My Review of "Death Note"

Death Note is a Japanese Anime that came out back in 2006. I've heard rumblings about this TV show for quite some time. Unfortunately at the time I was kind of getting out of the Anime phase of my life so the series never really caught my eye. After generations of friends coming at me about this series I finally decided to dive into it because it because it's available on Netflix.

The show starts innocently enough with our main protagonist Light Yagami discovering a notebook. Of course this notebook isn't any regular notebook. This notebook is guarded by a Shinigami (spirit) named Ryuk. I was immediately surprised that Light wasn't totally freaked out by being able to see this Shinigami out of nowhere.

Ryuk's notebook was passed to Light because well he was bored. It's such a hilarious reason for such an ominous notebook. This notebook has a whole set of rules to it. Ultimately, if a name has been written in this notebook and the person writing the name has the image of the person in their head the person who's name has been written will die in 40 seconds. What a heck of a weird situation! Who thinks of this stuff?

Of course Light thinks he's hallucinating because he's got this demon spirit in front of him that no one else can see and they just told him that he can kill people on command by just writing their name in the notebook. To test out the notebook Light decides to write the names of criminals on TV and lo and behold the criminal dies.

Instead of freaking out he continues to write criminal names in his notebook and this catches the eye of law enforcement around the world. Light believes that he's fixing the world by killing off evil criminals but justice is justice. The law doesn't believe that one person should be above the law and killing discriminately like he does.

This is where the real intrigue of the TV show starts up. We have conversations about morals and social norms. They mention that crime rates have dropped ever since they discovered that criminals are dying by a mysterious person. What really is justice? Who is to decide who is right and who is wrong? They never really went into the socioeconomic situations of criminals. It may have pushed us against light immediately if we knew he was killing people trying to steal to provide for their family.

Light is a clever fellow too. Much of the TV depends on his intelligence of outwitting the special policing units. On the other end of the spectrum we have our special policing units which is headed by a mysterious person simply named "L". L is probably just as smart as Light and has a hunch that the killer may be Light.

The war of wits is really where this show shines. L and Light are bold enough to square off with each other in person despite knowing each other's situations. There's a whole slew of other characters that join the mix but the majority of this show is based off the sparring between Light and L.

I have to say that this series did kind of last longer than I had expected. I'm so used to having TV shows that last only around 8 episodes or maybe 12 at max. Then I recognized it's an older show so I thought it would go up to 26 episodes and then it kept going! There are a total of 37 episodes! Luckily each episode is half an hour long and even further truncated because they don't have commercials when you stream. It is a quick binge worthy show but I still took 3 weeks to watch all of the episodes.

The amount of things that happen you really have to keep track of what's going on. If your mind slips you can really lose what's going on however it's really interesting how they go at each other in terms of trying to outsmart their opponents. Although, I did find that it should have been suspicious right away when Light barely seems to show any emotions when he's put into tight situations closer to the end.

Lights character progression is pretty awesome to keep up with. It almost reflects the same character arc that you see with Walter White in the Breaking Bad series.

Overall, I had a lot of fun with this show. I'm still not totally into Animes and do still prefer reading Mangas instead however I did thoroughly enjoy this TV series. It was a really entertaining show and I can see why a lot of Anime fans gush over this show. I have to give this series an 8 out of 10. My friends are going to love the fact that I finally checked it out. They can stop harrassing me now!