Fridge / The Sandman (1989)

As a Fridge subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.

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Fridge Logic

• In Calliope, Ric Madoc buys the eponymous muse from Erasmus Fry for the price of a bezoar, a magical...thingie that is generated in something's digestive system. Its most famous property is the ability to remedy poison effects. Erasmus says he'll put this new one with the rest of them, implying that he has several. Years later, Ric finds out that Erasmus died last summer by poisoning himself. That could mean a lot of things.
• The Endless refer to Destruction as "The Prodigal", but that only really works as a reference to the parable, since the word prodigal refers to reckless spending on opulence (like the son did in the parable), which doesn't describe Destruction at all, especially given his vagabond existence after he left.
  • It’s impossible for them to be speaking English all the time, so it’s quite possible it’s just a translation for our benefit.

Fridge Brilliance

• In A Doll's House, we are introduced to a serial killer called the Connoisseur, whose body count is lower than many of the other killers because he kills only a very specific group of people: "pre-operative transsexuals". Much later, in ''A Game of You," Wanda has a conversation with Maisie Hill (the 'I don't like dogs' lady), who tells Wanda about her granddaughter^note Maisie misgenders her as "grandson" in the text, but she's an old lady who seems otherwise supportive, a trans woman who was murdered and who apparently never underwent gender-affirming surgery. The Connoisseur isn't mentioned by name, but it's all too likely that he was responsible.
  • In the same issue that introduces the Connoisseur, there's a Running Gag about the absence of a killer known as "The Family Man". The reason for his absence is never revealed in the story itself, but if you were reading Hellblazer at around the same time, you'd know why he didn't make it. John killed the Family Man to avenge the murder of his father at the Family Man's hands.
• In A Game of You, Thessaly apparently drinks soy milk. She's thousands of years old. She was probably born before the people in her part of the world developed the ability to digest lactose as adults, or else is from a place where most people never got that gene.
• The second play that Morpheus requests from Shakespeare? The Tempest. The plot? A sorceror, through convoluted schemes and plots, conspires to end his life of isolation and entrapment, in the process destroying his magical gifts and ensuring himself an heir. Does that sound... familiar? Which means that Morpheus is really playing the long game when it comes to his suicide.
• I always kinda wondered why Wesley Dodds would fight crime if he's an avatar of Dream, since he never seems to care much about human morality. Then the Corinthian makes a brief cameo in the Phantom of the Fair arc, and it all begins to make sense. The Corinthian tends to turn the people he doesn't simply kill into Serial Killers, which is the main sort of crime Wes fights. His true purpose is cleaning up the mess the Corinthian's been making since he escaped.
• I'm a little ashamed for not realizing this sooner, but as John Dee's final fight with Morpheus goes on, he slowly decomposes, eventually revealing an entirely skeletal face. See also his original costume◊.
• One of the the running gags in the Brief Lives story arc is Destruction being a terrible artist. Well, of course he is! He's Destruction. He embodies the exact opposite of creation.
  • This extends beyond his art. Note that just about everything he tries to create is either unappreciated or is terrible, like the meal he cooks for Delirium and Dream that no one eats.
    • Except that according to the interpretation below of the Endless, he ought to be the spirit of creation, as well. So why is he bad at it? Because he is no longer that being. Destruction brings change, and if he were fulfilling his role, he probably could create — but he no longer identifies as Destruction, so he can't do anything associated with that role!
• In Endless Nights, Despair convinces Rao to create the planet Krypton inherently unstable, and to manipulate events so that there will be only one survivor who will carry the despair of the entire world's death. Instead, that survivor turns out to be Superman, who is practically the anthropomorphic personification of hope in the DC Universe. Why? Because despair, by its very nature, always fails.
  • Also, it is stated that the Endless, by their nature, also define and embody their opposite, like how Death is also the one who bestows life upon newborns, or how Desire can inspire love or hatred.
    • Further than this, there is another way to interpret Despair. In Dream's funeral, she notes that she will always grieve for him, and that she will never forget him, even when everybody (as in, all beings) forget him. This points out that a big part of Despair's nature is remembering past pains — being a witness. So, in a way, she won, because Superman remembers the tragedy and acts as a witness for the destruction of Krypton. Despair may not just be about abandoning hope and purpose, but also about memory and survivor's guilt.
  • This also ties into the shapeshifting duel Morpheus gets into with Chronozon, and specifically his final move. As Despair's sibling, he's very well aware of the power and resiliency of hope.
  • In fact, every superhero in their origin story has something to despair about, yet they go in the complete opposite direction and possess and inspire in others hope instead.
• At first, A Doll's House seems to rely too much on Attemped Rape as Drama as a method of putting Rose in danger. The muggers threatening to rape her is one thing, but Funland's attempt to rape her when she's clearly much too old to interest him (and when she could have been attacked by any one of the "collectors" who wasn't a rapist as well as a killer) borders on Gratuitous Rape. But it actually makes sense why so many people who see her want to have sex with her, consensual or no — she's Desire's granddaughter.
• Desire's kindness toward Tiffany in Brief Lives seemed sort of odd to me at first, since they usually come off as uncaring. What reason would there be for Desire to have any interest in some random stripper? Then I got it; it's because she was a stripper. She makes people want her for a living, but they can never "get" her. As seen in Endless Nights, Desire isn't interested in people getting what they want, because then they won't want it any more. Essentially, Tiffany is an agent of Desire, and through her we get to see the kindest they ever are in the series.
• Destiny appeared in comics before The Sandman, and thus the rest of the Endless, were ever written. He's the first of the Endless.
• In her very first appearance, Death perfectly describes what is wrong with Dream...by telling him about Mary Poppins.
  Death: There's this guy who's utterly a banker, and he doesn't have time for his family, or for living or anything. And Mary Poppins comes down from the clouds and she shows him what's important.
  • Keep in mind that Death is something of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, that she often carries an umbrella, and that she spends the rest of that issue taking Dream along with her as she collects souls, which helps him out of his ennui and kickstarts his Character Development.
• In Calliope, the eponymous muse inspires both of her masters to write the same sort of terrifying horror stories. Given her position, it seems unlikely that she's in the mood to inspire anything else.
• Why is Death always so nice to everyone? Because she's defined by her function like all the Endless, and death is famously impartial, as all people are equal before it. So she can either be nice to everyone or mean to everyone (and she apparently originally went with the latter before deciding that the former was more fun), but she can like some things better than others only to the same extent that Dream can be practical or Despair can cheer up — that is to say, it's not completely impossible, especially in limited amounts, but it's never going to be common or pronounced.
  • It's also implied that this is why she takes on human form once a century, so that she can experience death herself from within. In her chronologically earliest appearances, she's quite cold and abrupt, but by the time of the present, the experience of dying over and over again seems to have made her much kinder and sympathetic to people who will have to die for real — and who, unlike her, don't get to go back to being Endless.
• In The Wake, there's an odd one-page scene of a woman asking a man for a handkerchief. The man tells her the story of his childhood curtains, then hands her a scrap of the curtain as he asks her if she's crying. The woman says no, she's bleeding; we see dark blood coming from her eyes and streaming down her arms and hands. Then, oddly, the man says, "I'm sorry." These two One Scene Wonders aren't given names, and haven't been identified in any articles or wikis on the series, save for some offhand speculation that they're the dreamers serving the banquet in Season of Mists. Then realization finally hit today: they're John Dee and Judy (Foxglove's former lover) from the Diner of Death in Preludes and Nocturnes. Dee had forced Judy to kill herself by stabbing icepicks through her eyes, and with Wake's themes of remembrance, forgivness, and going on, Dee is finally apologizing to Judy for his senseless cruelty.
• In The Kindly Ones, when Rose Walker is flying home to the US, her seatmate on the plane introduces herself as "Celia Cripps" and tells a story about her wanton aunt going to the US with her boyfriend. Her wanton aunt? Ethel Dee, aka Ethel Cripps, John Dee's mother and the former lover of Ruthven Sykes, who betrayed Magus Burgess and fled to the US with Ethel to escape the Order's wrath, all the way back in the first story arc.
• Why is Dream so good at the Shapeshifter Showdown? Who could possibly be better in a duel of ideas than the being whose domain is, essentially, the wellspring of creativity?
• During The Wake we get a brief cameo of Superman, Batman and Martian Manhunter. I always found weird how Clark was the only one on civilian clothes and looked much leaner and scrawnier until I realised: This is how they see themselves! Superman is just Clark Kent, and he doesn't think he is that imposing or powerful. The comic was published during that time when Batman "was the true identity, and Bruce Wayne just a mask". And the Martian Manhunter sees himself as his superhero appearance instead of his martian appearance because he moved on and is happy with his life on Earth.

Fridge Horror

• In ''Tales in the Sand';, the narrator says, about Morpheus and Nada's lovemaking: "All that night they stayed together, and every living thing that dreamed, dreamed that night of her face, and of her body, and of the warm salt taste of her sweat and her skin." It sounds romantic before you realize just what it means. And you thought naked pictures of yourself on the internet was bad...
• After Lucifer turfs everyone out of hell in Season of Mists, a lot of the dead end up walking around on Earth as, well, zombies, basically. Among the dead shown to return are two babies — one just a few months old at most, the other a severely premature miscarriage. Yep. In this universe, babies too young to understand the concepts of right and wrong, let alone make any moral choices, can get condemned to eternal torture.
  • To be fair, it seems that there's some level of self-perception involved.
  • Even better: Remember that Luci turfs everyone out? Who's to say that those two "babies" aren't shapeshifting demons, tormenting the mother?
  • The never-born are stated to be inhabitants of Hell earlier in the book. At one point we even see ground covered in dead babies in Hell's landscape. This is a part of the long-standing Christian belief that unbaptized children can't enter Heaven. Of course, just because it's this way doesn't mean that it can't simultaneously be other ways too, The Sandman being what it is.
  • What happens to people who aren’t just dead and their bodies aren’t just gone, but their entire universe is? How many souls were stuck floating in the empty black where the multiverse once was?
• Remember how Delirium cursed the innocent policeman to experience imaginary bugs crawling on his skin FOREVER? Since she's an Endless, this may mean that the curse will linger even through his death into every reincarnation and afterlife that he'll ever have, unless Delirium some day changes her mind.
  • Or, once he belongs to Death, the other Endless (including Delirium) will have no power over him. They seem to have some power in each other's realms, but maybe they just don't use it on each other out of politeness. Except Desire, who's a bitch like that.
• There is one in perhaps one of the most harmless of books. In Delirium's Party, every one of the Endless gives a present to Despair, and everything is good and dandy until Desire gives her twin a locket that would make her the object of all hearts' longing, all they crave for. Imagine an entire universe craving for hopelessness!
  • Thankfully, she never wore it.
• In The Doll's House, when Funland attempts to rape Rose (which leads to her summoning Dream), Dream only puts him to sleep. Then Dream goes to the Corinthian's speech and took away the self-heroic fantasies of the "collectors" that were in the room. But since Funland was elsewhere, having just been given a dream about all his "little friends" BY Dream, he missed it. And then he can go right back to his "secret, special place", which is implied to be Disneyland (or Disney World), where his kills are covered up for him.
  • At least this one isn't a given. I don't see Morpheus letting him go so easily, especially once he realises that Funland's would-be victim is his grandniece.
    • Apparently it is a given, as well as Ascended Fanon — Funland shows up in Batman: The Widening Gyre, back to his old tricks.
    • Maybe not. Funland's dream is based on the final scene in Oscar Wilde's "The Selfish Giant," in which the children lead the Giant away to play in the gardens "which are Paradise," a.k.a. Heaven, i.e. the Giant is now dead. The later appearance in The Widening Gyre may be a retcon, or it may be that the Batman writers also interpreted the scene to mean that Funland was only sleeping.
    • It's also possible that Widening Gyre, not even being canon at the time it was written, has nothing to do with Sandman.
• There's one particularly unsettling implication in "Men of Good Fortune" that isn't so much "horrific" as "incredibly depressing". In the course of that story, we learn that Hob Gadling managed to get fabulously wealthy at two points in his life by getting involved in two historically important business ventures: the printing business in the 15th century, and the Atlantic slave trade in the 18th century. Note that he predicts that printing will never be a truly profitable business ("There'll never be a real demand for it"), and only takes it up as a trade because he's a professional soldier who needs a steady job in peacetime, and because it's a relatively new business that doesn't require guild membership. On the other hand, he's absolutely certain that shipping slaves will net him a tidy profit, and (initially) considers it one of his best ideas. In other words, The Everyman Hob doesn't recognize the true potential of spreading and preserving literature through the printing press, but he has no trouble seeing the potential of buying and selling human beings as property. A subtle but effective Humans Are Bastards message.
• The idea, lampshaded by both Death and Nuala (and never truly denied by Morpheus himself) that the events of the penultimate arc, The Kindly Ones, had been carefully and subconsciously orchestrated from even before the main timeline of the comics. The various plotlines and adventures become Harsher in Hindsight when you realize they may have just been an outside perspective of Morpheus as he planned his suicide.
• Lucifer reveals that all the damned souls in Hell are damned because of their guilt. While it hardly overlaps, the series does still take place in the main DC continuity. Thanks to Samaritan Syndrome, all of our favorite superheroes, even Superman, may end up among the tormented one day.
• Some people were not as lucky as Unity Kinkaid to come out of The Sleepy Sickness with their lives, however disrupted those lives might have been. Stefan Wasserman, a sixteen-year-old boy freshly discharged from the German army (having lied about his age to enist when he was 14), couldn't take the nightmares anymore and killed himself. One can only imagine that there were many other such cases, especially among those who experienced the horrors of war firsthand.