Things not Keikakudori: A Review of Death Note

When a couple of my friends enthusiastically recommended Death Note to me as a show, I saw no reason to not watch it. It was a relatively short series with a definitive end that was popular (although I knew very little about it) and my friends liked it. With that in mind, I set out to watch through the show.

First the positives. I like the main question posited by the show, namely the morality of using murder to achieve a peaceful society. The characters were interesting and relatively realistic, the art quality was pretty high, the voice acting good. The first few episodes were good enough to draw me in and not cause me to drop out right away, and since I got more than 10 episodes in, I was intent on finishing the show all the way through.

The main problem I had, that many other fans seem to echo, is that the show centers around Light. He's an interesting character that I quite enjoyed following about, but therein lies the problem: a lot of the episodes do not center around Light. The interplay between him and L makes the show, and early on when it's not Light, it's about L, and that's just as interesting. But midway through Light loses his memory, and it suddenly becomes, well, Light acting like a normal human being.

Suddenly shifting a show like Death Note into a wannabe "whodunnit" loses a lot of the value and charm. The show flat-out became much less interesting, and I was basically waiting for the "ta-da! I have returned" that Light inevitably did--it just took too long.

Similarly, once L was out of the picture, the series level of interest to me dropped a fair amount. Light suddenly again became less important (or at least got less screentime), Misa pretty much disappeared, and all the characters who had been important in the first season got replaced with subpar replacements. M and N in particular were particularly uninteresting, since they were supposed to be polar opposites which just ended up making them really two-dimensional, especially when compared with L. Again, I think the main problem with the second season is that it focused less on Light, and when it did it was foiled by uninteresting characters.

I think a final issue I had with the second season also relates to the new characters. Firstly, it was mostly believable that there could be an erratic genius like L solving crimes, but it stretches believability when there's some orphanage apparently just crankin' out the kids. Similarly, we never gain motivation for why all these people want to catch Kira so bad. By the end of the series, it seems that most everyone is happy with Kira and either don't wants to change the status quo or is afraid of challenging him, even up to the President. Why then would he allow this random squadron led by a preteen to do something he's publicly stated is against policy? Why do the ex-Japanese police force still care about catching him all these years later? Theoretically all of it seems possible, but personally he seems to stretch credibility.

While all this may sound harsh, I still did enjoy the series for the most part. I simply wish it had been a bit less erratic. It's not on my list of favorite shows, but I definitely did enjoy the ride. I also have the movie trilogy on my computer to watch at some point, which I hear improves on some of the faults of the series. When I end up finally watching those, I'll likely review them as well, but for now, I can cautiously recommend the show to those at a loss of what to watch next.

-HTMC