Sandman season 1 throwback review: I walked through his death, before the Dreaming began

Disclaimer: This isn’t just a review—it’s a return. Like Sandman itself, this piece blurs the line between memory and myth, criticism and confession. It was written by someone who didn’t just read The Sound of Her Wings—she lived it, once, in black clothes and record stores, when Death looked a little too familiar in the mirror. What follows is part analysis, part elegy, part love letter to a story that never really left. Read it not as a verdict, but as a dream remembered.

The girl who looked like Death

I didn’t find Sandman. Sandman found me.

It was the early ’90s, and I was the kind of girl who walked through the world in black. Pale, quiet, always sketching in notebooks and haunting record shops like they were cathedrals. One day, the owner of my favorite store looked at me, picked up a single issue—The Sandman #8, The Sound of Her Wings—and handed it to me. “You need to read this,” he said. “You look like her.” And he wasn’t just talking about appearance.

A pale black-haired gothic girl in the '90s was hardly an exception. It was common even. However, I got what he meant after I read it. It was something deeper. Something in the way I moved, the way I felt the world. Something that made me, somehow, part of that story before I even opened the page.

To this day, if I had to save just one story—no matter how impossible that choice might be—it would probably be this one. Or A Dream of a Thousand Cats. It’s confusing. It’s painful to choose. But these two? They’ve always been my favorites. Not just in the series. In everything. That's why the onirically animated episode A Dreamof a Thousand Cats will have a review of its own.

Sandman to screen adaptation: A dream decades in the making

For years, Sandman was considered unfilmable. A cult classic, yes. A masterpiece, definitely. But how do you adapt something that defies category? That weaves mythology, horror, fantasy, and philosophy into a single, sprawling epic?

You wait. And when the time is right, you let the story return.

Netflix’s Sandman does what so many thought impossible: it honors the original while reshaping it for now. It doesn’t modernize for the sake of it—it lets the world catch up to what the comic was already saying decades ago. And what it says still matters. About dreams. About death. About identity. About how stories, once told, never really end.

The adaptation is quiet in its confidence. It doesn’t scream its brilliance. It unfolds, episode by episode, like the turning of ancient pages. Like Destiny himself turnigthe ancient pages of his book. And somehow, it feels just right.

When the Endless meet the screen

You can’t tell Sandman stories without giving life to The Dreaming. And in this adaptation, the Dreaming breathes. Every frame is filled with atmosphere—sometimes lush and surreal, sometimes stark and aching. The aesthetic is deeply respectful of Dave McKean’s chaotic poetry, yet grounded in something wholly cinematic.

Tom Sturridge is the dream made flesh. His Morpheus isn’t loud or showy—he listens. He broods. He commands with silence and mourns with restraint. His voice, his stillness, his presence—it’s exactly what you imagine when reading the comic, yet somehow more.

But it’s Kirby Howell-Baptiste who steals entire hearts as Death. She doesn’t float—she walks. She doesn’t judge—she understands. Her kindness is vast, but never condescending. She simply exists, as necessary and inevitable as gravity.

Then comes Desire, played with chilling elegance by Mason Alexander Park. Seductive, cruel, amused, dangerous. And perfectly non-binary—not as a plot point, but as identity. As existence. As power. Just like in the original comic series, in wich Neil Gaiman introduced the first non-binary character when this term had not even been coined yet.

Desire, nightmares, and everything in between

The Endless aren’t characters. They’re forces. Archetypes in motion. And this Netflix adaptation never forgets that. It’s why moments like Death gently guiding a man through his final breath or Dream mourning his raven hit so hard. They’re not just emotional—they’re mythic.

And then there’s the Corinthian. With his unsettling charm and eye-filled smile, he represents every nightmare we don’t want to wake up from. Boyd Holbrook plays him with a chilling magnetism that somehow makes him one of the most watchable villains in recent TV. Terrifyingly awesome.

Still, it’s not just the spectacle or the horror that lingers. It’s the quiet stories. The ones where nothing explodes, but everything matters. The quiet friendship in The Sound of Her Wings. The immortal bond in Men of Good Fortune. The heartbreaking stillness of A Dream of a Thousand Cats, told in delicate animation and whispered prophecy.

That last one? It deserves its own altar. And we’ll get there.

What is a story, if not a dream we keep telling?

Sandman was always about stories. About the way we carry them. How they shape us, trap us, save us. This adaptation never loses sight of that. It understands that stories are what we become when the waking world stops making sense.

Season 1 is not just a faithful adaptation. However "different" from the comics it might be, it is still a faithfull adaption. It’s a meditation. A poem. A memory. It trusts the audience to feel instead of being told. To see beyond plot. To listen to silence. To walk into the Dreaming with open eyes.

For those of us who had been waiting—for decades, through rumors and false starts—this series isn’t just a win. It’s a resurrection. And now, the second and final season is coming.

We walked through his death long before the Dreaming began. And now, at last, the Dream returns.

Controversies aside—whatever your stance on Neil Gaiman’s public persona—the second season is on its way. And both the Dreaming and the waking world can’t wait for it.

Rating: 5 out of 5 moments where Morpheus feeds the pigeons.