SPOILER ALERT: This article contains minor spoilers from “The Sandman” second and final season premiere, “Season of Mists,” now streaming on Netflix.
Netflix’s adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s “The Sandman” graphic novels opens its final season with a storyline near and dear to many fans: “Season of Mists.” It’s widely considered the most beloved volume from “The Sandman” franchise, and was a priority when it came to which storylines co-creators Gaiman, David Goyer and showrunner Allan Heinberg wanted to make sure were included in “The Sandman” Season 2. That was particularly true once it was decided this would be the conclusion of the TV series adaptation.
And at the center of this plot is Dream’s (Tom Sturridge) first love: Nada, queen of a tribe called the First People, who fell in love with Dream thousands of years before the events of “The Sandman” Season 1. But the show’s Nada is different (first played by Deborah Oyelade in Season 1, and now Umulisa Gahiga for Season 2) from the graphic novels’ depiction of the African queen and her world. In Netflix’s “The Sandman,” she rules over a people from a millennia ago who live in a thriving Afro-steampunk-esque city blanketed in snow, rather than the savannah setting from the comic’s panels.
“First of all, I’m just glad that we were able to do a version of Nada and the First People,” Netflix’s “The Sandman” co-creator and executive producer David Goyer told Variety. “If you think about it, people were trying to make ‘Sandman’ forever, and I was even involved in a feature version at one point, but so much was left on the table, and it’s such a — and I mean this in the most loving way — the story is such a shaggy beast.”
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COURTESY OF NETFLIX
Written by Gaiman and published by DC Comics, “The Sandman’s” original run was a 75-issue story released between January 1989 and March 1996. When it concludes with the release of the second half of Season 2 later this month, Netflix’s version of “The Sandman” will ultimately consist of 23 episodes.
Goyer (who, along with Netflix and Heinberg, has made it very clear the second season was written, planned and filmed as the final season prior to the sexual misconduct accusations leveled against author Gaiman) says the consolidation was tricky, but also led to choices like the change in aesthetic for Nada and the First People.
“There are arcs where Dream is solidly the protagonist, and then there’s other side stories, and then there’s the individual issues,” Goyer said. “And God bless, when we pitched the show, we said, ‘These are features, not rather than bugs. And this is a show that’s very hard to nutshell in a sentence or two. And we’re going to do these flashback episodes, and we’re going to go to parallel dimensions and all of the above.’ And God bless Netflix, because they said, ‘Great. It’s weird. It defies a lot of kind of conventional storytelling. But we’re going to go for it.’ So look, I was happy. Obviously, we had to make some choices — it’s a different medium — in how we’re going to depict these characters. But I agreed with that creative choice, and Netflix has been great.”
Who Nada is and why she matters so much to Dream in his present-day story with his family of Endless siblings is something viewers will learn more about in Vol. 1 of “The Sandman” Season 2, which released Thursday, and that will hold true to the story from Gaiman’s comics, despite the new look.
“There are many moments in the show where you can even see individual panels, in a way, that we’ve recreated,” Goyer said. “Especially from like the first episode of ‘Sandman’ Season 1 and the first issue. And so there are depictions that we thought we could accurately render or bring to life in a way that felt true to the comic book. And there were other places where we felt, let’s just do something different and beautiful and more poetic, in some ways. The other thing is that ‘Sandman’ has had lots of different artists working on it who’ve also had very different visions. And so it always came down to the intent. And is the intention the same? Because I don’t think the First People, I don’t think the way that they were depicted in the book is necessarily like a visual standout. And we wanted to make it a visual standout, and we wanted to it defy expectations. And so I don’t even remember whose idea it was to do that. It may have been our visual effects supervisor, but it just sounded cool and beautiful.”
