The Sandman Season 2 is set to premiere on Netflix this summer and will serve as the final chapter of Neil Gaiman’s fantasy series. The show’s cancellation closely followed multiple allegations of sexual assault against Gaiman, and the timing raised some eyebrows. However, showrunner Allan Heinberg clarified to Entertainment Weekly that the decision to conclude the series was unrelated to the controversy, stating it was simply the right time to bring the story to a close.
Heinberg said the choice to make season 2 the final season was made three years ago, and when news of the allegations broke, they were already nearly finished production on the season. “I can’t say that it affected our process, which is scheduled years in advance. These are your delivery dates and you just keep going,” he explained. “So it’s been in the periphery of my experience and the background of my experience, but it hasn’t been part of the world of the making of the show, if that makes sense. Every production is its own little island. Even though we were in London, my experience was very limited to the making of the show, even in my personal life, which I did not have for the last six years.“
Entertainment Weekly also dropped a couple of first-look images from the new season, which give a peek at some of the new characters, such as Jack Gleeson (Game of Thrones) as Puck, Barry Sloane (House of the Dragon) as Destruction, and Esmé Creed-Miles (Hanna) as Delirium.
After the epic journey to reclaim his artifacts and restore his realm in the Netflix drama’s debut season, Dream (Tom Sturridge) believes he can finally return to business as usual—until the consequences of mistakes made over millennia begin to resurface, threatening everything he’s rebuilt. “That’s the entirety of the second season: how to reckon his idea of who he is with who he was to all the people in his life,” Heinberg said. “Dream has a very secure narrative about who he is, what his story is, what other people have done to him, and what he’s done to them. But he’s the hero of that story. In season 2, he realizes, ‘Oh! I’m the bad guy in Nada’s [Deborah Oyelade] story, I’m the bad guy in Lyta’s [Razane Jammal] story, I’m the bad guy in my son’s story [Ruairi O’Connor as Orpheus]. And it rocks him.“
The second season will be split into two parts, with the six-episode Volume 1 set to premiere on July 3, and the five-episode Volume 2 following on July 24.
