‘The Sandman’: How Neil Gaiman’s Original ‘Death’ Screenplay for Guillermo del Toro and Superman Inspired Netflix’s Final Bonus Episode

SPOILER ALERT: This article contains major spoilers from “The Sandman” second and final season bonus episode, “Death: The High Cost of Living,” now streaming on Netflix.

The final chapter of Netflix’s “The Sandman” has no dreams, only death.

Titled, “Death: The High Cost of Living,” the bonus episode — which launched Friday, one week after the final season of “The Sandman” concluded — is based on a one-shot comic series from author Neil Gaiman that focuses on Dream’s (Tom Sturridge) sister Death (Kirby Howell-Baptiste) and the time she spends as a human once every 100 years. During this particular visit, she meets a disillusioned young man named Sexton Furnival (Colin Morgan) and tries to help him reconcile his recent suicidal feelings.

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So why was this story — one that doesn’t even include the titular character — chosen as the last piece fans will get of this version of “The Sandman,” following the 11-episode second and final season?

“When we discovered together that Season 2 would be our last season, Netflix very generously said, ‘Why don’t you do an additional episode? Like, take the 11 episodes you need to tell the story, and then we’ll give you one more.’ When you find out what these things cost, it’s a very nice gift, indeed,” “The Sandman” showrunner Allan Heinberg told Variety.

The choice to end the series was made more than two years ago by co-creators Gaiman, Heinberg and David S. Goyer (prior to sexual misconduct accusations leveled against Gaiman), who decided the series finale would cover through Dream’s death in “The Wake” comics. But then the question remained, what do you do with the bonus episode?

“So we talked about ‘Ramadan.’ We talked about, is there a one hour version of ‘Overture’? Both are extremely unwieldy and expensive and, by the end of the season, we probably only had 10 days to shoot this in. And so practical considerations played a part,” Heinberg said, noting production occurred back in 2023. “But Neil had developed a version of ‘Death: The High Cost of Living’ as a feature with Guillermo del Toro back in, I think, 2010 and so it felt like, ‘OK, this is a lift we can handle.’ And it felt like a sequel to Episode 6 of Season 1, where Dream and Death are just having a walk around London and we all love that episode very much.”

Heinberg and Gaiman are credited as co-writers on the episode, a choice Heinberg says was made when Gaiman “very generously” gave him the original screenplay to draw inspiration from for the episode.

“I tried to take everything I could from that screenplay,” Heinberg said. “Most notably, there are a couple of lines that the cab driver, Lenny, says to Death and Sexton that were right from that movie. And it just felt like, Neil and David Goyer and I had shared credit for the first episode, and it felt like a nice way to go out to share credit with Neil for the last episode. And I committed to doing that when he gave me the screenplay, not knowing how much or how little of it we were going to end up being able to use. In that version of the movie, Death was a teenage girl, Sexton was a teenage boy. So there wasn’t a lot that could come with us into making them both adult characters in their 30s.”

While the episode features many references to Superman — Sexton’s favorite superhero and a classic Americana signal of heroic intensions — Heinberg says he had no idea when he wrote it back in 2023 that the installment would be dropping so soon after the theatrical release of James Gunn’s “Superman” reboot, and instead it was just a nice moment of synergy for Warner Bros. Discovery, which produces both “The Sandman” and “Superman.” (Heinberg also has an ongoing development deal with studio Warner Bros.)

“I didn’t! I don’t even know if James Gunn watches the show, but I hope so. No, it was that I tried to work in as many DC references as I can,” Heinberg said. “I don’t know if you remember but in Season 1, Rose’s little brother, Jed, is obsessed with DC Comics, and we had toys everywhere and and it was one of those things where Colin really wanted to show the, not arrested side of Sexton, but playful side of Sexton. That this is somebody who actually, prior to this moment, has a lot of joy and a lot of idealism and he’s trying to be out there and, as a climate emergency reporter for The Guardian, he’s trying to be a superhero. And he’s feeling like he’s failing every time he turns around. So because we meet him at such a low point, we wanted to really show the audience, this is not someone who’s usually like this, this is someone with big ideals and big dreams and who wants to be a hero. And Superman is the cleanest. And I’ve been putting DC Comics stuff into everything I’ve written for as long as I can remember. So it was a very natural thing to go to Superman.”

Gaiman’s “The Sandman” is a DC Comics property itself, and on more than one occasion brought in members of the Justice League for storylines — including Batman attending Dream/Morpheus’s funeral. That doesn’t happen in the series finale of Heinberg’s Netflix series adaptation, but with his love for DC references, it was something considered

“We talked about, ‘Does Robert Pattinson want to come to the funeral?’ Briefly, we did discuss that, but only briefly,” Heinberg says with a laugh.

Overall, Heinberg describes the bonus episode as “a good night kiss to the audience before the show goes to bed.” “It felt like, if you’re grieving the loss of your show, this is exactly the right way to say goodbye to it and remember that even in the face of death, there’s so much joy and so much love and so much to appreciate about the time we spend here,” he said.