\n<\/p>\n
M<\/span>orpheus, 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. \u201cTen thousand years ago, I condemned you to hell,\u201d he says to his other half, having sensed that she is annoyed about something. \u201cI think perhaps I should apologise.\u201d<\/p>\n Damn right! We\u2019re 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 \u2013 the saga concludes with another handful of episodes later this month \u2013 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019 gazes as he sulkily delivers platitudes suffused with doom and \u2013 quite literally, given the production\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s The Killing Moon at any moment \u2013 someone in the design department enjoys their 1980s pop, because they have also styled Freddie Fox\u2019s Loki to look eerily like Billy Idol \u2013 he is, by design, never that entertaining. Even when he is turning Thor\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n It just about works as an elaborate analogy for teenage disaffection \u2013 a time when you feel as if you\u2019re 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\u2019t do much with them. The back half of this batch of episodes concerns Orpheus (Ruairi O\u2019Connor), who in the Sandman universe is Morpheus\u2019s 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\u2019s coda \u2013 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\u2019s undermined by being delivered with zero dramatic subtlety.<\/p>\n And: some of the dialogue Sturridge has to say! Oof. As for Morpheus\u2019s appreciation of the power of storytelling \u2013 \u201cTales and dreams are the shadow truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes and forgot\u201d is the sort of non-zinger that would sound flat even if it wasn\u2019t coming from a character who says everything in a depressed gothic whisper. And the dream-shaper\u2019s stint as the caretaker manager of hell ends with him opining: \u201cHell is heaven\u2019s reflection. They define one another. Without hell, heaven has no meaning.\u201d A million lifetimes spent feeding off the deepest fears and desires of humanity, and he\u2019s still cursed to sound like a failed evangelical preacher\u2019s Instagram posts.<\/p>\n 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\u2019 dreams \u2013 to mould them and make them real \u2013 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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. \u201cTen thousand years ago, I condemned you to hell,\u201d he says to his other half, having sensed that she is annoyed about<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9905,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[2222,2549,2548,2547,2550,1085,2551,2546,225,1779],"class_list":{"0":"post-9904","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-drama","9":"tag-emo","10":"tag-gaimans","11":"tag-neil","12":"tag-pretentious","13":"tag-review","14":"tag-ruins","15":"tag-sandman","16":"tag-season","17":"tag-television"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9904","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=9904"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9904\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/9905"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9904"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9904"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9904"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}