Kirby Howell-Baptiste offers a wonderfully wise, serene twist on Death, who comforts the newly deceased and sends them on a path to the afterlife.

Here, the character is played by Game of Thrones’ statuesque Gwendoline Christie, who embodies Lucifer’s winsome insouciance despite being, you know, a woman.

Lucifer Morningstar, the biblical fallen angel who rules over hell, was famously drawn to resemble David Bowie in his big-haired, late-’60s folk singer era. That doesn’t necessarily mean finding the actors who look most like the comic characters. The back portion of the season makes an abrupt, if unavoidable, shift to parallel volume 2, The Doll’s House, centered on Rose Walker (a self-possessed Vanesu Samunyai), a young woman who is searching for her long-lost kid brother and who, unbeknownst to her, has the latent capacity to effect mass destruction.Ĭasting was always going to be crucial for this project, and Netflix’s The Sandman absolutely nails it. In the first six episodes, which hew fairly closely to the first volume of the comics, Preludes and Nocturnes, the quest will take him back to Earth and, literally, past the gates of hell. With the help of his most loyal deputy, dream librarian Lucienne (Vivienne Acheampong), and quippy raven sidekick Matthew (voiced by Patton Oswalt), he must reclaim three plundered objects that hold the power to rebuild. This is all essentially a prologue to Dream’s escape and return to his kingdom-now crumbling and all but abandoned. He spends a torturous century in his prison, too proud to buy his freedom by acquiescing to the demands of his mortal captor (Charles Dance). the Corinthian (Boyd Holbrook), who’s entertaining himself by causing havoc among humans, Dream is the Endless they capture instead. Because he’s descended into the waking world in pursuit of a “rogue nightmare,” a.k.a. It’s 1916, and the members of an occult order have gathered on an English estate for a ritual that they hope will summon Death, so that they can entrap her in an orb and force her to do their bidding.

In both the comics and the TV series, we meet Dream (a movingly vulnerable Tom Sturridge, recently seen in HBO’s Irma Vep) on what must be the worst day of his eternal life.

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