Diksha Sundriyal
The second season of Netflix’s ‘The Sandman’ focuses on the fall of Morpheus, aka Dream, as he commits a sin that cannot be forgiven. The first half of the season focuses on his journey as he reunites with several people that he has loved, starting from Nada, to his brother Destruction, and eventually his son, Orpheus, whom he abandoned a very long time ago. The reason behind their estrangement is revealed to be Orpheus’ choice to bring his wife, Eurydice, back from the dead. Dream does not approve of it, and as he predicts, the path to her resurrection doesn’t end well for his son. Despite all the bad things that happen in Orpheus’ story, the worst point is when, on his way back from the Underworld, he turns back and looks at Eurydice, when he was explicitly asked not to do this. SPOILERS AHEAD.
Orpheus’ Doubt and Excitement Lead Him to Turn Back
When Eurydice dies on their wedding night, Orpheus asks for help from his father to bring her back from the Underworld. Since his father is one of the Endless, he thinks that Dream can do it, but he is told otherwise. Still, his love for his wife leads him to undertake this journey himself, and with Death’s blessing to become an immortal, he marches into the Underworld with the intention of bringing his wife back at all costs. He appeases Hades, Persephone, and the Kindly Ones with his song, and despite themselves, they decide to let him take his wife back. However, he is told to follow one rule: Eurydice will follow him like a shadow, but he cannot turn to look or speak to her until they are both out of the Underworld and the sun is shining on both of them.
For almost the entire journey, Orpheus follows this rule. But then, as he sees the end of the tunnel and the sun shining in the distance, he turns back. The moment he does it, Eurydice is dragged back into the Underworld, never to return. Later, Orpheus tells his mother that when he saw the light in the distance, he couldn’t help himself. He felt compelled to look back to confirm that the gods hadn’t tricked him into leaving the Underworld alone. While he was silent the entire way, he didn’t hear anything from Eurydice, who should have been close enough to follow him like a shadow. The fact that he didn’t even hear her footsteps makes him wonder whether she has even followed him thus far.
In the midst of this doubt, he believed that the gods have been kind to him and that his wife is right there behind him. The moment he saw the end of the tunnel, he became so excited at the prospect of having succeeded that he forgot that he hadn’t yet completed the task. This sheer rush of the joy of having done what no one else could do before, what even his father didn’t believe could happen, leads him to turn back, and this turns out to be the very mistake that the gods were counting on him to make.
Not Looking Back was a Test Designed to Fail
The story of Orpheus in ‘The Sandman’ is borrowed from Greek mythology, and in the show, it goes almost exactly as told in the myths. One of the things to be noted about the gods, especially Hades, is that they are known to play tricks on mortals. In this context, the test that they gave to Orpheus in order to save Eurydice was meant to fail. However, this is not to say that there was no way Orpheus could have passed it.
Being an immortal, Hades has seen the mortals and their ways since the beginning of time. He knows that no matter how good or kind or adamant they are, there are certain things they are bound to do, even when they are told not to. He knows that it would be next to impossible for Orpheus to undertake a long journey and not turn back to look or talk to their beloved because he will never be able to throw the doubt out of his mind. Even though he renounces death and comes all the way to the Underworld to take the risk of irking the gods with the hope of getting his wife back, he doesn’t put the same effort into trusting the same gods to keep their end of the bargain.
This means that the test wasn’t his resolve to stick to the rules. It wasn’t to test whether he could walk the whole way without speaking or looking at Eurydice. It was to see whether he could hold fast to the belief that he had shown in them when he begged them to give him his wife back. It was to see whether he had the confidence to exhibit blind faith in them and their word. At the end of the day, Hades and Persephone were counting on Orpheus’ hubris to believe that he had bent the rules of the world and brought his dead wife back to life, something that even higher beings than him, like the Endless, did not believe possible. It was this mix of doubt and overconfidence that eventually resulted in his failure, and sadly, the gods weren’t surprised by it.
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