Playing House

Episode 8 of The Sandman continues right where we left off with Rose standing in front of Dream and Lucienne. Rose imagines she can make her way to the King of Dreams and is welcomed by him. Rose is allowed to speak freely. Now, it would seem that Dream believes he’s partly responsible for the birth of a new vortex. Dream mentioned Jed and this may have been what triggered Rose’s arrival. Dream believes Gault, his missing Nightmare, is the one who holds Jed.

Dream encourages Rose, promising to assist her in her dreams as she searches the waking world for her brother. Jed is now locked up in a filthy basement of a shabby house with Aunt Clarice, Uncle Barnaby and strict surveillance. They’re using him for his money, with Jed’s miserable existence made slightly more tolerable by some fantastical dreams about being a superhero called The Sandman, courtesy of Gault.

Lyta dreams of her husband and builds her dream house. She encourages Lyta, despite having fantastic dreams. Lyta doesn’t though, and instead awakens and speaks to Rose. Determined, she’s printed out numerous Missing Person posters relating to her brother and wants Lyta’s help in putting them up. Rose first visits Ms Rubio – the woman working at the foster agency – and convinces her to visit Jed.

Uncle Barnaby speaks to Jed when he finds out about the visit, demanding he be good and even offers to let him sleep in a real bed… but only if Jed keeps his mouth shut and follows orders. Barnaby will take every bone out of Jed’s body.

Ms. Rubio appears and all is well for a while, but Jed takes his leave, and hugs the agent. He then slips a small note into her bag. This turns out to be a mistake. Barnaby intercepts the letter and promises that he will make Jed pay for it.

While Jed prepares for Barnaby’s wrath, The Corinthian finds Ms Rubio and kills her in his usual way, even eating her eyeballs while reading Jed’s file.

Rose begins dream walking, accompanied by Dream who serves as her protégé. Rose follows Dream, who encourages her to discover her own path. She wanders through fantastical dreams conjured by her friends. Eventually, she finds young Zelda in a graveyard and follows this young child through a doorway to Jed’s dream.

Jed soon shows up before Dream, telling him that he’s the Master of Dreams. Dream is puzzled by the title, but everything changes when Rose appears. Dream shows Gault’s true form, which has shape-shifted from Rose’s mother into her celestial form. As for Rose, she urges Jed to tell her where he is… but the dream ends before he can say anything. Rose, however, finds out where Jed is held and runs, thanks to the dream’s landscape. As for Lyta though, she awakens from another dream with Hector to find out she’s inexplicably pregnant.

Dream then dispatches Gault, and banishes Gault into the darkness. Lucienne isn’t exactly pleased with this though, pointing out that Gault has changed and this Nightmare only wanted to dream and inspire rather than cause fear.

Jed wakes up to find that his house is empty and in an unfinished state. At the basement landing, Corinthian greets Jed and claims to have been sent there by Rose. With his guardians dead, Corinthian drives off with Jed, exclaiming that he’s looking forward to meeting his sister.

Episode Review

The Sandman returns with another good episode, this time turning the attention to dreams themselves and Rose’s part to play in all this. As the Vortex, she has the ability to dream hop and switching between these different dreams accompanied by Morpheus himself is a nice segment and quite reminiscent of that brilliant sequence in episode 6 where Death walked through the final moments of various people’s lives.

The ending hints that we’re going to get a lot more of this in the coming chapters, and for those unaware of how the story plays out, strap yourselves in – this one’s about to get chaotic!