Only eps 1-->6
From someone who has not read the original story !!!
I got tired of it, I was expecting wow-scenes, effects and magic, dreams... but instead only a small, very small part is magical, the rest is sad, or cruel... I don't know, I kept at it for a while, but got bored.
s1e1- Sleep of the just
Roderick is an old, bad man. Already the fact that he was the leader of a ‘cult’ and had even his young son call him Mage said it all. He lost his oldest son, the only one he cared about, and now wants to perform some kind of magic ritual to capture Death and order him to give him his son back.
Lord Morpheus, Dream of the Endless, is in the waking world about to capture Corinthian, a nightmare who escaped his realm of dreams to kill humans, but before he can do it he is captured by the ritual and brought to Roderick’s mansion. Roderick takes his Tools away.
Corinthian is quite happy to leave him a prisoner, so he advises Roderick on how to do it so that he can’t escape. Morpheus never speaks to anyone, and Roderick won’t set him free unless he gives him something in return, like his son, or immortality…
Nobody, not him or his son, seems to care all that much, if at all, that since they captured him so many people started to being unable to fall asleep, or remained trapped in their sleep…
The son doesn’t like it, and seems like he would gladly set him free, but he’s a weak, useless thing, and shoots Jessamy, the raven that tried to free Dream.
Ethel became Roderick’s lover, maybe for his power or his money or both, but when she gets pregnant and he orders her to get rid of the baby without giving her a choice at all, she escapes. She steals money and Dream’s tools and flees.
After Roderick dies, his son does not free Dream, afraid of his vengeance. Many years later, his parter is pushing his wheelchair when he ruins the magic circle around Dream’s glass cage - I don’t know how intentional it was, but he certainly knew he had done it, and said nothing. Dream is able to enter the dream of one of the two guards, who shoots at his cage freeing him.
Dream goes back to his real, to find it almost empty and in ruins. Only Lucienne stayed behind, knowing he would come back.
s1e2 - Imperfect hosts
Lucienne has faith in Morpheus, she tells him she never felt abandoned and knew he’d be back, so she stayed, even being a Royal Librarian without a library anymore.
Morpheus doesn’t have the power to do much without his tools, so he plans to get them back.
Lucienne suggests asking for his siblings’ help, like Destiny or Desire, but he points out that they knew for sure what happened to him and no one tried to help him. He gains a bit of power back by vanishing a Gargoyle he created, Cain and Abel’s pet Gregory. (So Cain and Abel live in his realm but are not created by him…I thought everything there was created by him… were they created by people? Or are just… there, like his subjects?…. I’m not too clear on that…
So, with that bit of power he looks for offering - he takes some stuff from people’s dreams…? but then he only gives a snake to the Fates he calls forth. He gives an egg to Abel (he finds it as soon as he wakes up and climbs out of his graves, after Cain killed him again), so they will raise a new baby gargoyle.
He asks three questions to the Fates, and has three answers. Rather vague, but still that’s something, so he can start his search. He plans to go after the pouch of sand first, sold to a woman in London, then his elm, now a demon has it.
We see Ethel again, who looks rather well considering how many years have passed. Corinthian goes to see her, wanting to know about the Tools - he can’t use them but doesn’t want Dream to have them back. The ruby wan taken by her son; the ruby can give life to dreams and nightmares, and she says than in turn the ruby took her son. We see later that he is now locked up in a prison/hospital.
Corinthian attempts to harm her, but she traded the elm with a demon for some stone of Protection, so he is vanished instead. He ends up back in the ream of dreams, but since Morpheus already left, he is free to go away again.
s1e3 - Dream a little dream of me
Dream goes to London to find Constantine (constant-i-n) who works as an exorcist. She’s rather sad and bitter, not exactly likeable, and plagued by a nasty nightmare that doesn’t let her rest. At first she doesn’t even want to talk to him, then she understands, and maybe hopes he’ll help her rest. Anyway, she tells him that she left him the pouch with the sand with someone… for some time she lived with Rachel, then six months ago or something like that she left. Without a word, she got out and never went back, and she left the sand there, since she was never able to use it, never even managed to open the pouch.
They go to Rachel’s house, but she wants to enter alone, expecting a tense encounter, but what she finds is a dream, meaning she dreams instead of seeing reality, and only realises it when Dream arrives to wake her up. She dreamed of a nice reunion, but the reality is: Rachel is in bed with the pouch in her hand, she looks terrible and seems stuck in the dream or something, and Morpheus says that that pouch was never meant for mortals and that she’s still alive only because she’s attached to it, so she will die when he takes the sand back. He gives her a nice ending with a nice dream, and goes out.
A raven, Matthew, has been sent to him even after he repeatedly said he didn’t want one, not after Jessamy died. Matthew is someone who died recently, if I got it right, and was some kind of scoundrel. Anyway, now Dream and Matthew head to Hell to find the elm.
Ethel asks her son John for the ruby, again and again, afraid of when Morpheus will come for it, she’s scared for him, she has her protection, but wants to help him too.
This guy is someone who murdered people thinking it was self defence, and Ethel knows he is a murderer, but still tries to protect him, but John does not give her the ruby, or tell her where it is, or give any indication that he would give it up, he still sound rather obsessed with that ruby and even says that a solution would be to dream a world without Sandman or something like that.
At last she gives up trying and changes her tactics; she wanted to protect him, and she decides to do just that, she gives him her stone of Protection.
!!!
She does, the idiot. Sorry, she’s a mother and she’s sacrificing herself to protect her son, but she’s still a criminal, knowing what he is she’s sort of condemning the world, I understand one’s children come first, but not when they’re crazy murderers!!!!!!!
She insists and insists until he takes it, and she dies in his arms, she was already 116 years old (although looking half of that or less) and ages all at once and dies. Guards arrive, but everyone that tries to stop him, can’t. Anyone who shoots at him dies a horrible horrible death. He goes out, simply walking out the door, and Corinthian gives him a jacket and a good luck.
s1e4 - A hope in hell
John wanders around, crosses the street, is startled by cars and almost hit by one. The driver, Rosemary, stops to worry about him. She sees him in his night attire, in slippers, alone, he says he doesn’t even know where he is, so she offers to drive him whenever he wants to go. She’s very kind and nice, but while they talk he admits first that his mother, when alive, was a thief and a liar, and then that he himself stole something from her and was in prison for that, and for arson, and for murder, and spent 30 years in a psychiatric hospital… no doubt the woman is terrified now, she has a dog in the car and two daughters at home, and when she stops for gas and asks the guy at the counter to call 911, the stone protects him again when the guy shoots at him.
She drives him to the place where he keeps his precious ruby…
In the meantime, Dream has gone to Hell, with the capital H, and brought to Lucifer. He explains why he came but the demon who has his helm refuses to just give it up so Dream challenges him for it. The demon chooses Lucifer as his champion and they… fight? Sort of, with illusions, they say I am a wolf, I am a wolf hunter (and Lucifer feels the wound of the arrow), then a serpent who bites and poisons the horse, than a bird of prey to tear him apart, then bacteria to destroy the bird… stuff like that, you know, then all of a sudden Dream goes all big, I am a world, she (Lucifer) is a supernova, he’s a universe, and she’s anti-life… and he’s down, almost defeated, but Matthew comes to him, tells him that dreams can’t die, not until someone believes in them, and he does believe that Dream will not leave his raven alone in Hell… and Dream gets up and is Hope… and what defeats hope?… She can’t find anything and tells the demon to give him his helm. Dream is rather amicable, of course, thanks him for being honourable, but Lucifer is pissed, tells him dreams have no power in Hell and he has yet to get out, but Dream remarks that what would Hell be is all of them could not dream of Heaven? Which stroke a cord with Lucifer, of course. He may have been pissed off, but Dream gets his helm and can now see where his ruby is, and transports there directly, and finds it, takes it in his hands but senses that something is wrong and the ruby repels him away.
Dream is down on the floor when John enters and takes his ruby, that as he said to his mother is now modified to answer only to him, and walks out to find Rosemary still there. I’m not sure why, but she’s still there to see if he needs a ride somewhere, but he goes away on foot after telling her she’s a good person and giving her his stone of protection, saying nothing will hurt her now and he doesn’t need it anymore because he has his ruby now.
s1e5 - 24/7
John enters a diner and uses the stone to force the people inside it to reveal the truth, stop the lies. There’s a CEO and her husband, a young man named Mark hoping for a big job, a girl sad because her girlfriend broke up with her after she hit her after a fight, the waitress Bette who wants to be a writer and the cook Marsh who turns down her attempts at flirting, and then reveals that he only accepted her invitations to dinner because he liked to eat something cooked for him and then after she fell asleep he had sex with her son, her 21 year-old son. When the husband gets angry at Mark having sex with his wife right there and almost chokes him, Mark kills him. Bette confronts John and he sort of pushes them to hurt and kill themselves (that part wasn’t exactly clear to me, the why they did that), then Dream appears to confront him and John insists he wants to stop the lies. Dream says that they were not lies, they were the dreams that kept those people alive, take away their dreams and their hope and nothing remains.
John wants to kill Dream and take his place, and they ‘fight’ each other in the dream world, and John thinks he’s draining Dream’s life inside the ruby that he then sort of crashes in his hand… ? But then Dream is more powerful than before because by destroying the ruby all the power he had put inside it was released into him again.
Now, the end is cryptic, the raven did ask if he will undo the damage done by the ruby… will he? Or will those people stay dead? Also, was John affecting only the diner or everywhere? A lot of people might be dead..
s1e6 - The sound of her wings
Dream is feeling down, he has accomplished his quest of retrieving his tools and even if now he is more powerful than he ever was, he feels kind of empty, sort of without purpose… so his sister Death approaches him, talks to him and has him follow her around while she meets some new souls… she says that their job, what they do is their purpose, that they do it all for the people, or something like that, and she sort of ‘cheers him up’, between the soul of an infant and that of a young man… well, she also tells him that she missed him, that she knew he was captured instead of her… (and yet not a word on the small issue that nobody tried to help him…)
She seems very much the optimist.
Second half of the episode: already in 1389 Death tried to bring Dream more in contact with people, and had him join her in a tavern, where they heard a man saying that he chooses not to die, and Death grants his wish for Dream’s entertainment, sort of; Dream tells the man that they will meet right there in 100 years and the man Hob (Robert) will tell him how he liked it. Dream bet with his sister that he would be begging for death but no, the man had the time of his life for quite a while, they meet every 100 years in 1489, 1589, 1689, 1789, 1889 and on only one of those occasion the man was at his lowest, but despite having hated the last 80 years he still wanted to live… in 1889 Hob told him that he figured out why they keep meeting, he thinks Dream is lonely and wants some friendship or something, but Dream takes offence and storms out, and Hob yells that if they’ll meet again it will mean that they are friends… and then, in 1989 they didn’t meet. Hob waited and waited, but Dream did not arrive. He could not know that Dream was currently imprisoned and unable to go anywhere. When he hears that the place (a place where they could sit, drink and eat and talk for hundreds of years) will not be there much longer because it was sold or something, Hob can’t have that.
After taking with Death, now Dream goes to meet Hob, and although the place is no more the same, he follows a writing on the wall signalling the ‘new Inn’ and meets Hob there, it seems to be his place, and they sit in recognised friendship; Dream admits openly to it.
At the end of the episode, we see Desire, another sibling, talk about her new plan after the first failed… so she’s the one who wants Dream out of the way… and probably someone else since it seemed like she was talking to someone…
