“You could have stayed the course. You could have carried on as you were. But you changed. And when one of the Endless changes, well, that changes everything,” says Stephen Fry in a late episode of the final season of Netflix’s The Sandman, all episodes of which are available this week.
He is speaking, of course, to Morpheus (Tom Sturridge), the King of Dreams, whose quest to make amends for all of his past wrongdoings has brought him to the edge of death itself.
Though its characters are gods or beings beyond gods, and the plots that make up its arc are derived from world myth and legend, The Sandman is, fundamentally, a story about a man learning how to be a better person.
In every episode of the show, like every volume of the comic source material, Morpheus reluctantly but gamely faces the challenge of doing what he knows is morally right, even if, eventually, it dooms him. Over the course of the tale, he evolves from someone who routinely shirks his responsibilities and his realm to someone who is more than willing to free a person from an eternity of torture, even if he gets nothing in return.
Every member of the Endless—Dream’s dysfunctional family—is a metaphysical aspect that defines some opposite force of the universe: you can’t have one without the other, and without one, the other loses its significance. Dream’s sister Death defines life. Dream himself defines reality. And the reality—our reality—is that The Sandman’s journey of cosmic self-improvement was authored by a man whose alleged actions in his personal life have left a bad taste in the mouths of former fans for whom his work was once precious and profound.
Last year, a group of women came forward on the Tortoise Media podcast Master: The Allegations Against Neil Gaiman to accuse the author of unwanted and unsafe sexual advances towards them. In January of this year, Vulture published a lengthy article further detailing the accounts of four of these women along with four more accusers, painting a damning image of an influential man on a power trip willing to abuse the fandom culture around himself and his work to violate those less powerful (and quite a bit younger) than he. Gaiman’s subsequent statement on the matter validated the odd sexual situation, but denied that there was ever any abuse.
The disappointment experienced by certain corners of the internet through all of this was tangible. Comparisons to fellow genre auteur Joss Whedon were rampant: here, again, another artist whose work meant so much to so many, whose stories dramatized the hard victories of good over evil, accused of being just the sort of monster his beloved characters would have battled against.
Netflix, in the middle of ramping up a promotional campaign for The Sandman, released a statement that the second season, half of which was released at the beginning of July and the other half of which drops this week, was always meant to be the last. (Knowing Netflix’s pattern of canceling shows after two or three seasons, this checked out anyway, but Season 2 does indeed adapt the rest of the comic, ending with the end of the final issue.)
What do you do with great art or works based on great art by people whose true selves you no longer trust? Plenty has already been written about this issue in a broad sense, and plenty has also already been written about Gaiman specifically. The Sandman TV series—thankfully, I suppose—isn’t nearly good enough to watch “anyway,” even without all this baggage.
Season 2 is about as good as the first, which is to say, visually drab, tonally sleepy (so to speak), and narratively both too fast and too slow, somehow, focusing too much energy on endless monologues and dull conversations and not enough on really developing this world or the characters in it past a certain point.
So, the show is doubly skippable: a “just okay” adaptation of a groundbreaking work of literature by an author whose work has now been tainted by the sort of accusations we dread being leveled against our favorite creators. Gaiman is talented. The Sandman comic is one of the best works of graphic storytelling ever written. Now, though, engaging with it in any form carries an immense discomfort, a crushing disappointment.
Separating Gaiman, who fashioned himself from the early days of his career as a tall, dark-haired innovator who favored long dark coats, from Morpheus, a tall, dark-haired personification of imagination often dressed in long black robes, is impossible. It’s a bizarre feeling to watch or read a story about a man determined at all costs to right his cosmic wrongs, knowing that it’s possible that the very creator of this story is capable of the same or even worse behavior, and denies responsibility for it. It’s enough to make you wish it was all a bad dream.
