To paraphrase Shakespeare, “I come to bury Sandman. Not to praise it.”

I debated whether or not I wanted to write about this show. Certainly I found myself in little mood to watch The Sandman Season 2 given what we now know about the show’s creator. (If you do not know, by chance, you can read the details here, but I advise against doing so if you have eaten recently.) And yet, I was given screener access, and thus was obligated to write something.

My conflict is, I suspect, the same as many other people to whom The Sandman holds special significance. On the one hand, I do not want to promote the creator. On the other, I feel bad for all the artists who put their hearts and souls into this adaptation and would praise their work, if it were worthy of praise.

It didn’t help that I read two excellent arguments for and against watching or covering the show the day before the embargo lifted. Alex Zalben wrote an excellent piece about why, in this case, we cannot separate the art from the artist for the sake of the other artists. Conversely, Sonya of Felines and Final Girls, makes a compelling case for why it is important to honor the feminist stories at the heart of The Sandman in defiance of the creator’s hypocrisy.

Ultimately, I decided to watch it because the screener copy I had would not add to the streams of the show. More, I thought that I might deliver a verdict on behalf of those who were curious, but were too heavy hearted to go into the world of The Dreaming one more time. Finally, I felt the need to mourn what this franchise meant to me and bid it farewell.

The first six episodes of The Sandman Season 2 break neatly into two halves. The first three are a fairly faithful adaptation of Season of Mist. The next three are a fairly faithful adaptation of Brief Lives. There are a few changes to the narrative, with characters eliminated or combined for the sake of story flow. However, the tale of Morpheus, how he is charged with stewardship of Hell, and how he goes on a quest to find his brother, Destruction, is largely untouched.

Most of the changes serve two main purposes. The first is sneaking adaptations of various one-shot comics into the show. The best example of this comes in Episode 3, “More Devils Than Vast Hell Can Hold,” which contains an adaptation of the World Fantasy Award winner “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” This comes after Morpheus runs into the fae maiden Nuala and she reminds him of how they first met years earlier when her people last traveled to Earth to watch Shakespeare stage his fairy play. This in itself is a neat retcon of the comics, for Nuala logically should have been present for that story, but was not because she wasn’t created until later.

The second purpose of the changes is eliminating those aspects of the original comics that have aged poorly in the past three decades. One example of this is how they change the circumstances of Nada, the queen whom Morpheus condemned to Hell when she would not marry him. Here, Nada is given more agency, in that she chooses to go to Hell as penance for bringing about her people’s destruction through her forbidden love of Morpheus. This is consistent with the belief in Vertigo Comics that you only go to Hell if you think you deserve to go there. However, Dream still blames her for rejecting him and denying his efforts to save her.

The writers of these episodes (who do not include the creator) deserve praise for capturing the spirit of the original stories. In many cases, they improve upon them, and give the supporting cast greater depth. And every actor takes advantage of these moments perfectly. My favorite involves Mason Alexander Park as Desire, who dresses down Dream for his callous attitude after allowing a club full of innocent mortals to die for the sake of his quest. Granted said mortals were in a strip club, which is practically a temple of Desire, but just because Desire is selfish does not mean they are wrong. Particularly when they throw Morpheus’ words from Season 1 about how mortals should not be their playthings back at him.

Unfortunately, the decision to try and compress the original story into a single season still leaves the whole thing feeling rushed. While the sets and costumes still look gorgeous, things feel notably smaller scale and lower budget. The one example of this that stood out to me most was Delirium. In the comics, her appearance and clothing are ever changing. Here, she maintains a single costume for all of Brief Lives and it’s a surprisingly sedate one.

Ultimately, I am glad I did watch The Sandman Season 2, Part 1. I do not, however, feel any need to watch it a second time. Nor do I feel the need to assign it a rating or to write about the rest of the season to come. It is a fine piece of work and the people involved in the adaptation should be proud of what they have done. Hopefully they will all go on to work on more worthy projects.