SPOILER ALERT! What happens at the ending of The Sandman? The explanation of the Netflix TV series.

The Sandman is a complex story, layered in its multitude of references, pigeonholing itself into a composite narrative universe that is born and develops like a dream within a dream, enclosing itself in a vortex of parallel stories and events that influence others.

Although the series follows the fil rouge of comics, not deviating from it particularly and maintaining consequential linearity that allows, despite there are parallel stories that intersect in the macro-history centered on the figure of Sandman, to understand the incessant diegetic flow that characterizes the television series produced by Warner Bros. and Netflix, as well as the original comic book born from the pen of Neil Gaiman.

Specifically, the TV series shows itself in its glossy essence of lyrical dreaminess, inevitably approaching the tables of American comics without ever trespassing, however, in the banal reduction and transposition of these, imposing its own stylistic autonomy through an adaptive and enunciative staging. 

This, in particular, combined with Gaiman’s tendency to rely on stylistic metaphors, symbolisms and metonymies, could step too far into the unspoken, bringing together in the last part many plot elements mentioned in the 10 episodes and which will unfold in the second season, of which the writing of the script has already been announced.

The Sandman – The end of the beginning

The last episode of the first season of The Sandman presents itself as a focal point of convergence between characters, stories, and events that lead to an apparent diegetic hiatus at the end of the episode, a prelude to future events based on past ones.

Rose Walker, the young girl in search of her little brother Jed, is none other than what is defined by Morpheus and Lucienne as the Vortex, a human being of immeasurable power able to attract the dreams of other individuals to himself and to be able to cross over into Realm of Dreams, risking to collapse the real world and the dream world, destroying both.

Her potential, which has already emerged in the last four episodes of the series, intensifies more and more, risking compromising her size in order to try to save and protect her brother. Corinthian, in turn in search of Rose in order to exploit her powers to overwhelm Morpheus, is annihilated by the latter: the King of Dreams has the power to end the life of the beings he himself created. Corinthian is certainly one of the most powerful Nightmares, but nothing can be done against an Eternal.

Only with the death of the Vortex, and therefore of Rose, is it possible to restore the balance between the World of Dreams and the World of Waking.

Gilbert, the Dream that represents the Sailors’ Paradise, assumes as a hypothesis that the existence of vortices, of which Morpheus himself seems to ignore the reason, could be a warning to the inhabitants of the Dream Realm to remind him that their existence derives from the ability of human beings to dream them and not the other way around.

But where did Rose’s powers come from in the Netflix series The Sandman?

The question that many have sought an answer to is solved in the last episode: Rose, we knew, is the great-granddaughter of Unity, the little girl we see in the first episode falling asleep irremediably due to the sleeping sickness caused by the loss of the powers of Morpheus, deprived of his amulets from Burgess. 

Unity awoke from the long coma caused by what has been called lethargic encephalitis, to discover that she had a daughter during her sleep, in which she dreamed of having met a charming golden-eyed man with whom she had built a beautiful family. . These others are none other than Desiderio, one of the Eternals, brother of Morpheus and twin of Despair, who hatched a plan to try to annihilate the King of Dreams: it was he who made Burgess’s summoning rite fail, evoking Morpheus instead of his sister Death, thus depriving him of his amulets and his power for decades. His imprisonment led to the apparent death of millions of people, including Unity: she should have been the real Vortex of this era, not Rose. 

Taking advantage of her coma, Desiderio impregnated the woman, to make sure that her power was passed down to Rose, who could potentially destroy the two Kingdoms causing them to collapse between them. Morpheus would have been forced to kill her, but this would have led to consequences since Rose would have been in effect a blood relative of her: the Eternals cannot harm their direct progeny or blood relatives.

Unity decides to sacrifice herself in Rose’s place once, thanks to the mediation of Lucienne, she understands that she herself is the true Vortex of this era, letting herself be delivered in the shared dream the oneiric realization of her power.

In this way Morpheus can kill the holder of the Vortex, that is, Unity, not a blood relative of his.