\n<\/p>\n
\n\t[This story contains major spoilers from season two, volume one of The Sandman<\/em>, as well as from the comics.]<\/strong><\/p>\n \n\tAt the start of the second season of Netflix\u2019s hit fantasy drama series The Sandman<\/em>, the Fates \u2014 a trio of goddesses consisting of the Maiden (Dinita Gohil), the Mother (Nina Wadia) and the Crone (Souad Faress) \u2014 delivered an ominous, ambiguous prophecy to the eldest Endless sibling, Destiny (Adrian Lester): \u201cA king will forsake his kingdom. Life and death will clash and fray. The oldest battle begins once more.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tThat prophecy will seemingly be fulfilled by the Sandman himself a.k.a. Dream of the Endless (Tom Sturridge), the powerful cosmic being who controls all dreams. After reclaiming the powers he had previously lost in captivity, destroying the dangerous dream vortex and unmaking the Corinthian at the end of the first season, the moody Morpheus has been quietly rebuilding his kingdom, the Dreaming, with an eye towards the future. But the past will always come back to haunt the King of Dreams.<\/p>\n \n\tIn the first half of the second and final season of The Sandman <\/em>(now streaming), largely adapted from the creator Neil Gaiman\u2019s comic collections Season of Mists<\/em> and Brief Lives<\/em>, Dream is forced to come to terms with the fact that his actions have hurt the people he loves most. While he is not able to make amends with everyone \u2014 who could blame an ex-lover for holding a grudge against him after he condemned her to Hell for 10,000 years? <\/em>\u2014 Dream is able to heal some rifts in his own immediate family.<\/p>\n \n\tThree hundred years ago, Dream\u2019s brother, Destruction (Barry Sloane), abandoned his realm, and now the only person who can locate him is Orpheus (Ruairi O\u2019Connor), Dream\u2019s estranged son with the Greek muse Calliope (Melissanthi Mahut). Thousands of years ago, Orpheus had gone against his father\u2019s wishes and accepted a life of immortality in exchange for a trip to the Underworld, where he was unable to rescue his new wife Eurydice (Ella Rumpf). In a last-ditch attempt to be killed and reunited with Eurydice in the Underworld, Orpheus put himself in the path of the Sisters of the Frenzy, a vicious cult of the Greek god Dionysus, who attacked and dismembered him, reducing him to only a severed head.<\/p>\n \n\tDesperately wanting to be put out of his misery, Orpheus begged his father to kill him, but Dream could not bring himself to commit the act \u2014 in part because the Endless are not allowed to \u201cspill family blood.\u201d Instead, Dream left Orpheus\u2019 head in the care of priests on an uncharted island and told his son they could never see each other again. But centuries later, in exchange for Orpheus\u2019 help in locating Destruction, Dream agrees to grant Orpheus the one boon he has always wanted: the sweet release of death. It\u2019s a loving gift that could very well cost Dream everything.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cWhen you pared The Sandman<\/em> comic down to Dream\u2019s emotional arc, it really is so clear that this is a man who has gained some self-knowledge and some self-awareness through his imprisonment, through having to live in the waking world and the mortal world and having to reflect on his past behavior and sins,\u201d showrunner Allan Heinberg tells The Hollywood Reporter<\/em>.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cIn Dream\u2019s mind, he\u2019s the hero of his story. I think he\u2019s very surprised to realize in season two that he is the villain<\/em> in several people he loves\u2019 stories,\u201d Heinberg continues. \u201cAt the end of episode six, the choice is, \u2018Do you sacrifice your life for your son?\u2019 And there\u2019s no other choice [but yes] for him \u2014 not just because of his own honor, but because he didn\u2019t love his son well thousands of years ago. And now, he has a chance to be a good father, brother and former lover, even though it costs him everything to do so.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tBelow, Heinberg unpacks his decision to end The Sandman<\/em> after two seasons (despite initially conceiving of a three-season adaptation), what Dream\u2019s interactions with his Endless siblings and estranged son reveal about his evolution as a character \u2014 and why viewers should not expect Dream to take his fate lying down in volume two. He also teases the final bonus episode centered around Kirby Howell-Baptiste\u2019s Death. (Stay tuned for part two of THR<\/em>\u2019s conversation with Heinberg, which will be released after the final episodes drop later this month.)<\/p>\n \n\t***<\/p>\n \n\tYou\u2019ve maintained that <\/strong>the second season of <\/strong>The Sandman<\/em><\/strong> was always meant to be its last<\/strong>, even as fans began to <\/strong>speculate<\/strong> that those reasons weren\u2019t purely creative. Can you walk me through the rationale behind that decision? And on a macro level, how did that affect the structure of this final run of episodes?<\/strong><\/p>\n \n\tWe learned making season one that we were only going to focus on the stories where Dream was the protagonist. In the comic book, it has more of an anthology structure. There are long story arcs where he may appear in one or two scenes, but there are other people\u2019s stories. We realized that the audience, for a serialized drama, needs a character that they can follow and root for throughout the entire run of the show. Anthologies are very difficult to pull off [because] every time you introduce a new cast of characters, you have to earn the audience\u2019s trust, love and rooting interest. And with this show, we watched the audience reaction to the first episode and then the second episode, and their interest was always held when Dream was either onscreen or the subject of the scene. But anytime we drifted into other people\u2019s storylines, they got confused and lost interest because it\u2019s called The Sandman<\/em> and they thought the show was about the Sandman, which we all understand.<\/p>\n \n\tSo, by the end of season one, we started looking at the stories that were going to be part of a proposed second season. The biggest question mark was around a graphic novel called A Game of You<\/em>, where Dream has two or three appearances, but it\u2019s not his story. It\u2019s Barbie\u2019s story, who we introduced in season one. So there was some debate about how we would do it. The writers and I actually spent two months, because it was a three-episode arc, building a story for Dream to be part of A Game of You<\/em> that was not in the comics. In order to tell that story, it would have to become a Dream story, and we labored a long time over it.<\/p>\n \n\tIn the end, Netflix came to us and said, \u201cWhat if we skipped it storywise? Since we are focusing on Dream, what if we went straight from the end of Season of Mists<\/em> into Brief Lives<\/em> [for volume one]?\u201d It was a proposal. They asked me, \u201cHow do you think you would do that?\u201d And because Dream isn\u2019t in A Game of You<\/em>, it was fairly easy [to adapt]. So, from the comics, we substituted his affair with the witch Thessaly, and we concentrated on Nada \u2014 Season of Mists<\/em> is all about Nada [the Queen of the First People who Dream condemned to hell for 10,000 years after she rejected his proposal to be with him]. So him proposing to Nada again and Nada rejecting him took the place of Thessaly\u2019s rejection, and it was a very seamless way of transitioning into Brief Lives<\/em>.<\/p>\n \n\tI had always thought of The Sandman<\/em> as a three-season show with 11 episodes in each season, and initially I had crafted season two to end with Orpheus\u2019 death and Dream\u2019s response to it. And then the third season was going to be The Kindly Ones<\/em> [the ninth and penultimate installment of the original Sandman<\/em> comics], and everything that comes after. And when we took A Game of You<\/em> out of the mix, it created all the space we needed for The Kindly Ones<\/em> and everything that came after. So it was a very organic process of looking at the comics and saying, \u201cIf we\u2019re just telling Dream\u2019s story, what are those elements, and can we do it in the 11 episodes that we had? And then [we\u2019ll have] the additional Death episode at the end.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tYou\u2019ve always said that your adaptation of <\/strong>The Sandman<\/em><\/strong>, at its core, is a family drama centered around Dream. What new facets of Dream did you want to reveal through his interactions with the other Endless siblings? How did you want to humanize him in this second batch of episodes?<\/strong><\/p>\n \n\tDeath [Kirby Howell-Baptiste] is really honest with him about his behavior in Season of Mists<\/em> and Destruction basically tells him several times, \u201cI could not handle it. I could not handle my responsibilities.\u201d Throughout season one, we discovered that Dream has a curiosity and a longing to do things that are outside of his calling, outside of his realm. And every time we see him with another member of the family, it brings out a different side of Dream.<\/p>\n \n\tFor me, watching his progress over season two, he just becomes more and more and more vulnerable and more emotionally present to the point where \u2014 well, you haven\u2019t watched it yet \u2014 by the end of the season, he\u2019s so authentically himself with Death at the end. He\u2019s so raw and so naked, and so the opposite of who we met at the beginning of season one. I don\u2019t want to spoil anything for you, but it is profoundly moving. We were able to tell the story as we have because of Tom Sturridge\u2019s phenomenally nuanced, intelligent, deeply felt performance.<\/p>\n \n\tDream is an impossible character to play, especially if you look at the comics, because he reveals nothing. He doesn\u2019t have eyes; he\u2019s got black pits with stars in them. So it\u2019s impossible to tell what he\u2019s thinking or feeling. And the biggest shift for me, as the primary storyteller of the show, is that I had to allow myself in script to let the reader know everything that Dream was thinking and feeling along the way, which was a huge leap for me. Neil Gaiman created this character. I am doing my interpretation, but it took a certain amount of chutzpah, as they say, to put down on the page what I think is going on in the scenes and hope that the writer who created this character agrees and is OK with it.<\/p>\n \n\tSo that\u2019s the way we were able to tell Dream\u2019s story and focus on it. Tom and I, together with the director Jamie Childs, were constantly transparent about what moments mean, how he\u2019s feeling, and how his feelings dictate his next action in a way that is not in the comic. He is a mystery in the comic; he\u2019s opaque. There are times when in the comic Neil gives him a voiceover and he gives you some insight, but you\u2019re not tracking him emotionally the way that we have had to because we\u2019re a television show. So the bones of the story are the same, but the way we tell the story is very different because we\u2019re telling it from the inside out as opposed to the comic, which is very outside in, I guess. I don\u2019t know if that makes sense, but I\u2019m articulating this for the first time!<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\tRuairi O\u2019Connor as Orpheus with Barry Sloane as Destruction in season two, episode five. <\/span><\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCourtesy Of Netflix<\/p>\n \n\tDream\u2019s relationship with Orpheus is such a key part of the comics \u2014 and, for me, the relationship that humanizes Dream the most in this adaptation. What was your take on the complexity of their relationship? Why are they both unable to realize that they are more alike than they\u2019re willing to admit until it\u2019s too late for Orpheus?<\/strong><\/p>\n \n\tI love Ruairi\u2019s performance so much. Dream and Orpheus don\u2019t live together. Their time together before [Orpheus\u2019] marriage is limited, but Orpheus clearly adores him. They adore each other. I think that with Orpheus, Dream is warmer and more unguarded than he is even with Calliope. But I think with a young man in love, you watch Dream try to parent him as best he can. You watch him try to put his foot down. He does what I think any protective parent would do in that moment. And Orpheus\u2019s passion, his youth, and maybe some resentment that he didn\u2019t have a full-time father there \u2014 there\u2019s something in him that forces him to rebel and need to seek his own course. He\u2019s the hero of his own story. And as a parent, you are powerless to stop your child from doing enormous harm to himself. And at every turn, Dream isn\u2019t evolved enough in that moment to make an emotional appeal to Orpheus, right?<\/p>\n \n\tThe way that Dream and Orpheus speak to each other at the end of episode six is very different from the way they speak to each other in episode five. You\u2019ve got hundreds of years of regret and recrimination in episode five. They\u2019re very much father and son \u2014 \u201cI tell you what to do and how to behave, and you do it because I am your father, and I know more than you.\u201d By the end of it, there are just two people who love each other enormously. In some ways, Orpheus is a much wiser soul by the end of episode six than Dream is and knows so much more about humility and patience and gratitude. Dream is just learning these things now, and his son\u2019s been ahead of him for hundreds of years and you see it in their interaction.<\/p>\n \n\tThere are two one-on-one scenes between Dream and Orpheus which absolutely gutted me as a viewer: the first being when Dream refuses to kill Orpheus post-decapitation, and the second being when they come face-to-face for the first time at the temple. What did you want to accomplish with those two bookends in the characters\u2019 relationship? How did you want to show the way they\u2019ve evolved or not evolved during their time apart?<\/strong><\/p>\n \n\tIt\u2019s interesting because I had to look at that scene on the beach in episode five where Orpheus has been decapitated and he\u2019s begging for his own death. Our dialogue is very similar to the dialogue in the comic. Dream, as a comics reader [myself], always seemed very much like an Old Testament God: \u201cI gave you an order, you disobeyed me, and now you must be punished.\u201d And I couldn\u2019t find a way into writing the scene in a way that made sense to me with Tom\u2019s Dream.<\/p>\n \n\tI just thought to myself, \u201c[Dream\u2019s] behaving this way because his heart is broken.\u201d The reason he says we will not see each other again is that Dream can\u2019t handle [seeing him like that]. It is too much for him. From that point of view, as Dream\u2019s walking away from Orpheus, we can see that he is absolutely shattered instead of stone-faced and punishing. You understand how hard this is for him.<\/p>\n \n\tAnd then in the last scene that you referred to, Dream says, \u201cDo you know why I said those things to you? I couldn\u2019t kill you because I couldn\u2019t imagine living in a world without you. There\u2019s no way that I could kill the person I love most in this world and have tried so hard to protect.\u201d Interestingly, that scene doesn\u2019t exist in the comic. There\u2019s an omission, and I was hoping I wouldn\u2019t have to write the scene where Dream and Orpheus face each other for the first time [in a long time]. (Laughs.<\/em>) In the comic, Dream leaves Delirium [Esm\u00e9 Creed-Miles] outside the temple, and we stay with Delirium. Dream comes back out and says, \u201cIt is done.\u201d So I thought it was a perfect opportunity.<\/p>\n \n\tOrpheus, at that point, is so philosophical about his fate and trying to spend his days as best he can. Even though he longs for the peace of death, he\u2019s not an unhappy man. He\u2019s not suffering, and Dream is suffering and has been suffering since he left him on the beach. So there were a lot of ways to go in that scene. Orpheus could have been angry or resentful, but casting Ruairi made it so easy to just have him be loving, accepting and forgiving: \u201cLet\u2019s not waste another minute fighting. Let\u2019s just start loving each other as best we can right now.\u201d It\u2019s such a relief for Dream in that moment because he\u2019s been dreading having to face the biggest mistake he\u2019d ever made.<\/p>\n \n\tHow did you decide to write Orpheus\u2019 death scene? And what stands out to you about the way Tom chose to play the aftermath of Orpheus\u2019 death?<\/strong><\/p>\n \n\tThat\u2019s very much from the comic. I think I added some dialogue, but how difficult it is for [Dream] in the moment and the breakdown in the palace \u2014 that\u2019s from the original comic. I think Tom\u2019s performance is absolutely staggering all the way through and so moving. I love that scene in the library with Lucienne [Vivienne Acheampong], the way it was staged. He hides behind a bookcase and Lucienne doesn\u2019t see him, and it was not scripted to have him like that. It was our DP Will Baldy\u2019s idea in the moment, like, \u201cWhat if it\u2019s too much for him and he can\u2019t face her? And his not showing himself to her shatters her.\u201d It was such a lovely collaborative idea and it sets up that scene in his private quarters where he\u2019s washing the blood off his hands in such a beautiful way. I\u2019m absolutely indebted to Will for having suggested that and to Jamie for the way that it\u2019s shot.<\/p>\n \n\tAt the end of volume one, Dream is able to reconnect with not only Orpheus but also Destruction. You\u2019ve previously described Destruction\u2019s story as \u201ca soul that\u2019s in conflict.\u201d He doesn\u2019t want to destroy; he wants to create. Can you unpack Destruction\u2019s decision to abandon his realm and his final conversations with Dream before vanishing?<\/strong><\/p>\n \n\tI love that Destruction has the same sense of honor and responsibility about his realm and what his job is that Dream has. But in the end, it became too much for him. He could no longer be the destroyer of lives and universes, and he could not handle it anymore. It really broke him. And he did what no Endless had done previously, which was to essentially just abandon his realm. Dream has been livid with his brother making that decision for 300 years, but I also think that Dream was resentful because he\u2019s jealous. What Dream does takes an enormous toll on his soul and his psyche, and to be able to just leave and pursue a life outside of one\u2019s calling \u2014 it\u2019s everything he has wanted and it\u2019s unthinkable to him. In some ways, I think he knows that this job is too much for him.<\/p>\n \n\t(Major spoiler alert!<\/em><\/strong>) So by becoming more human himself and allowing himself to be reborn through Daniel, which is obviously a spoiler [from the comics] for the end of the series, he understands that the new Dream has to be more human and less Endless in order to serve mankind the right way, in ways that he was not able to. So I think Destruction teaches him that.<\/p>\n \n\tWhat I find so compelling about Barry\u2019s performance is you see Destruction, who is Dream\u2019s younger brother, has also evolved more than Dream has. Having fallen in love with humanity before Dream did, he knows so much more about his own heart \u2014 and he wishes he could help Dream. You saw it in episodes five and six, especially in episode six. He\u2019s trying so hard to help Dream out of this prison that he\u2019s created for himself. I think he does get in, obviously, but in that moment, Dream can\u2019t really hear it or respond to it. So I find it really powerfully moving where Destruction is basically saying to him, \u201cI have been here. I have felt these things. I know exactly what you\u2019re going through, and you don\u2019t have to.\u201d Dream obviously shuts down and isn\u2019t ready for that advice at that moment.<\/p>\n \n\tVolume one ends with the Fates seemingly divided about taking action against Dream, but regardless of how they personally feel about him, the fact that Dream has spilled family blood means that he will now have to face the consequences of his actions. What can you preview about the final five episodes of his story and the bonus episode involving Death?<\/strong><\/p>\n \n\tIn the back half, Dream is going to do everything he possibly can to keep his life and his kingdom, and the people who work with him, whole and safe and alive. He\u2019s not just going to give up. He\u2019s not just going to resign himself to his fate. He\u2019s going to fight for the next five episodes, because that\u2019s who he is. So it\u2019s not over, and there are lots of surprises along the way.<\/p>\n \n\tThat final episode is a very interesting episode for us. It\u2019s freestanding. It doesn\u2019t really have anything to do with the 11 episodes prior to it, but it\u2019s a continuation of all the themes that we\u2019ve been exploring the entire time. It\u2019s especially topical now \u2014 I mean, I guess it\u2019s always going to be topical \u2014 because the world is a very dark place at the moment, and we are all trying to figure out how to live in it with love and with hope. That\u2019s what Dream is trying to do the entire time in the body of the season, and that\u2019s what Death is trying to convey to Colin Morgan\u2019s character, Sexton. So that\u2019s our goodnight kiss to the audience, and our thank you to the audience for staying with us through these two seasons.<\/p>\n \n\t***<\/p>\n \n\tThe Sandman is now streaming on Netflix. The next five episodes, which will conclude Dream\u2019s story, will drop on July 24, with a bonus episode centered around Death set to drop on July 31.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [This story contains major spoilers from season two, volume one of The Sandman, as well as from the comics.] At the start of the second season of Netflix\u2019s hit fantasy drama series The Sandman, the Fates \u2014 a trio of goddesses consisting of the Maiden (Dinita Gohil), the Mother (Nina Wadia) and the Crone (Souad<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10281,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[2256,274,3056,2546,225,241],"class_list":{"0":"post-10280","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-explained","9":"tag-netflix","10":"tag-part","11":"tag-sandman","12":"tag-season","13":"tag-show"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10280","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10280"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10280\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/10281"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10280"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10280"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10280"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}