The creators should be commended on how well they’ve done this, although ironically enough, we think it revealed some blind spots in the storytelling. Gault, Death, Lucienne and to a lesser extent Rose represent the very best examples of diversifying a fantasy cast and not making them all about their race or gender. We even like the oddness of her whole look, which renders her as a fully fantastical being while keeping her recognizably a Black woman. We think they did a wonderful job and Ann Ogbomo is pretty great in the role. Gault, the nightmare who cut Jed Walker (Eddie Kranja) off from the Dreaming, is a semi-necessary replacement for the characters in the original story who did the same thing, with motivations that had to be created entirely for this arc. A good deal of this episode actually worked fine.
Had we occasionally checked in on the old woman who woke up after a century while Dream was off regaining his tools, this arc would have felt a bit more integrated and organic, we think.īut it’s not like it’s all bad from here on out. This works just fine in serialized comics or discrete graphic novels, but it feels very choppy and confusing in a season of television. She’s there in the first episode and then she’s ignored for seven episodes until she becomes a centerpiece of the next arc. It seems to us that it was a mistake not to include the Unity Kinkaid subplot in the first arc of the season. The opening five minutes of this episode was simply Dream telling Rose things the audience already knew. Last episode simply bounced back and forth from setting to setting as characters sat around and talked about what was happening.
It’s possible that this put some sort of strain on the writing, because it’s not just the acting that underwhelms this episode. The first half of the season felt like prestige television and the second half almost immediately became a mid-week CW fantasy show.Īs we noted last episode, this arc, unlike the first one, deviates significantly from the original version in ways we won’t get into here. Especially when the first arc was stacked to the rafters with well known and highly trained actors, throwing the difference in skill into high relief. Really hate to be harsh about this, but it was a mistake to center an entire arc around someone with no acting experience who isn’t up to the job. The scene with The Fates made us crazy, because she acted the whole time like she was asking for directions to the rest room.
#We were here together chapter 6 series#
Her parents are dead, her brother is lost in the foster care system and a series of completely insane things keep happening to her and she never has a reaction more intense than mild confusion. “You’re the King of Dreams?” “You know where my brother is?” “You’re my long-lost great-grandmother and you’ve been in a coma for a century?” “My brother was in that house you’re pulling dead people out of and you don’t know what happened to him?” All delivered in the same near monotone with the same frozen expression, as if she were asking about specials on a menu. She has exactly one facial expression and one line reading: a raised-eyebrow, open-mouthed look of confusion and a mildness of vocal delivery no matter what the scene asked for. She has no prior onscreen work and we won’t make judgments about her abilities overall, but Vanesu Samunyai is simply not good in the role of Rose Walker. We’ve tried to dance around this and avoid being too blunt, but for us, it’s unavoidable this episode. We interrupt this series of raves to give The Sandman its first critical pan of the season. Which is why it’s so insanely frustrating to watch the quality of the television series just plummet from this point to the end of the season. From this point, the original series started becoming the eventual masterpiece it became. After the introductions, table-setting, and nihilistic horror of the first arc, Death came in and reset everything to a dark fantasy setting. As we noted in our recap of “ The Sound of Her Wings,” the closing of The Sandman‘s first arc and the introduction of his much cooler older sister represented a significant shift in the focus of the graphic novel series.
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