The second season of The Sandman is technically over, finished off with the aptly-named “A Tale of Graceful Endings” that showed us what the future looks like for the Dreaming and the Endless: A new Dream and a new page, as the Dream we’ve come to know exists the stage like Prospero from The Tempest, the play he himself commissioned to William Shakespeare.
But there’s one final story left for us to explore in the world of The Sandman on the little screen—a bonus episode titled “Death: The High Cost of Living,” which revolves, as the title might suggest, around one of the best characters in the entire show. This would be Death of the Endless, the second-eldest of the siblings, brilliantly played by Kirby Howell-Baptiste.
Even though, technically, the episode begins with Sexton Furnival, a journalist for The Guardian who is plagued by a general sense of malaise over the current state of the world—and who can blame him, really? He’s played by Colin Morgan, who, as a person whose fandom life was permanently altered by Merlin, I’m always happy to see on my screen.
The moment we meet Sexton, we immediately realize he’s planning on taking his own life. He’s trying to compose a final email to his ex-girlfriend, and with a bunch of pills in his back pocket, he says goodbye to his roommate as if it were the last time. But the universe has other plans for him, and when he slips on a trash pile he’s helped back up by none other than a brightly smiling Death, on the one day off she gets from her duties as one of the Endless. It’s a rare occurrence, one that happens only once every hundred years, and Death is determined to make the most of it.
And Sexton ends up being taken along for the ride. He doesn’t really believe she’s Death, of course, not even when she tells him, but her pull is magnetic—even though she’s human for the day, there’s clearly something about her that bends the fabric of the world. People give her things for free, gravitate towards her, and perceive her as someone special.
Eventually, Death and Sexton find themselves at a nightclub where his friends are—his roommate Billie and her girlfriend Amelia, and a friend of theirs, Jackie, who is clearly interested in Sexton, even though it will take him a painfully long time to notice. But it’s when they’re at the club that the most action-packed part of the plot arrives. It turns out that the club’s owner, Theo, actually summoned Death to him, and he wants to force her to return Natalie, his girlfriend, who died from an overdose.
Of course, we know Death doesn’t really work that way. Once someone is gone, they’re gone forever—we technically saw the same with Orpheus during the course of the first part of this second season. Death could grant him access to the Underworld, but not even Hades’s benevolence helped Orpheus rescue Eurydice and bring her back to the world of the living. Eventually, Theo desists from his purpose, and Death and Sexton break free from the warehouse where he had locked them both in.
Sexton’s night side by side with Death ends at dawn, when Death’s day off is over. She returns to her duties in the only way she could—by dying, rapidly and suddenly, leaving Sexton quite shocked and full of grief. He’s consoled by Mad Hattie, who had barged into Death’s apartment at the beginning of the episode to ask her to find her soul, hidden away somewhere not even Hattie remembers—but of course, Death found it, leaving it to Sexton so that he could hand it to its rightful owner.
I really enjoyed this episode, and not just because Death is such an incredibly amazing character—a perfect reverse of everything popular culture tells us about personifications of Death, more psychopomp than Grim Reaper, with a boundless love for life and humanity for someone whose job is seeing to the end of both.
It's because I found the character of Sexton incredibly topical. His “why bother” speech, while he and Death are locked away in the warehouse, punches really deep thanks to Morgan’s great delivery and the general sense of tragedy that hangs around the actual, real-life world. And the contrast between Sexton and Death is the stuff great character dynamics are made of—plus there’s something so very touching about Sexton, deep in the throes of the lowest low of his life, having his jacket sewn back by Death, and that being the moment he starts climbing back up out of the hole.
Episode grade: B+
The Sandman Season 2, Volume 2 recaps and reviews:
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