My Review of The Sandman's 1x09: "Collectors"

 

Written by Vanessa James Benton

Directed by Coralie Fargeat

The Corinthian: "Hello Rose. Don't worry, you're safe with me."

Oh, look, it's a cereal convention episode. A whole episode discussing the merits of Coco Pops, Rice Krispies, Corn Flakes and so on. Wait, what do you mean, that cereal means serial killer convention? What kind of false advertising is this? 

Anyways, the Corinthian and Jed have made their way to that convention and for the most part, Jed seemed blissfully unaware of the fact that Fun Land was a bit more than a friendly weirdo before witnessing his new friend and others killing a wannabe serial killer.

Yes, it turned out that the Boogieman (Lewis Reeves) aka Phil Sitz doesn't have quite the body count his reputation would have believed. In fact I'm sure he doesn't have a body count full stop and that he's little more than a fanboy with a deep thirst for The Corinthian. Needless to say, it didn't end well for Phil but the Corinthian was too busy making himself known to Rose than finishing up on Phil this week.

Then there's Rose and Jed. They properly reunited in this episode, managed to get away from an overeager Fun Land and then found themselves cornered off by the Corinthian. On top of that, we also found out that the rather helpful Gilbert was in fact Fiddler's Green and it's looking more and more likely that Rose might have to die in order to prevent worlds from shattering even further.

When the episode wasn't getting the Corinthian to his own goals, it was also doing a great job in creating a rift between Morpheus and Rose. The latter didn't take to Morpheus removing Hector from Lyta and she certainly didn't take kindly to Morpheus's threat of coming for Lyta's unborn child at some point. Morpheus really does have form for pissing the wrong people off.

On the other hand, he did show some character growth by apologising to Lucienne and he certainly seemed more forgiving of Fiddler's Green/Gilbert than he was with Gault in the previous episode. Perhaps he might be more willing to work with Rose in order to deal with their Corinthian style problem in the next episode.

- Seeing the various breakdowns in serial killers at the convention was interesting. That religion section though. 

- I think we got ourselves a Superman and Static Shock cameo of sorts when Jed was watching cartoons in his hotel room.

- I do find it nice that both Matthew and Merv each managed to get both Morpheus and Lucienne back on speaking terms with one another.

- Chronology: From where the previous one left off with the action mainly in Georgia. 

Collectors had some serious fun with the cereal conventions tropes as the Corinthian felt right at home, Rose and Jed finally united and Morpheus realised that he had to deal with both the vortex and getting people on side. 

Rating: 8 out of 10