Kittens, kittens! Now this was an interesting hour of television!
By removing our Sad King from most of this episode, The Sandman was able to get very dark, and very violent, in an upsettingly intriguing way.
The through line for the episode was simple enough - Johnny walks into a diner, does some people-watching, then decides to re-enact a global version of the movie Liar Liar but with fewer farts in elevators and more public sex and self-mutilation.
This demented escape room come to life was possible because of Dream’s ruby, as altered by Johnny some 30 years before.
Johnny’s quiet observation of the diner as full of twisted truths and hidden agendas led him to release the stone’s power, making the mundane eatery the centre of a whole world spinning off its axis.
We never saw the outside at all; only the buzz of background cable news dropped us any information about first a brutal storm (a fairly obvious metaphor, but still apt), then traffic chaos, power outages, wildfires, and a general maelstrom engulfing humanity.
“Feeling cute, might delete all lies later.”
Overall, it’s a tough episode to recap because it was like watching a sinkhole open in a bitumen road - all you can do is gaze on as the gaping maw of terror widens and sucks more and more down with it.
A moment that truly shocked was definitely the two seconds before Marsh the short order cook admitted to using dinners with Bette as an excuse to have sex with her son.
The sweet waitress had mentioned the college-aged Barnard a few moments earlier, and that titbit of information sat in the cerebral cortex like Guy Fawkes’ explosives on a long fuse.
As she probed for any sign of affection from him, his tense face and silence lit a flame that scampered along that fuse until the moment she asked him why he liked to visit their home.The dynamite went off behind my eyes just before Marsh said “I like to go upstairs to Barnard’s bedroom and f*** him”. I audibly… well, it wasn’t a gasp so much as a “violently flabbergasted verbalisation”.
The sexual content ramped up too, with Bette getting entangled with recently dumped Judy; Mark the job interviewee getting a hands on and heads down interrogation from controlling company boss Kate; and Kate’s trophy husband Garry having some hand-to-hand combat in a telephone booth.
But it turns out lust was either a precursor to, or the only thing stopping, a little bit of ultra-violence.
Strangely enough for a mega-fan of true crime documentaries and podcasts, I’m rather squeamish with fictional body horror. I mean, I ask every medical professional I meet “What’s the weirdest stuff you’ve found on or in a human being?”, but watching fake people saw their fingers off or stab their eyes out makes me flinch in a way that a double-ended marital aid up a real-life wazoo just can’t.
The production on this episode was eerily good too. The diner turns from being a flat, boring, almost two-dimensional space, to a scene almost reminiscent of the Hell we saw last episode. Burnished light glowed from lamps, casting deeper and deeper shadows as it became time for Murder on the Diner Floor.
Some men just want to watch the world burn. With ice cream!
Eventually, the non-dead guests gather around Old Mate Johnny, who’s equal parts bored and upset by the events he’s set in motion. There’s some cut shots with the Fates, as seen in episode 2, and old mate Johnny has a great time orating about how he was aiming to relieve humanity of its suffering, but it seems to really get off on it.
Finally The Sandman shows up, and my first thought was “Hey, sexy!” Our Goth King really was a sight for sore eyes among the mayhem of the restaurant.
Johnny realises who the intruder is, and last episode’s winning motif of “hope” makes a return here, as Dream tells Johnny that basically the linguistic cliche “hopes and dreams” exists for a reason, and by taking that away from them, he has forced violence to the fore.
What Johnny sees as lies, Dream sees as manifestations of people’s desire to create a better reality for themselves. In other words: LIES ARE IMPORTANT, PEOPLE, I CANNOT STRESS THIS ENOUGH.
Johnny threatens Dream’s sovereignty, but Upturned Coat Collar insists he can only do that in The Dreaming, and somehow spirits Johnny there. Johnny has to run around the maze that is historic Wych Cross (this cross!), his father’s home, catching glimpses of a sexy leg in a robe that I couldn’t place. A nod to his mum Ethel, one-time seducer of old Roderick Burgess? Call in if you know the answer.
Eventually Johnny ends up in The Dreaming’s ruined throne room, which he sets ablaze and stars ranting about Dream’s power now residing in him. Dream tricks him into crushing the ruby nearly to dust, and for a moment Johnny is triumphant.
But no, up he stands to see he is merely a bug in the giant hand of the giant Sandman. Emo Boi realised that he had put so much of himself into his trinkets that destroying the ruby actually GAVE him back some power, like knocking back lots of that health potion in Prince of Persia.
My video game knowledge is very basic, so feel free to insert a more modern reference here.
Scared now, Johnny asks if Dream will kill him. But Sandman was magnanimous, saying something along the lines of “Awww, not your fault really, you cheeky wee bastard”. This is where Dream and I would have to sexily disagree. I would have bloody crushed the sod.
Instead, Dream returns him to the very hospital bunker prison room he escaped from not a day or two earlier, seemingly in a comatose state.
Thinking back, it really was very stupid of Ethel to give Johnny her amulet and let herself die of speedy old age in that room with him.
Johnny was pretty dead set against returning the stone to The Sandman, and if she was so convinced he was coming, why didn’t she just stay and beg for mercy when Goth Boi turned up? She would have been dead either way. At least if she’d stuck around in that facility with him and the amulet, Johnny wouldn’t have got out and murdered a bunch of people.
I must say, if there’s one thing this episode probably didn’t need was the short opening shot of Matthew trying to wake Dream up in that storage container. I think viewers would have been smart enough to work out that he probably would have come to and then followed the ruby to the diner, thus making his appearance to confront Johnny more powerful.
But Matthew was cute at the end, asking what the hell happened as he and Sandman took to the burnt-out streets. Dream says the rebuilding in both this world and The Dreaming can begin, but for one night, “humanity can sleep in peace”.
It was a tidy bow to put on the episode, but it still left me wondering - what on earth are they waking up to? There’s surely going to be some fall out from the ruby’s use. People are dead, aren’t they? If everyone in that diner self-harmed or worse, that must mean a whole lot of clean-up required. Did the events in the diner - and the wider world - really happen?
I have another follow-up question - remember back in episode one, when Dream was first captured, that millions of people the world over were rendered immoveable by a mysterious sleeping sickness?
Whatever happened to that? Was it still an ongoing problem when he finally broke free? Or did it only affect people who were alive in 1916, because they were the ones dreaming or trying to dream when Dream powered down?
It would make sense that as those people died off, that the global panic over troubled sleepers would fade… but wouldn’t that lead to another phenomenon of people not dreaming at all?
As we learned from the James Bond classic Die Another Day, humans need to dream, or they’ll go mad, and conjure up earth-razing satellite weaponry with which to attack the Korean DMZ.
Or take part in some sexy fencing.
Or was Dream’s line “humanity can sleep in peace” a declaration that, having re-absorbed all the power of the crushed ruby, Dream has finally brought an end to a century of the sleeping sickness?
All in all though, quite a captivating session in front of Bounteous Mother Television.
By now I’ve had enough people saying “Episode 6! You must watch and recap Episode 6! It’s so good!” that I know something will be up with next week.
I’ve heard talk of the character of Death appearing, which will be fun. Was that Death who appeared in the very last five seconds of the episode sneering “I’m watching you, brother?” Or was that another Endless?
Join me next time for more Raven On: Dream On!
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