The Sandman: Episodes 7 to 10

Of the two story arcs, I would have guessed that The Doll’s House would work better than Preludes and Nocturnes. Having finished season 1 of The Sandman, I’d say I was wrong. Episodes 3-6 were the strongest parts of the show.

The Doll’s House is still good television but it is also the show settling down to tell a more conventional story. I won’t recount the plot. If you know the comic book, you know the basic premise and if you don’t (and haven’t seen the show) it’s better as a surprise. It’s clearly in the same space as the first six episodes but despite a whole hotel full of serial killers, it’s less horror orientated and more, well, Gaimanesque.

There are changes. The lingering connections to DC’s superhero universe have largely been cut. That requires a new plot line for Lyta Hall and for that to work The Sandman is tracking down a different (and singular) nightmare rather than the unmemorable duo in the comic. The Corinthian is still on the loose of course and Stephen Fry is frankly inevitable as Gilbert. Yes, he’s very Stephen Fry but if they had cast somebody else they’d have ended up sounding like they were doing a Stephen Fry impression.

But cramming the story into four episodes results in a lot of up-front plot explanation. The mechanics of Rose Walker somehow being a threat to the Dreaming needs regular explanation because it is essentially an arbitrary thing. That didn’t feel forced in the comics because, well, it is dream logic. Here, there was less trust of the audience and I feel things got over-explained. Whereas, the time shift created odd issues like Unity Kincaid would have to be well over a hundred years old, which went unremarked upon — which on one level is fine, weirder things happen, but also just strange not to mention it.

I think the story needed maybe another episode to breathe and be a bit more mysterious and with less enforced explanation. Having said that, it also just feels like a very 1990’s Vertigo comic book story. Likewise, the “cereal” convention had a clever element back when the story came out of both tapping into the trend at the time for serial killer stories while also repudiating the obsession with them in popular culture. I’m not sure the idea works as well 30+ years later.

An additional constraint is that The Doll’s House has a lot to do. The broader arc of Morpheus’s story as well as the arc A Game of You have their roots in this story. I think that added to the addition of explanations to stitch the multiple parts together.

I enjoyed this arc but I didn’t find it as compelling as the first part of the season. Sturridge continues to grow into the role and he is doing well conveying Morpheus’s self-centredness and lack of consideration for others.