Watch the teaser for the (almost) final episodes of The Sandman

The second season of The Sandman dropped this past Thursday, or rather, the first six episodes did. The show is speed-running Neil Gaiman's comic book, and by our estimation is doing a pretty good job of it. In these first six episodes, Dream of the Endless (Tom Sturridge) went to Hell, reunited with his lost love, was sounded rejected, traveled around the mortal world with his sister Delirium (Esmé Creed-Miles), and saw his son Orpheus (Ruairi O'Connor) again after thousands of years apart.

That particular reunion ended with Dream finally fulfilling his son's wish and killing him, which means he's officially spilled family blood, a big no-no for a cosmic entity like him. That brings us to season 2, part 2, when the Kindly Ones, aka the Fates, aka the Furies, aka a lot of other things, will exact retribution.

If you've read The Sandman comics, you know how this goes. If you haven't, I'll spare you the spoilers; as you can tell by the teaser trailer above, things get intense.

I'm a fan of The Sandman comics, so I was a bit upset to hear that the show would only run for two seasons; that meant that Netflix would have to cut out a lot of material. But so far, I think the show has done a good job of delivering on the heart of the story. It looks like they'll keep up that momentum in Volume 2, which will consist of four more episodes. It's due out on Thursday, July 24.

There will be some neat surprises. For instance, Volume introduced to a couple of trickster deities in the form of Puck (Jack Gleeson) and Loki (Freddie Fox). True to the comic book, the two of them will team up in Volume 2; the show looks to be adding a bit of a romantic twist. And for Game of Thrones fans, it's fun to see King Joffrey and Gwayne Hightower in cahoots:

Although the teaser doesn't mention it, there's actually one more episode of The Sandman that will air after Volume 2: we'll get one more bonus episode of Thursday, July 31. My guess it that Volume will wrap up the main story and that the final bonus episode will mostly stand on its own, similar to what happened at the end of season 1.

We'll be all over all of this. While you wait, check out our episode reviews for season 2, Volume 1:

The Sandman season 2 episode reviews

• The Sandman season 2, Episode 1: "Season of Mists"
• The Sandman season 2, Episode 2: "The Ruler of Hell"
• The Sandman season 2, Episode 3: "More Devils Than Vast Hell Can Hold"
• The Sandman season 2, Episode 4: "Brief Lives"
• The Sandman season 2, Episode 5: "The Song of Orpheus"
• The Sandman season 2, Episode 6: "Family Blood"

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