Having worked as a staff writer on a number of other episodes from The Sandman’s first season, Catherine Smyth-McMullen has taken the helm for a “bonus (two-in-one) episode” called “Dream of a Thousand Cats/Calliope.” As for the Andersonian-in-animated-visual-style (think: Fantastic Mr. Fox, Isle of Dogs) first title, it serves as an amuse-bouche for “Calliope”—itself an amuse-bouche for the impending second season of The Sandman. Based on the seventeenth issue of the graphic novel, the twenty-five pages are adapted into about sixteen minutes that lay the thematic groundwork for “Calliope.” The latter was adapted from the issue that preceded “Dream of a Thousand Cats,” and yet, it makes perfect sense to flip-flop the order for the episode version. Because, by allowing the viewer to see the first example of an unjust and inexplicable pecking order in terms of humans controlling cats, it sets them up to see it escalate in the form of patriarchy. The persistent “hierarchy” in human society. Again, inexplicably so.
Like the Siamese cat a.k.a. “The Prophet” (voiced by Sandra Oh) presented in “Dream of a Thousand Cats,” the muse Calliope (Melissanthi Mahut)—billed in Greek mythology as “The Chief of all Muses”—is the subjugated and imprisoned one in the scenario. Unlike the Siamese, however, she never fooled herself into believing she was anything other than the prisoner held captive by a bloviating white male author named Erasmus Fry (Derek Jacobi)—whose pretension and sense of self-importance is manifest in such a name alone.
Enslaved by him through dastardly and dishonest means, Calliope suddenly finds that she’s being “passed” to the next author. Specifically, to a younger white man named Richard Madoc (Arthur Darvill) meant to “take up the mantle” in exchange for giving Erasmus a trichinobezoar—in plain terms, a hairball (sort of like the ones cats cough up) removed from the stomach of a woman suffering from trichophagia. Probably as an anxiety-ridden reaction to dealing with the daily tensions inflicted by patriarchal dynamics.
Having given him this, Erasmus, per their “deal,” thrusts Calliope upon Richard, who initially puts on the veneer of being a “good” guy that doesn’t really want to “hurt” her. And, just as Erasmus did, he promises to set her free once she helps him get inspired. Of course, Calliope does not feel obliged to obey his “request,” insisting instead that she might be more inclined to willingly bestow him with her gifts if he actually freed her. Richard, selfish and predictable male knave that he is, locks the door again and leaves, saying that maybe she needs more time to “think” about it.
That grace period is over swiftly when he gets a call from his agent reminding him that his manuscript draft is well overdue to the publisher. This stressful amount of pressure is all it takes to prompt Richard to do what Erasmus did before him and “extract” what he wants from Calliope by force. Because Richard, like so many of his ilk, is not pursuing “art” for pure reasons, but for money, fame and supposed glory. Which is why Calliope reminds, “An artist does not hold a Muse against her will.”
But a shill/hack does. Thus, a couple years later, Richard has become “Ric” Madoc, with a new highly successful book out called …And My Love, She Gave Me Light. Doesn’t exactly have a title that screams “bestseller,” but whatever. During the time before Calliope is further milked by an oppressive and talentless male, she learns that the lover she once knew as Oneiros (Tom Sturridge)—a.k.a. Morpheus a.k.a. Dream—has been enslaved himself by yet another white male with insecurity issues. Calliope is nonetheless advised by the Fates that this particular member of the Endless is her best hope of escaping from the clutches of Madoc. A walking ego who becomes more insufferable and self-important by the day. And yet, the Madoc of the graphic novel is even more brutal, described as a “serial rapist” by executive producer Allan Heinberg. Knowing the sensitivities of viewers in 2022, it is instead merely “implied” that Madoc sexually violated Calliope as part of his bid to get her to submit to his will.
What remains the same is Dream’s eagerness to answer Calliope’s call after escaping his own prison. Humbled by his century-long confinement, he might never have come to her aid were it not for being kidnapped himself by a human who simply doesn’t “get it”—that is, how their whims to fulfill their own selfish ends have consequences for all the rest of humanity. So it is that after appearing to Calliope and earnestly empathizing with his ex-wife’s (in The Sandman universe, the two shared a son you may have heard of, Orpheus) plight, Dream seeks to get Madoc to do what he should have done from the moment Erasmus “gave” her to him. Madoc also seems to recognize in advance that he’s made a huge mistake with the ominous forewarning from Dream, “You will not set her free because you need ideas? Well if it’s ideas you want, then you shall have them. In abundance.”
Hence, at a reading for his third book, Eagle Stones, followed by a Q&A, a girl in the audience asks, “Where does it all come from?” with regard to his “inspiration” for so many characters, worlds, genres. Faux self-effacingly, Madoc replies, “For me, ideas don’t ‘come from’ anywhere. They’re all around us, all the time.” Dream, as though to cry out in front of everyone, “Bullshit!” materializes in the room just as Madoc suddenly can’t stop coming up with ideas (as Dream puppets them), peacocking as a means to show his audience how “easy” it is. Like diarrhea, the words spew from his mouth to the point where his brain can’t keep up, and he seems to find himself with a touch of graphomania in the stairwell as he writes some of his ideas down in his own finger blood on the wall (sort of like what James Keene [Taron Egerton] had to do out of necessity to draw a map in Black Bird).
He finally relents to Calliope’s long-standing and simple desire, telling one of his fans to go to his house and release the woman locked upstairs (doesn’t sound creepy at all). She abides the command, but only finds an empty room with a copy of Here Comes a Candle on the floor—the book that Erasmus most wanted to see reprinted from his oeuvre. When she picks it up, she sees that, grossly, the tagline for the novel is: “She was his muse… and the slave of his lust!” Which one can take to mean that Erasmus likely put Calliope’s torture and imprisonment on blast in novel format. Heinberg also added as an interpretation of the book being the only trace left behind, “This creature was held prisoner for decades upon decades only for this—this thing that isn’t in print or that people aren’t even reading. Or it can also be taken as a sign that literature lives on and hopefully sends a message to future generations about the dangers of sacrificing others for one’s own advantage.”
Something male “artists” are rather notorious for (Fitzgerald, Picasso, Salinger, Presley—to name a few). What’s more, in both episodes, humans are the oppressors in general (with the male gender taking that role more precisely in “Calliope”) that seem to find themselves somehow endlessly superior enough to deem their wants and “needs” more valuable and important than the other beings that suffer the consequences of their hubris and folly. But “hierarchy”—whether rich dominating poor or humans dominating animals or men dominating women—comes and goes, with the only constant “entity” truly in charge of anything being Mother Nature, soon to humble everyone.
