying everyone in a self-pitying monotone? Season two, part one – the saga concludes with another handful of episodes later this month – sees Dream attempt to grow and atone, questing first to rescue his beloved queen Nada (Deborah Oyelade), who is miffed about the whole 10-millennia-in-hades cock-up.
Sorting that mess out requires Dream to negotiate for access with Lucifer herself (Gwendoline Christie, playing Satan as a weary lifer who tires of tormenting), then host a gathering of assorted netherworld freaks and legends in his maddeningly underlit dream castle. After that, he is off to attempt reunions and rapprochements with some of the family members who he has, over the course of eternity, alienated.
The Sandman really is a curious beast. Where other, similar series centre around a hero warrior, the main guy here is more of an emo worrier, for ever standing stiffly in the shadowy corner of the frame, evading other characters’ gazes as he sulkily delivers platitudes suffused with doom and – quite literally, given the production’s apparent lighting shortage, gloom. The rhombus-jawed Sturridge is physically ideal for the role of Morpheus, with his concave cheeks and a set of eyelashes that could have someone’s eye out. But while his impeccably backcombed barnet and swishy monochrome outfits suggest he is about to break into a chorus of Echo and the Bunnymen’s The Killing Moon at any moment – someone in the design department enjoys their 1980s pop, because they have also styled Freddie Fox’s Loki to look eerily like Billy Idol – he is, by design, never that entertaining. Even when he is turning Thor’s throbbing hammer to dust or personally granting William Shakespeare creative immortality, what could be fantastic adventures are always shuffled through stroppily as if they are tedious obligations.
It just about works as an elaborate analogy for teenage disaffection – a time when you feel as if you’re acquiring some sort of awful power, but everyone becomes angry when you try to wield it, and not knowing why makes you more peevish still. When the show co-opts Greek, Norse and Christian mythologies, though, it doesn’t do much with them. The back half of this batch of episodes concerns Orpheus (Ruairi O’Connor), who in the Sandman universe is Morpheus’s son: after a rote retelling of the myth of Eurydice in the underworld, the show spends time trying to fashion a fresh spin on the tale’s coda – but the suspicion is that this was merely because it involves a talking severed head, which looks cool. A visit to a transgender acquaintance in present-day New York, meanwhile, is a story with an admirable, heartfelt moral that’s undermined by being delivered with zero dramatic subtlety.
And: some of the dialogue Sturridge has to say! Oof. As for Morpheus’s appreciation of the power of storytelling – “Tales and dreams are the shadow truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes and forgot” is the sort of non-zinger that would sound flat even if it wasn’t coming from a character who says everything in a depressed gothic whisper. And the dream-shaper’s stint as the caretaker manager of hell ends with him opining: “Hell is heaven’s reflection. They define one another. Without hell, heaven has no meaning.” A million lifetimes spent feeding off the deepest fears and desires of humanity, and he’s still cursed to sound like a failed evangelical preacher’s Instagram posts.
The Sandman is not short of ideas, but it smothers them all in a fug of pretension, missing every opportunity it creates for itself. The fact that Morpheus has the ability to access humans’ dreams – to mould them and make them real – barely features. Even the comic relief of a sarcastic talking dog offers little respite: they got Steve Coogan to do the voice, but the real challenge for him would have been behind the scenes, pretending the lines he was given were funny.
