It’s time. Putting the three episodes worth of wheel spinning, narrative hand holding and stilted production behind us, this week The Sandman finally kicks into high gear as Dream ventures into Hell and confronts Lucifer Morningstar in order to retrieve his helm, the second of his lost vestments. Right? I mean, right, like that’s how this has to go. There’s no way they screwed up the Hell episode, right?

Sigh. Spoilers ahead, but you damn well knew that.

I went out of my way last week to highlight the fact that I really did enjoy something vaguely original that this show did by introducing Matthew the Raven in this early part of Dream’s story. It gave Dream a companion during these chapters where he would be otherwise alone and, at least in the comics, his thought process in the comics would relayed primarily through narration. By bringing Matthew’s introduction forward, the show has given Tom Sturridge’s Dream someone to converse with and build a rapport with and generally think out loud around, especially here as he enters Hell. It’s something this episode had to lean on as they had to cut the cameo from Etrigan the Demon, who originally lead Dream into Hell in the comic, and it’s not like they could beef up Squatterbloat’s role anymore than they have here anyway so giving Sturridge someone to have a bit of a rapport with was a welcome decision in my eyes.

The problem is that the dialogue between the two is so trite and so emblematic of every single narrative handholding problem this series has had since the very beginning. I mean, you have Matthew right there to liven things up with Dream as they enter Hell and as they move through the suicide forest and you use that time to have Sturridge rattle off some dreadful exposition about who Lucifer is and how Dream knows them as if the audience has never heard of the Devil before? Forgetting for a moment that there’s been a separate TV show loosely adapting the “Lucifer” comic that spun out of “The Sandman” that’s been running for the past six years, but this is a show about the Dream King and his Nightmare Realms and his Endless siblings and he’s walking through Hell talking to a raven and if you think the audience needs to be babied into understanding who the Devil is then who the hell are you even writing this show for? I can feel the death knell of writing to test audiences hanging over so much of this show and it’s killing whatever small amount of life might be able to seep out through the cracks of the braindead production.

And that’s on top of the absolutely atrocious moment in that suicide forest where Squatterbloat disappears just so the show can have the excuse to point out all the moaning bodies in the trees to Dream and, by extension, us. It’s like having Gaiman sitting on the couch next to me while I try to focus on reading the comics over him nudging me in the ribs and pointing at the panels going “Ey? Ey? Innit scary? Innit all spooky? Ey?” and I just cannot believe this is the show he signed off on. There’s simply no subtlety or nuance to any of the horror present throughout this storyline and when the show could have definitely used the time to build some suspense and dread, they instead just point to a creepy thing in the set dressing before moving on.

That being said, everything with John Dee in this episode actually works for me! Imagine that, something in this show actually succeeded at being good television. I credit a lot of this to David Thewlis himself, who seems to be the only person in this absolutely packed cast of all-stars to be embodying a fully fleshed out character instead of just coldly reciting lines in costume. This b-plot to the episode is a folding in of what elements of the comics’s fifth issue, ‘Passengers,’ would be viable for the show since Dream spends most of that issue talking to the Justice League about how to find John Dee and his ruby. What the show focuses on instead is the car ride John takes with woman named Rosemary, who he takes hostage, which plays out a lot differently than it does in the comic and, for a change, actually improves the material a great deal. See, in the comic, John’s car ride with Rosemary is played for some pretty dark comedy heightened by John’s far more ghastly character design and the fact that the whole thing is done at the end of a gun barrel.

The show smartly deviates away from this and plays a slowburn, rising tension throughout the episode as John slowly unravels before Rosemary’s eyes from a seemingly helpless and doddering old man into a quietly menacing figure holding her hostage through sheer force of will. It’s actually the first example of the show ramping up the horror of a sequence over how it’s presented in the comics and it’s anchored by Thewlis’s performance. He really seems to have a holistic grasp of his character and has this uncomfortably domineering presence despite how soft spoken and sort of aimlessly dishevelled he is which slowly but surely reveals glimpses of the horrors dwelling within him, plastered over with layer after layer of trauma and pain which only makes what is to come even more harrowing. At least, I certainly hope it will, because Thewlis is honestly the only thing this half of the season has going for it and that’s about to wrap up in the next episode so I really hope this show can pull it together for the latter half.

While I’m on a roll for pointing out things I liked, I think this episode nailed the scene introducing Nada. This is, surprisingly, quite an important scene for how short it is and how otherwise detached it is from the rest of the goings on in Hell. See, this is our first real glimpse at the skeletons in Dream’s closet, at the many terrible decisions he’s made in his long existence that still hang over him to this day. While this first arc is largely about stripping this beyond God-like being of his power, shackling him to mortality and then allowing the audience to follow him on his quest to rebuild himself, the series would eventually become an examination of whether something so immutable as a constant concept could grow or change. He may be Endless, but can he not feel? Can he not regret? Can he not evolve?

This scene is the beginning of the thesis statement that would go on to define the comic series as a whole and the fact that the show nails it is, honestly, pretty surprising to me at this point. I was half expecting the Corinthian to show up in her cell or something. But, no, the emotions are all on point and Deborah Oyelade is incredibly affecting as Nada despite how little screentime this scene actually amounts to. Both her and Ernest Kingsley Junior’s turn as Dream’s form of Kai’ckul, as seen from Nada’s perspective, hit the high emotions of the scene in a way that no other actors have managed in any of the episodes so far. It feels like a scene from a much more different, much better show.

So, naturally, they had to go and ruin it. You couldn’t have just let their scene and their acting and their emotions speak for themselves, could you, you just had to have Matthew ask Dream the most obvious, most braindead questions so that Dream could strip any intrigue or mystery from the encounter. They craft this incredibly interpretation of such a key scene in the comics and shoot themselves in the foot not two minutes later by having the characters say all of the subtext (if you can even call it that) out loud for the benefit of the layaudience at home instead of trusting them to sit on and ponder on what they just saw play out. It’s yet another act of sheer storytelling cowardice from a show that’s supposed to be about the power of bloody storytelling!

Man, how did a roadtrip with a mental patient and his hostage pull focus in an episode where Gwendoline Christie shows up as Lucifer Morningstar? Well, probably because she’s the only thing worth writing home about during this entire sequence. Even the fact that the show has rearranged things so Dream faces Lucifer in the Oldest Game can’t do anything to make their visualisation of Hell, its denizens and the game itself anywhere near as interesting as it was in the original comics. This visualisation of Hell as nothing but dark brass, bronze and grey ash with a modicum of red lighting is just so lifeless and carries with it all of the staging problems I’ve breathlessly documented so far. It’s stilted and stock and I’m honestly running out of ways to describe how boring it is seeing these incredibly talented actors stand absolutely still on their marks and trade what are supposed to menace dripped barbs with all of the conviction of bad video game acting from the early days of FMVs. It’s genuinely tiring having to document how much this show does not live up to the grandiose spectacle evoked by the artwork of the comics. Just the difference between the incredible two-page spread of the summoning of the demons in the comic against the bland crowd shots of out of focus figures in the show does more to show the discrepancy than I could ever put in words.

And you know who comes out the worst of all of this? Bloody Chronozon! Like, if you were going to have Lucifer replace him in the game, at least make him half as interesting looking or feeling as we was in the comic to compensate for it. No hot pink skin, no weird double mouth thing, no pizzazz to his MC moment of explaining the rules to the game, no nothing. I’ve said before that this show seems to have no interest in any of the visual design of the comics that they couldn’t turn into branding and this is the worst example yet. I mean, you have the High Duke of the Eight Circle right there and he’s just some guy? Again, the mental patient in his pyjamas was more interesting than this and he was the b-plot! It’s not even his episode! This was the Hell episode and the Hell stuff is the least interesting part! I wish I had more that I could say about this, but at this point it feels like I’m just regurgitating the same points over and over. It’s boring, it’s stock, it’s visionless. Not even Gwendoline Christie in black leather and bat wings can save this from feeling like a bargain basement Sci-Fi Channel project that does not look anywhere close to how expensive it actually was. And the cut Beelzebub and Azazel. Ugh.

Listen. I told you from the jump that this show was going to have some pretty high expectations to live up to from yours truly. This is a comic I have been downright obsessed with for the past two goddamn decades and I have a full tattoo sleeve of the Endless to show for it. This was the comic that convinced me to become a writer. This was the comic that made me understand the vital necessity and the sheer power of storytelling. This comic fundamentally changed the course of my life and I have spent all of that time trying and failing to convince people to read this silly little fantasy comic from the 90s that’s not quite DC but not not DC and this show was supposed to be the thing that I could point people to in lieu of that. Instead, I feel the need to constantly defend my position as someone who loves the comic this is based on that this show is barely a representation of what made me fall in love with it.

Now, I know, it’s far too early to be calling time of death on this whole affair and, really, we’re still a whole episode away from wrapping up this first half of the season, but this is honestly the worst foot the show could have gotten off on. I’m not even disappointed for me, really. I knew I was never going to like this show as much as I like the comic. For one, I’m not fourteen anymore and I don’t have the wide eyed idealism I had then. For two, try as it might, this show was never going to replace the comic, regardless of its quality. What I wanted from it was something that could co-exist alongside the comic. A show I could point people to when they ask what my tattoos are and actually feel good about recommending as their first foray into this world. After these four episodes, instead, I want to warn as many people off it as possible. I’ve heard it gets better as it goes on, sure, but does that mean we should have to suffer through half a dozen half baked episodes where no one really seems to know what kind of a show their in and only has the barest grasp of the material they’re adapting in the first place? I don’t know. At least we’ve got ’24/7′ up next and, if nothing else, I’ll get to enjoy the last of what David Thewlis has to give to this show before, inevitably, things become even more focused on the Corinthian.

sworn to protect a world that hates and fears her, august has been writing critically about media for close to a decade. a critic and a poet who's first love is the superhero comic, she is also a podcaster, screamlord and wyrdsmith. ask her about the unproduced superman screenplays circa 1992 to 2007. she/they.

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