All 11 episodes of The Sandman, ranked worst to best

Episode 9: “Collectors”

The cereal convention is one of the funniest ideas Gaiman came up with during his run on The Sandman. What if a bunch of serial killers got together and basically put on a Comic Con, complete with panels and workshops and cocktail mixers all hosted in a big hotel? It’s a wild, strange, disgusting notion that I thought might not translate to live-action…but it does, mostly. “Collectors” wrings a lot of comic juice out of the idea, although it’s appropriately creepy too. I’m thinking of the bit where the serial killer Fun Land gets wistful thinking about hunting kids at amusement parks. Am I supposed to laugh? Cry? Call the cops? I don’t know and I think that’s good.

The highlight is probably when Gilbert (Stephen Fry) is wandering through the con and popping his head into panels, which he expects to be about cereal but are about…other things. Fry is excellent in the role of yet another escaped resident of the Dreaming, in this case taking the form of an avuncular English gentleman.

Meanwhile, Rose — acting as the vortex — is unwittingly bringing down the walls between dreams, which leads to her friend Lyta’s dead husband managing to get her pregnant, both in the waking and the sleeping worlds. This is a weird storyline, and I don’t think the actors quite succeed in selling it, but we do get a great scene where Dream intervenes and “kills” Lyta’s husband…or unmakes him, or whatever, considering her wasn’t real in the first place. He also claims that Lyta’s unborn child belongs to him, since he was conceived in the Dreaming, which does not sit right with Rose. Because of her growing power, she poses a real threat to Dream.

This is another serialized episode that feels more like part of a longer story than something that can stand on its own, but I’m gonna give it the edge over the episodes surrounding it because of all it does right.