If Sandman were doing it's job, episodes 7-10 would explain why we should care about Dream and The Dreaming, not alienate and confuse viewers that do not have an insight into where the epic Sandman storyline eventually ends up. There is little connective tissue from Point A to Point Z, mostly because these episodes lack any real tone or nuance. The show gets busy - strangely more compacted- than even the 24 page comics they are adapted from. These episodes - without the gravity of a gifted actor like David Thewlis - just sort of spiral into nonsense. And since little effort is placed on delineating the importance or role of Dream or The Dreaming (or for that matter, the identities of The Endless as characters or the function of their realms) the series comes off as dull and drab and dim-witted.
"the Sandman" is one if the most emotional, insightful, intelligent comics ever written, and it accomplishes so much by suggesting the fantastical in the mundane. But in this Netflix adaptation, The Dreaming and Reality have no clear identities - just noisy cross-cutting between often drab actors performing rote functions. That's why, perhaps, the performance of Thewlis pops so much. We need to see the consequences of an innocent character interacting with the ideas of a universe so beyond his control. Every bit of momentum that the show builds up in those center episodes puts a greater emphasis on how the first episode and especially episodes 7-10 utterly fail.
Netflix's Sandman lacks scope, and ultimately comes off as pretty silly when it fails to maintain a solid core of genuine human emotion. Why, for example, squander the casting of Stephen Fry and the warm, wonderful Gilbert character with such a slim, unconvincing treatment? Gilbert's journey is essential as a mirror to that of the Corinthian, and all of the queasy menace of a "cereal convention" gets lost in the production's dayglo attitudes, loose ends, and loud box-checking.
I turned on this series the second Rose, Unity, and Jed began stumbling through these awful scripts and questionable performances. Any honest crew could have seen that mess going wrong. How could they not, having obviously understood the significance of, say, "Passengers" and "The Sound of Her Wings"? If Jed, Unity, and Rose are a "family", hiw are supposed to believe that Dream has any real affection for Death or Hob, or even compassion for John Dee or Johanna Constantine? The emotional gravity devolves into nonsensical B-movie execution.
If Sandman gets a second season, it will have to address the elephant in the room - casting and scope will have to get much more expansive and solve a lot of scale problems. Nothing here suggests that this can be accomplished. If you read through the negative responses to the series, you can see that folks don't have a lot of patience for the massive world-building that makes the conclusion of Sandman so moving and philosophically relevant. But as a fan of the source material, one has to ask why a die-hard would want to see such messy adaptations of works that deserve better?
With the two most awkward Sandman texts out of the way, the meat of the series comes next, but nothing in episodes 7-10 suggest that these producers are up to the task.
