Ryuk takes Light in 37 episodes
July 20, 2008
Imagine a book that kills people. Write someone's name in it, picture his face, then wait 40 seconds until he dies of a heart attack. Works on anyone, at any range, every time. This is a decent premise and is executed very well in Death Note, a kind of parallel universe Fate: Stay Night. Instead of Shirou Emiya, the stupidest man on earth, who manages to come out ahead as he dawdles and dithers, we have Light Yagami: honor student, smug and smarmy owner of the titular book. Despite his massive brain and superior reasoning skills, Light paints himself into a corner. He's been murdering enough people to arouse the suspicion of the police, and decides to shake the detective on his tail by murdering him. Sigh. When all you have is a hammer, you begin to visualize every anime character's face as a nail.
Doesn't this sound squeamishly like every teenager's fantasy? Light goes through the thought process you or I might consider when assuming such a responsibility: who gives you the right to choose who lives or dies and blah blah blah. Using the power of mental thinking, or at least market differentiation, Light resolves to use the Death Note to kill bad people and make the world a better place. Or so he believes. Light's "bad people" are criminals (and suspects!) who are unfortunate enough to have their face broadcast on national television. He kills them in their prison cells, while they're taking hostages on TV, or if they try to rape a girl outside a convenience store. I suspect "due process" is the only topic for which this genius ever received a B.
Research is another of Light's neglected skills. Not one to pour over court cases and review evidence and witnesses, he relies on TV and newspapers to find the names and faces of bad people to kill. I dread the day he tires of those sources and turns to Digg. There doesn't even appear to be a minimum offense that earns you the death penalty. If society deems you evil, you're a goner. How many of the falsely imprisoned have fallen under Light's pen?
We'll never know that tragic number, but we do know a lot about the supernatural origins of the Death Note. It comes from the Shinigami realm, a sort of demon-infested afterlife wasteland. Ryuk the demon gets bored and drops the notebook in the human world to see if causes anything interesting to happen. Gee, I think it might. Invisible to the rest of the world, Ryuk follows Light around apparently for giggles. Munching happily on apples, you might the demon was visiting an old college buddy for all the portentous warnings he doesn't deliver. Light's got the whole thing figured out; all Ryuk has to do is float around and enjoy the show.
The real excitement is watching the police react to this creepy bloodbath. What would you do if scores of people died from inexplicable heart attacks, even if they're criminals? If you're Interpol, you throw up your hands, declare defeat, and turn the investigation over to mysterious detective "L". This is the point where Death Note goes from remotely logical to not even remotely logical. See, Interpol cannot contact L. But they know someone who can, this being somehow different from "able to contact L." Mystery detective L talks to them through voice masking on a laptop and describes his devious plan. That the police agree to it is more fantastic than any dimension traveling demons.
Mystery detective L announces a worldwide broadcast for the specific purpose of gaining the murder's attention (known in Japan as "Kira", their pronunciation of "killer"). On live TV, a man named something like "Lucius Langrove" condemns Kira and challenges the assassin to kill him. Never one to back down, Light writes the man's name in the Death Note and calmly watches as he drops dead of a heart attack. Then L's ornate symbol (it's an "L") fills the screen and he announces it's all a sham. The broadcast only occurred in the Kanto region of Japan, where super genius detective L determined the strange killings began. Having determined that Kira is in Kanto, or at least has access to satellite TV and is somewhere on planet Earth, the manhunt condenses to the local police.
Shall we cover the "ends justify the means" methodology by which L intends to capture Kira? Mister Langrove, or whatever his name was, is now dead. Sure he was a death row convict, but his heart attack was broadcast on television. Are the decency standards in Japan that lax? L then announces he's determined Kira is in the Kanto region. We see Kanto shoppers gazing up at the jumbotron, not even slightly alarmed that there's a murderer in their midst. Where's the panic? The lawsuits? And why, oh why, is L shown to be an attractive, androgynous Japanese twenty-something?
A better question might be why Light and L play this idiotic cat and mouse game when they're clearly looking at each other's notes. Light's father is the chief of police, so he hacks into his dad's laptop and can see what L's up to. L, in turn, is a genius detective and guesses what Kira is thinking / doing correctly every single time. Not once does L's theory deviate from what Light himself said five minutes earlier. You'll spend the first disc muttering "oh come on!" as The Infallible Detective and The Uncatchable Killer play Marco Polo with their eyes open.
I could do without L and Light's insufferable smugness, but until Lucky Star disc 2 falls into my lap, this is all I've got to watch. Your pity, I can haz it?
