Spoilers

“Sleep of the Just”

Sunday Morning Sidewalk started a new series this week, The Sandman, from Netflix. Based on a classic DC Comics comic book from Neil Gaiman, The Sandman was a show that I had always intended to watch, but just never got around to doing. It has eleven episodes on Netflix so it will be our new Sunday Morning Sidewalk into early June.

At least, that is the current schedule. I do hope that the remainder of The Sandman is an improvement over this first episode, because I was not very impressed with it.

Before I go into the negatives, the show looked absolutely amazing. The visuals were stunning and it was clear that this show did not skimp on a budget for it.

However, there was so much exposition that I had a difficult time keeping my focus on the story the show was telling. It bounced around at first and did not establish the feel well. Then, the story moved on to Charles Dance, a well known character actor playing a man named Roderick Burgess, who was able to capture Morpheus in some contraption. He then holds him for ten years.

The problem with this was that Burgess’s motivation was very muddy. Did he want his deceased son back from the dead or did he want immortality and wealth? It seemed as if he wanted all of that in order to free Morpheus. Poor Morpheus had to lay inside this glass container naked for such a long time. Get the man a blanket at least.

Then there was another son, Alex, who was ignored and verbally abused by Burgess. Alex accidentally killed his father and then he held on to Morpheus for an undetermined amount of time. The world suffered from some kind of sleep sickness, but the show really did not go into any specifics on that.

Oh, Boyd Holbrook is here too, as some kind of figure that opposes Morpheus. IMDB tells me his name is The Corinthian. I was not a Sandman comics reader so I do not know whom that was. He seemed to be a potential future antagonist. Not sure why.

The story of this episode was a mess and I was very disappointed in the show. The main story of the Burgess family did not grasp my attention and did not seem to be a worth story to kick off this series with. Again, I do not know if this is a vital comic storyline adapted or if this was completely new for the series, but I did not enjoy it much.

I do hope this gets better as it moves along or else I might have to looking into the possibility of adjusting the Sunday Morning Sidewalk schedule.