"The Sandman," Netflix's adaptation of Neil Gaiman's seminal comic book, is here, and it's pretty spectacular. It's also really odd; the story is about a family of concepts who are also god-like beings known as the Endless; Dream, played to moody perfection by Tom Sturridge, is the one we spend the most time with. I ended up really enjoying it and hope it catches on, in part because I want to see the rest of the comic; there's a lot of good stuff in the issues to come.
For instance, there's an episode in this first season where Dream travels to Hell and plays a game of imagination against Lucifer, played by "Game of Thrones" veteran Gwendoline Christie. Dream wins and humiliates the Lord of Hell, after which she swears revenge. That plot moves forward in the "Season of Mists" arc from the comics, and Gaiman himself can barely wait to adapt it for television, as he told Variety:
I take too much f**king pleasure in saying to people who do not know anything about what's coming up in Sandman, "If we do Season 2, we're going to be having the rematch and Morpheus is going to be going back to hell. And Lucifer has some surprises in store that Morpheus is not expecting." And they are all like, "Ahh!" And I'm like, "Yeah, and I know how that's going to work, and you don't. And everybody who's ever read "Season of Mists" knows how that's going to work and you don't. But that's good because not everybody will have read "Season of Mists" and this is going to be so much fun.
In all, there are 10 volumes of "The Sandman" comic. The first season adapted the first two, "Preludes and Nocturnes" and "The Doll's House." Next on tap are "Dream Country" and "Season of Mists."
Neil Gaiman has grand plans for adapting the rest of "The Sandman"
And ideally, fans want to see the whole thing adapted, as does Gaiman. "Well, we told the first 400 pages of a 3,000-page arc in the first 10 episodes. So there's a kind of a 'you do the math' on that," he said. "But then the other answer is, how long is a piece of string? What we know that we would like to do, in a perfect world, as long as the audience is there and people come out for it and people want it, is we want to tell the whole story of Sandman that went through to 'The Wake.' And after that we want to tell 'Sandman: Overture,' and somewhere in there, possibly, even as a special or whatever, we'd love to do things like 'The Dream Hunters.' We quite probably weave the stories that are in 'Sandman: Endless Nights' into the body of the whole. What is nice is we have the entirety of Sandman to draw on."
We also have the "Death" books. It might be great to go off and do one of those as a sideline, in addition to which, anybody who has seen "Sandman" Episode 3 has sidled over to us at some point or other in the last six months and said, "Do you think there's any possibility that we could do a Johanna Constantine show with Jenna Coleman?" And, oh my God, she's a star and you just want to see her going through battling demons and destroying other people's lives. So that's in there, too. We can keep going on this for a long time to come.
But this isn't us going, it's eight season exactly and then out — or five seasons and out. We want to tell the story. Which feels wonderfully familiar for me, because when I was writing "Sandman," people go, "So how long does Sandman go?" And I'd go, "I don't know, maybe Issue #50?" And I'd be at Issue #50, and go, "I don't know, Issue #75, maybe?" But when you get there, there's still be more story to tell after that.
There is indeed a lot of material to draw on, although we haven't heard anything about a renewal yet. I have all my fingers and toes and arms and legs crossed.
In the meantime, producer David S. Goyer told Den of Geek that the team was working on scripts for Season 2 whether or not it's ordered. "In some ways, it's easier because we've educated the audience to the basic ideas," he said. "We've shown how the dreaming life can affect the waking world."
There are also some key characters we have yet to see, including a couple members of Dream's Endless family; we've met Dream, Death, Desire and Despair, but I won't be satisfied until we also see Destiny, Delirium and Destruction. "Right now, what we're doing is every time I think of or run into or pass or notice an actor who could be either a Destruction or a Delirium, [producer Allan Heinberg] gets an email," Gaiman said.
