TL;DR: The Sandman Season Two returns with stunning gothic visuals, Neil Gaiman’s mythic ambition, and Tom Sturridge’s mopey cheekbones – but smothers all its potential with overwrought dialogue, funereal pacing, and the personality of a black velvet painting.

Dreams, Nightmares, and That Time I Tried to Re-read The Silmarillion

I’ve always thought fantasy should be one of two things: either a sprawling playground of dazzling quests and grotesque monsters, or an introspective mirror reflecting our collective existential terror. Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman source material often manages both, but Netflix’s second season feels like it swallowed the emo half whole, then choked when it tried to down the fun.

Watching The Sandman Season Two felt eerily similar to my third attempt to re-read Tolkien’s The Silmarillion at 2am in my underheated uni dorm. You know there’s profundity in those pages – or in this case, on that screen – but the act of parsing it feels like wading through black treacle while a waifish man in eyeliner whispers melancholy riddles into your ear.

The Mopey Monarch Returns: Morpheus, Emo King of Pretension

We rejoin Morpheus, aka Dream, aka Tom Sturridge’s cheekbones in a trenchcoat, as he embarks on quests that should be glorious. He journeys to rescue Nada, the lover he condemned to hell ten millennia ago, attempts family therapy with his endlessly bickering cosmic siblings, and rearranges mythologies with a casual god-tier flick of his pale fingers. All these plot beats should explode with imaginative bravura, like when American Gods gave us gods eating roadside diner pie, or Good Omens dropped an Aziraphale/Crowley slow-burn to melt the internet.

Instead, Sturridge delivers every line like he’s reading a Tumblr breakup poem in 2007. He has the perfect bone structure for Gaiman’s goth prince – sculpted, ethereal, eternally just out of reach – but the performance is so committed to weary detachment that it drains even his grandest moments of their wonder.

I half-expected him to pull out an acoustic guitar and croon a cover of The Killing Moon in his dream castle’s underlit halls. The production design knows exactly what it’s doing – all shadowy corridors, Gothic arches, and candlelight filtered through eternal mist – but it often feels like a Hot Topic photoshoot rather than a stage for the universe’s subconscious ruler.

Pretension, Thy Name Is Morpheus

One moment in particular, when Dream utters, “Tales and dreams are the shadow truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes and forgot,” made me pause Netflix, lean back in my chair, and whisper to the empty living room: “Bro. Are you okay?”

Gaiman’s original line works on paper, nestled among panels of stylised mythological art, but spoken aloud in a doom-laden monotone, it lands with the tragic pomp of a motivational Instagram account for depressed goths.

Even when Morpheus tears through myths, reshaping hell’s dominion or granting Shakespeare creative immortality, it feels like he’s ticking off chores on an immortal to-do list. The meta-mythic potential of The Sandman – to reveal storytelling as the ultimate magic – becomes diluted under a fug of pretension, as if the scriptwriters were so focused on sounding profound they forgot stories also need to pulse with life.

Of Gods, Myths, and Thor’s Underwhelming Hammer

Take the scene where Thor’s hammer is reduced to dust. On paper, this is wild. In the show, Morpheus reacts with the weary affect of a man finding out his Uber Eats order is missing extra ketchup. The entire Asgardian arc has all the high drama of an admin email chain: dry, perfunctory, no sense of wonder.

Even the visual nod to Freddie Fox’s Loki as Billy Idol cosplaying a Norse trickster ends up feeling like an in-joke nobody laughed at. Where American Gods felt like Neil Gaiman’s LSD dream of modern myth, The Sandman Season Two often feels like his caffeine withdrawal nightmare.

Orpheus, Eurydice, and The Talking Head That Should Have Saved It All

Mid-season, the series tackles the tragic myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, reimagining Orpheus as Morpheus’s estranged son. This should be a rich seam to mine: betrayal, love, grief, the cosmic cruelty of gods meddling in mortal fates. Instead, it lands with the emotional resonance of a Wikipedia summary, despite Ruairi O’Connor’s best efforts to imbue Orpheus with more humanity than his father ever displays.

Then there’s the talking severed head. I won’t spoil its grimly comedic potential, but let’s just say its entire existence screams “Look! Something cool and edgy!” rather than earning the moment through narrative gravitas or genuine horror.

Steve Coogan, Sarcastic Dogs, and the Void of Humour

Even Steve Coogan voicing a sarcastic dog – which on paper should be the kind of sly comedic relief this series desperately needs – is buried under dialogue so unfunny that you can almost hear him trying to ad-lib behind the scenes, only for the production to cut him off. He deserves better. The audience deserves better.

Is This The Death of Modern Fantasy?

I don’t think The Sandman Season Two is a failure because it’s too ambitious. It fails because it mistakes solemnity for depth, pretension for poetry, and hushed monotone for gravitas. Fantasy is, above all, an invitation to feel wonder. To feel terror. To feel anything other than the dreary sense you’re being preached at by a particularly verbose funeral director.

Verdict

The Sandman Season Two is a beautiful hollow nightmare – visually luscious, conceptually fascinating, but emotionally inert. Its greatest tragedy is not Dream’s immortal loneliness, nor Nada’s eternal damnation, nor Orpheus’s severed head. It’s that a show about the raw chaos of our subconscious minds ends up feeling like a lifeless aesthetic moodboard.

If you want mythic grandeur laced with humour and human warmth, go rewatch Good Omens. If you want to feel like you’ve fallen asleep in a black velvet coffin while a sad boy reads Nietzsche aloud… welcome home.