The early posts are uneven, the middle ones long, and there’s a massive change of tone toward the end, when the plot begins to collapse. No spoilers past the current episode (unless marked).

The best kid in Japan: Episode 1
That’s right, this is your first Interpol meeting: Episode 2
No matter how you look at it, it’s an ordinary date: Episodes 3-5
Let us be careful about telling people our names; let us value our lives: Episode 6
Considering he’s seventeen, it isn’t that unusual: Episodes 7-8
And our other freshman representative, Ryuga Hideki: Episode 9
Yagami Light sure talks a lot: Episode 10
Are you telling me to just sit here and watch television?: Episode 11
Totally ruining Kira’s image: Episode 12
She’s not as stupid as I thought: Episode 13
My first friend: Episode 14
As long as I don’t die, university is fun: Episode 15
I’m sure it’s a gray that’s almost indistinguishable from white: Episode 16
So you lean that way, Ryuzaki-san: Episode 17
It’s probably better if we don’t try too hard: Episode 18
They just said “kill!”: episode 19
Ningen fucker: Episode 20 (spoilers through 25)
I know you aren’t a stalker, but you clearly aren’t human!: Episode 21
Everybody watch this
This is going so precisely to plan, it’s almost scary: Episodes 22-23
This is the longest forty seconds of my life: Episode 24 (spoilers through 25)
Everyone lies: Episode 25
My firm achievement: Episode 26
My name is John McEnroe: Episode 27
Something wrong, L?: Episode 28
Not just any orphanage: Episode 29
All you lot seem to do is watch TV: Episode 30
She is nothing but a woman: Episode 31
Is God unable to act freely right now?: Episode 32
I have never boarded a plane alone in my life: Episode 33
You people are already out of the picture: Episodes 34-36.5
All humans will, without exception, eventually die: Episodes 36.5-37

The SPK and the task force face down, with Near initially wearing a mask of L’s face. Mikami arrives, and writes the cast’s names in his notebook; Near and Light have both planned for this, and have created various elaborate forgeries and plots to ensure his success or failure. Both silently celebrate their victories, but only Light proclaims, at thirty-six seconds, “Near, it’s my win.”

But it’s not, of course; Light’s wrong, and nothing can save him. He dies in agony.

1. Near’s L mask is a nightmare, and in the bargain, it doesn’t look much like L (though it’s a plausible caricature of Near). I’m sure this was intentional, and it’s a good visual scare in a Jokeresque way.

Enjoying Death Note‘s last scenes is all about pretending they were set up properly. For the first time in many episodes, there’s some sort of heft to what’s happening, but it’s hard when it’s not connected to anything in the past. Again, if we’d learned even the first thing about how Near feels about L, then the mask would’ve been a fantastic dramatic weapon. It could have meant fifty things, at least one of them intentional, and the rest helpfully written by the viewer.

2. The Yellow Box scene uses arty angles in much the same way that Episode 25 did, and picks up many of the same images – the dripping water, industrial architecture, even the fisheye lens. But it doesn’t work as well here, because most of it’s deployed at random (the fisheye, which originally signified L’s first-person viewpoint, is just dropped to the floor between Light and Near ).

Likewise, there’s a shitload of obvious imagery (that big hook!) to replace the earlier, defter stuff — though by the end, we’ve seen that big hook so many times that it’s passed through silliness, somehow. The weird, wet sound design also helps to compensate.

3. I wish that they’d retired “Domine Kira” after L died to it. It’s a great piece of background music, claustrophobic and panic-inducing and extremely conclusive, and at L’s death it was wielded rather than played — not only because of the mood it created, but because it had already been used at several climactic scenes. By then, you’d memorized the phases of its choral frenzy; you knew when it ended, so you knew precisely how long L had to live. It was an inexorable countdown.

Hauling it out for second-arc shocks, especially Mikami’s final “sakujo,” is too much. The thing is already done and spent (in a slightly different sense from Mikami).

4. I don’t know what they were trying to do with Light’s prolonged and stylized breakdown, but I don’t think it succeeds. It certainly humiliates him, but it also dehumanizes him — and at the precise moment when we should have begun to pity him in his hideous failure. You can’t even empathize with the other characters. They’re responding to something completely unrecognizable, and so their emotion is unrecognizable as well.

5. Given the underdevelopment of Mello and Near, it’s hard to get the “together, we can even surpass L” business. Which is a shame, as it’s a silly but viable explanation for their defeat of Light.

We can guess Mello’s arc. We’re not idiots. But it would be nice to have some confirmation from the control booth.

6. Miyano Mamoru does Light’s hysterics beautifully. I stopped really paying attention to the Death Note voice acting after the passing of The Yamaguchi, but it takes a lot not to overplay this kind of over-the-top vocal blood; instead, Miyano’s voice is one of the few things that lends Light any humanity at all.

7. Matsuda’s redemptive moment isn’t really shooting Light five times. That’s the kind of shit Matsuda always gets up to. The impressive part is that, even amidst all of this excitement, he’s thinking — he shoots Light specifically because he’s realized who killed Soichiro.

8. And after being the only character brave enough to challenge either L or Light, much less both, Aizawa’s closing moment is refusing to follow Near’s first order as the new “L.” It wasn’t obvious to me the first time, but Aizawa is secretly the protagonist; he would’ve been the protagonist in the hands of any other writer.

9.  Light’s death is awful. And after all that, it’s very important that it be awful, and that we feel for him in his final moments of horror. This isn’t a tragedy about evil consuming itself; it’s a much more everyday tragedy — human stupidity in wasting life — so the lives Light’s wasted, including his own, must be the focus of the ending.

10. Arguably, the manga did this better; his last moments are so resoundingly pathetic, and his desperation not to die is played out over what seems like precisely forty seconds of panels. But I respect and admire the anime ending, too, which plays it much more quietly. In particular, Light’s vision of his younger self is startling — especially the moment when his eye flicks to see the boy, and you realize that his appearance in flashback isn’t a dramatic device. Light is really seeing him.

11. I also love the setting of Light’s end — an industrial wasteland surmounted by a beautiful sunset.

12. Ryuk’s line (“It was good while it lasted; we killed some boredom, didn’t we?”) seems to address us, though he’s really addressing Light; it’s a well-aimed barb, like an epilogue from an evil Puck.

13. Light’s final vision of L on the stairs, and the juxtaposition with Misa’s suicide, and the grandeur of the sunset and the moon, and the music, are really very, very good — for the first time in several hours of benighted crap, it’s viewer-implicatingly good, the kind of good that makes you regret wasting six hours of precious life on that benighted crap, and hate yourself a little for enjoying Light’s final curb-stomping.

The return of L is especially painful. This should have been a great detective series; L, Light and Misa should have been some of the greatest and most engaging heroes in anime history. But their time was wasted, and they’re dead now. The loss of their youthful lives, and the absolute permanence of that loss, is the very point of the series. No force on Earth can bring back the pampered, aloof, but essentially harmless young Light. Misa’s current film will be her last. Nothing more can shock Yagami;  Mello will never fall in love; Matt will never play Scribblenauts on the DS; Naomi will never get her life sorted out; the great L will never catch another criminal, nor enjoy another sundae. Nor will we ever know the precise nature of L’s life. If the series had gone as it should have, we would have learned it by degrees, but history was averted.

Domine Kira!

More meetings in hotel rooms; more toybuilding. Aizawa determines that Light and Takeda are communicating in writing during their meetings, and alerts Mogi, Ide and Near — who tells him that, to be honest, Near’s already sure that Light is Kira. Nothing Aizawa does can change anything. His final task will simply be to “witness.”

The SPK members kidnap Misa and Mogi (they go willingly). Near reflects that, if Light’s Light, he’ll know the meaning behind his capture of Misa — presumably, that Near is retracing L’s original steps toward him.

Everyone prepares for the showdown. Near and Light both think they’ve got the other pinned. Mello — who, unbeknownst to us, has agreed to work with Near on a final suicide gambit — traps and kidnaps Takeda. The result is one dead punk, one dead newscaster, and finally, one dead gamer. Matt, we hardly knew — oh, what’s the point?

1. Watching Near stride through the problem doesn’t really work for me. I’ve made that clear. I know the Mello and Near arc was a conscious attempt to avoid “a repeat” of the Light/L struggle, but it does end up being one — except it’s also less believable and interesting, since NAME OF POORLY-DEVELOPED CHILD CHARACTER can apparently solve the whole fucking mystery that NAME OF WELL-DEVELOPED ADULT CHARACTER died trying to solve, on a quarter of the evidence, at a third of the risk, in half the time.

This is the last stop, and I’ll be busy at the terminal, so I’ll say it one more time: you guys spent twenty episodes building up a worthy and brilliant antagonist, a character whose every move made sense on five levels. Your fans love this character. Virtually everyone who’s worked on any part of the series cites him as their favorite. That’s great. Then you killed him. That’s brave.

Then you replaced him with this sort of Wesley Crusher guy who does everything he did, but renders it meaningless by doing it twice as well and without apparent effort. It’s like you killed off Batman, replaced him with Richie Rich and expected the fans to be happy. Fuck you and fuck your ending.

2. As usual for the second arc, while most of these death scenes are done well, there’s no lead-up or sense of agony to them. Lots of potentially shocking, dramatic, terrifying, redemptive moments, all tossed off casually into the abyss.

I realize that Mello’s death, in particular, had to be underplayed to avoid giving away the ending — in which case you care too much about your goddamn ending and too little about the reason people care what it is. Fuck your ending. I liked this series because it was about brilliant, charismatic characters and the intimacies of their thought process. Blindfolding me will not help.

3. I think it’s official that Light’s misogyny is meant to be as bad as it sounds; he’s just had too much to say about women lately for that not to be the case.

Of course, since he’s trapped in a universe where women usually are unappeasable monsters with no philosophical agency, it’s hard to argue with him.

4. I complain, but this sequence of episodes essentially has no chance of being good, because by now, the series has killed off every really human character except Aizawa. It’s possible to feel bad for Misa if you try too hard, but Misa was essentially killed off ages ago.

The writers do understand this, I think, and try to compensate by working on Giovanni and the rest of the SPK — but the whole thing goes by so fast; the timing’s a blood-soaked mess, and we grasp to the few moments of emotion only briefly before we’re dragged along to the next spectacle.

5. Interesting that the TV commentators argue that because Takeda died, she plainly “wasn’t up to the task” of being Kira’s spokesperson. Once again, the equation of death with losing comes up, and it’d be an interesting comment, except that — again — the series’ perspective really does seem to equate the two.

This is very unusual for me — I usually write at least a page on an episode I don’t like — but I’ve just got nothing to say about Episode 33. I don’t love it, I don’t hate it. Its characterization is neither fascinating nor failed. It’s plotty, but mostly in setup form.

I will say that there are a few nice touches, especially re: Near, who gets a few sympathetic moments (“that’s not how we work” — and he really does mean “me and the dead man”; that is incredibly depressing, Near). Conversely, the scene with Misa and Takada is annoying — it seems to exist for the sake of gleefully trampling the Bechdel Test, which rejects any film that fails at the following:

1. It has to have at least two women in it,
2. Who talk to each other,
3. About something besides a man.

This is not quite the first time in Death Note that two female characters have conversed. Misa and Rem talked several times, and occasionally not even about Light. And as a longtime female fan of entertainment and leaving the house, I can take a fresh example easily enough. But you have to admit that the series blows the test pretty hilariously — especially since the Misa/Takada scene, in which they catfight with thousands of lives in the balance, might be the least believable moment in the entire story, up to and including the money drop. Misa needs a brainwipe and an idiot pill for it to even happen. Why does bullshit like this never happen to Light?

This episode is largely given over to the autobiography of Mikami, the new Kira and Light’s chosen proxy. Mikami’s life is full of classical music, minimalist design and money; he has a successful legal career, and a disturbing childhood which he recounts with distressing serenity.

Mikami had always considered it his calling to protect other children from bullies. As he grew older, the situation quickly got out of hand, and he himself became the victim; his mother chastised him for continuing to provoke the bigger boys. One night, Mikami’s mother and the boys who had victimized him were all killed in the same car accident — an act which Mikami viewed as a miracle, and which influenced his slide from peculiarity to fanaticism.

Mikami’s life continued to be plagued by such deaths — cumulating in the beginning of Kira’s career, and Mikami’s entrance into his cult. Now Kira has selected him as his proxy and prophet. Mikami returns the favor by calling up Light’s beautiful and articulate college girlfriend, Takada Kiyomi, now a news anchor, and asking her to be Kira’s “spokesperson.”

Light decides to meet with Takada, ostensibly to get her to work with the police; over the course of a smooth and seductive wiretapped meeting, he vamps everyone thoroughly and emerges with two powerful new allies.

***

1. It’s not a great episode, but I’m impressed. This is the kind of thing the second arc should’ve done from the beginning — show Light’s increasingly inevitable rise, particularly his engagement with the media and public, leading to the growth of a powerful new religion. (It’s actually more a religion than a cult, except to Mikami and Takada.)

2. I particularly appreciate the appearance of bookends — characters and plot twists that mirror the first arc, showing the consistency of Light’s behavior and making the story feel cohesive. Takada was introduced in the first arc, and plays a similar role now. Mikami is a new character, but we’ve been prepared for his arrival by the introduction of Kira’s corps of followers, and by his parallels with the first-arc cast. Like Naomi, he’s a strong personality introduced abruptly and given a very limited time to act; more importantly, he shares Light’s motivations, personality and swift ethical decline (and a coincidental similarity of surname).

To be honest, I don’t know if these are deliberate callbacks, or if I’m just desperately grasping for reminders of when the series was good, justifying the creators’ limited range with fancy talk. I hope it’s the former.

3. So Light is once again communicating, through the subtlest of nods, with a very distant figure. It’s an ally this time, but it’s still irresistible to read a bit of Light and L into Light and Mikami’s dynamic — especially given Mikami’s long dark hair, pallor and downturned mouth. Light’s instinct to use this man is not hard to trace.

4. With this episode, Death Note also abruptly remembers that it was once a story about adults. In fact, it seems to remember it with a scream similar to Light’s in Episode 24. Suddenly the series is drenched in adult trappings — suits, wine, high heels, star closeups, opulent offices, and a strong implication of hotel-room infidelity. It all seems deliberately excessive, especially the hyper-romantic cinematography of Light and Takada’s meeting.

Even if it’s not deliberate, it works. This is how Light sees himself now: James Bond with a demon friend.

5. The word “sakujo” (delete/eliminate) is worked into Mikami’s monologue with impressive frequency. In general, I think Mikami is a very well-done thing — exactly the kind of person who’d crack absolutely at the appearance of Kira, which is probably a much larger phenomenon.

6. The fact that the characters suddenly spend so much time in hotel rooms is another callback to the first arc, though of course, they’re now sexy hotel rooms.

7. Are we meant to assume that Mikami and Takada are/were an item? He’s “spoken to her in private several times,” and at least one of those times appeared to be over dinner.

8. This is the third episode running in which Light’s worn that white shirt, though of course he dolls up to meet Takada. He’s also adopted a few of L’s vocal habits, including polite speech and a softer tone.

I’m really not sure how intentional this is — for all I know, it would be entirely normal for a young man to switch to polite speech as he jumps from junior membership to leadership of a group like this. And it’s not particularly obvious. It’s not like he adopts “watashi” or does what could, under any circumstances, be read as a straight L imitation. I’m just saying that there have been a couple of gestures toward echoing L lately, and it’d be interesting if Light were consciously or unconsciously imitating him (though I don’t honestly think this is the intent).

9. I wonder if there’s any import to everyone using “kanojo” as the pronoun for Takada? I thought it was a little unusual to use a gendered pronoun in Japanese unless you really had to be clear about the person’s identity. Maybe I think wrong.

10. If I’m going to write a positive second-arc episode review, I may as well keep up with Towerwatch. In prior episodes, towers portended doom; they implied miscommunication and hubris; they evoked Tarot imagery. Here, Tokyo Tower manfully shoulders the much more straightforward work of signifying a good old-fashioned fucking.

To escape from Light’s pincers, Near drops ten million dollars of L’s money off the skyscraper in which he headquarters himself. He and his team then leave in the guise of riot cops, and Near resumes working on the task force, successfully convincing Aizawa to become his mole. Light moves ahead with his emergency plan, starting with ordering Misa to relinquish her Death Note and lose her memories again, this time for good. The defections continue; Aizawa, Ide and Mogi now all suspect Light.

As the episode ends, everyone tunes in to Kira’s Kingdom, the Sakura TV show anchored by Demegawa, who dies suddenly on the air along with all his cohort. Light has had Misa send her Death Note to what he feels is a worthier successor — a stylish young prosecutor named Mikami Teru, who worships Kira as a god.

1. Mello is about 19; Near is about 17. Seriously. I sat down with How To Read 13 the other day and did the math.

To me, this makes Near even more of a failure of a character. If he is meant to be a childlike adult, then why has he been designed to look like a child? Of course the writing’s more to blame, but at least he’s an equally nonsensical and two-dimensional figure — a little Batman villain, really, with his all-encompassing theme — as a brilliant child and as a childlike genius.

I suppose that if Near is seventeen, it helps the story in one respect: it’s no longer entirely inconceivable that he has his own government agency. But it’s still very close.

2. Come to think of it, it’s interesting that Near went in person to speak to the President. L would never have done so. It demonstrates a greater forthrightness than L had, and even fits with the general intent of Near’s character — that is, he’s even more socially absent than L; it would never even occur to him that people wouldn’t take him as seriously if he spoke to them in person, so he reveals himself casually, non-tactically.

As usual with Near, all of this shatters if you look at it too closely, but if you use just the right distance it stays duct-taped together somehow.

3. I wonder if Mello and Near’s voice casting would have been any better if it had been reversed? If Mello had had a husky but unbroken voice, it would have emphasized his poseurdom and essential immaturity; if Near had sounded like a forty-year-old smoker, it would really plunge him into the Uncanny Valley, but it would also contrast his mind and body in an interesting way (potentially even tipping off the audience to the fact that Near is meant to be at a significant tactical disadvantage because he’s so emotionally and socially odd — also true as of How To Read 13, though if you’ve resorted to adding facts like this in the manual, I just don’t know what you’re doing).

4. The less said about the money drop, the better. It is a bad idea — all the worse because Near apparently planned it from the start — and it breaks, perhaps irreparably, the series’ remaining veneer of plausibility. The mild humor isn’t worth it.

5. It’s a call from Near, everyone! Get on your headsets! We have to fulfill our daily quota for technological pornography!

Or you could just listen to it on the computer, like you used to do.

(Or maybe Near’s speaking English and there’s a very troubled and confused translator involved, one who won’t sleep tonight.)

6. I like Aizawa’s worries that suspecting Light betrays Yagami’s memory. Yagami’s inclusion was a brilliant piece of plotting; so long as he’s around, everyone has an automatic damper on their suspicion of his son. Perhaps eliminating him was Light’s fatal mistake.

7. Is it me, or is there a little bit of regret and pride and horror in Misa’s response to being, essentially, ordered out of the plot? I hope so. It’s an ignominious end to a hideous career — as if Lady Macbeth had simply died in a household accident at the top of Act IV.

8. Aizawa looks so different now. It’s so damned effective that the characters age.

9. Near can’t even bring himself to touch a cell phone; Giovanni holds it for him. Heh.

10. I hadn’t realized this, but Aizawa’s honesty about contacting Near is a very L-style “deadman switch” tactic — he preserves himself by making it clear to the task force that if he dies soon, Light is Kira.

11. Unfortunately, now that Aizawa’s taken on an L role — complete with eye-to-eye callback shot to the first opening sequence — he’s going to have to get used to being constantly fucked over and embarrassed, starting by watching Mikami slay Demegawa. I know he’s up to it, but I’m sorry for him.

(I do like how much they’re playing up Aizawa-as-L; it actually has a thematic relation to the first arc, and it helps that it involves a character who had a defined relationship with both L and Light. I forgot how well that was done.)

12. There’s just enough emphasis on “male” among the traits on Mikami’s questionnaire to give me some hope that Light’s misogyny is meant to be as grotesque as it looks.

This episode begins with a vaguely sublime moment: Near flies a toy rocket around a plastic city, adding the sound effect “Nyuuuuuu.” Lester approaches him and asks him for his thoughts on the case. Near tells Lester that he’s concluded the second-generation L is also Kira, based on the willingness of the task force to work with Kira’s plan of the previous episode.

A brief montage shows Kira’s increasing power. Criminals are terrified of him. Schoolchildren put their enemies’ names on the Internet in hopes that Kira will kill them. People try to commit suicide-by-Kira. Somewhere, unnoticed, Light’s mother weeps.

Meanwhile, the president of the United States surrenders; Matsuda confides in the task force that he’s not sure Kira’s evil, though he knows this has a lot to do with his own low position and accompanying admiration of power. Light tells him it doesn’t matter. He thinks Kira’s chosen to sacrifice his own decency in order to further the greater good, but he also adds that it’s their job as cops to enforce the current system. It’s not their job to be philosophers. If Kira wins, they’ll become the bad guys.

Mello breaks into the home of Near’s female aide, Lidner, and escorts her at gunpoint back to Near’s. The two have a brief, tense exchange, in which Near pleasantly credits Mello’s antics for bringing him closer to Kira’s identity.  Mello repeatedly threatens to shoot him, but then relents and tells Near some useful information about shinigami. He also asks for his photo back. Near has captioned it “Dear Mello.”

Near then proceeds to work at Light a little more, gathering more information about shinigami, forcing Light to admit that the 13-Day Rule might be fake — and making Aizawa begin to doubt Light’s motivations. As the episode ends, Light makes a serious move on Near, putting the threat of “Kira” to the American President’s head and forcing him to dissolve what remains of Near’s organization.

***

1. I knew that this would happen. I knew that the quality of my posts would suffer as this arc wore on, because Mello and Near are absolutely dreadful fucking characters, and how many ways can you say that?

I just want to know how the same writers who plotted the first arc managed to fuck up this one. It’s a story of succession — the stuff of classical drama. Two princes, opposite in personality, are vying for the throne of a dead king; the nation’s at war, its enemies closing in. How do you ruin that?

In this case, by not giving either of the princes any sympathetic traits, any motivations, any obvious desires. I’m sorry to keep harping on this elementary crap, but without these things, they are not even characters. Why does Mello fight? To screw Near. Why does Near fight? For no obvious reason. It doesn’t help that both of them appear to be completely amoral, and repeatedly describe what they’re doing as “a game.”

But I’m sick of complaining, so here — why don’t I just list four other ways to do this, and if you don’t think any of them are better, then just consider my complaints illegitimate and move on.

-Mello and Near are young. Really young. Preteens. They’re brilliant but essentially innocent children, trusting their handlers to make the moral calls and point them in the right direction; over the course of the series, Light’s treacherous nature will destroy their innocence, leaving them aware of the evil around them, and thus worthy successors to L — indeed, possibly wiser than L was at the beginning of his arc.

-Mello and Near are even worse than they are in the series — that is, they act precisely as they canonically do, but without the final reveal of a very basic decency. Their absolute immaturity infuriates Light, making him question the actions of his own youth and affecting his mindset. Some form of redemption ensues, though it is likely somewhat ugly and incomplete.

-Mello and Near resent being “L’s successors”; neither of them wants the job, as it seems stressful, dangerous and dubiously necessary outside the context of Kira. They do both work against Kira; they comprehend the importance of that battle and feel some loyalty to their predecessor’s memory. Nonetheless, they are cynical about both L and what made him, and after defeating Kira, they see no further reason to carry on his name.

-Mello and Near are not Mello and Near. They are entirely different characters, people who had a closer connection to L, and who have unexpectedly taken up arms to finish his work. Intelligent, but never previously judged to be geniuses, they attempt with surprising success to duplicate L’s manner of thought. They are L’s childhood friends, his brother and sister, his wife and child, his close protégés, or even his personal enemies. Of course, the presence of any of these things in L’s life is unintuitive, which is why it would be interesting to try and do it well.

2. This lack of moral thought in Mello and Near (and by moral thought, I honestly mean philosophy, personal self-awareness — abstract thought of any kind) is only made uglier by this episode, in which even Matsuda comes closer to enlightenment.

3. Light’s comment about Kira’s sacrificing himself for the greater good is probably the closest he ever comes to a thoughtful statement. So noted.

4. I find it interesting that Light is styled a bit like L in this episode — he’s suddenly dressed more casually and plainly than the rest of the task force, wearing jeans with his black turtleneck or white button-down; he also drinks coffee and regards his reflection in a window, much as L was wont to do. Since nobody has made the slightest effort to suggest that Light is becoming the mask, I prefer to imagine that this is conscious PR on his part.

5. Yet another new headquarters, boys?

6. I find it spectacularly unlikely that the U.S. would lead the world in surrendering to Kira — indeed, I doubt that any world government would surrender without more direct provocation, but particularly not the U.S., which so passionately refuses to see itself as anything other than the protagonist.

7. I appreciate that, like L’s, Mello and Near’s most serious personal moments take place in an imagined Winchester Cathedral and are accompanied by the sound of bells.

What? It’s a great visual. I haven’t done a complete heel turn.

8. I cannot imagine anything more infuriating to watch than Mello’s chocolate routine.

9. Somewhere amidst all of this, someone decides to develop Ide. Too damn late.

10. So Near does have a little ego; like L, he’s imperiously angry when Light is disingenuous with him. This is a new wrinkle in his established character.

(Or perhaps Near is not even a character, but merely acts as the plot, image or drama demand.)

11. I also like that Near uses tarot cards to direct his thought process, or shorthand them visually — he certainly doesn’t appear to be reading them –

(Oh, fuck it, see above.)

Light does some research, gloats, and willingly snuggles with a lingerie-clad Misa after she uses her shinigami eyes to find out the Mob’s address.

Misa speaks to the task force in a computerized voice, saying that she’s Kira, she’s sending them her notebook, and the recipient can make the eye deal and fight Mello this way. Chief Yagami volunteers; since the task force still believe that the user of the notebook will die in thirteen days if the killings stop, he’s essentially committing suicide, and he acknowledges this.

The task force makes a heavily armed assault on Mello’s headquarters, and Misa mows down the pointless characters who’ve helped him so far. Yagami can’t bring himself to kill Mello, though, and he dies in the hospital after Mello blows up the building. Light mourns.

A shinigami called Sidoh is also involved in this episode, but though he’s very funny, I don’t have anything to say about him.

***

1. There’s a scene in this episode in which Light opens his shirt and stuffs the Death Note down the front of his pants. He has an excuse, but it’s not a very good one.

2. May I submit that Light kills his father? Or is this the usual assumption?

Otherwise, his plan is impossibly stupid. There’s no need to use the Death Note to win the battle; Light already has Misa killing most of their enemies before the task force goes in. And he’ll have to kill the holder in thirteen days to enforce the false rule which appears to prove his innocence.

So it’s a guarantee that this plan will lose him a pawn. And odds are the volunteer will be Yagami. That makes Light a patricide. While the Yagamis both crucially hesitated to sacrifice family members in the last episode, it’s likely that Light saw this as a sign that family is a weakness — just as Soichiro sees death as the only way to atone for his failure — and the tactic’s a virtual repeat of the way he used Rem to take out L.

So Soichiro dies; ideally, he kills Mello in the process; Light loses a recently proven liability; at best, Yagami even uses his eyes to confirm to the task force that Light doesn’t currently own a notebook. The plan meets every goal except eliminating Mello. Perhaps even Light can’t look directly at it, but this is what he did.

3. Yagami’s death is missing something.  It took me a long time to figure out what.

It’s not that it isn’t set up. Yagami’s never been the loudest member of the cast, but we’ve seen enough to learn how much Light takes after him — he’s passionate, an extremist even; he’s very physically brave, uncompromising, and shockingly dedicated. He’s kind of guy who apologizes when he’s shot. He values his duty over his life, and he has an extraordinarily broad definition of “duty.”

4.  Yagami’s death does lose something because he has no dramatic role in the series. He’s the leader of the heroes, ostensibly, but he takes orders from his son, and the task force are not the heroes anyway (though it’s a testament to Light’s people skills, and L’s magnetic unpleasantness, that it takes them so long to realize that). Thus, as we watch Yagami die, with all the dramatic trappings of a beloved leader’s passing, we don’t feel a part of the scene; we feel as if we’re watching an unfamiliar soap opera.

5. But I think what’s missing is simply dramatic buildup. The elements are all there, but coming so few episodes after L’s epic fall — and with relatively little preamble — and with absolutely no interior commentary from Light, it just seems horribly weightless. Perhaps if we were used to this kind of death from the start — but the series had previously been brilliant at giving its deaths some solemnity and momentum; even Naomi got an entire episode.

6. The task force barely pause to dwell on the fact that they’re suddenly trusting their sworn enemy, the man who killed their first leader. Why? Yes, because the plot demands it, but really, why?

7.  I think both Near and Mello were badly miscast. This isn’t the actors’ fault; they’re illustrious enough — indeed, like L, both of L’s successors are played by actors already associated with iconic roles. Sasaki Nozomu was the lead in Akira, and Hidaka Noriko starred opposite Yamaguchi Kappei in Ranma 1/2. (I’m sure that the hilarity of casting Ranma and Akane as Light’s chief antagonists had nothing to do with the decision to bring in Hidaka.)

But the essential qualities of their voices don’t ring true. Giving Mello such a deep, rough voice seems like a transparent attempt to butch him up; likewise, I’m aware that Hidaka plays boys from time to time, but her Near sounds like a mature woman, to the point where I’m surprised that Light doesn’t remark on it when he sees his picture. I suppose he has other things to worry about.

8. I don’t usually complain about research, but these things are almost story-breaking: since when does the American Mafia look anything like Rod Ross’ gang?

And an orphanage? In England? In 2007?

***

LANGUAGE HELL

***

9. Pronouns: Between episode 27 and the present, Mello undergoes a significant pronoun switch from “boku” to “ore” (I hope it wasn’t too painful). “Ore” is, for a guy like Mello, pretty pointedly rough and mature; it’s a good way to indicate his pretensions. I’m glad that, though we don’t see much that we need to about this character, we do see what he looked like before he struck the pose.

Naturally, Near’s inherited the L “watashi.”

Near continues his conversation with Light-as-L, putting him in charge of the effort to rescue Sayu. Light admonishes his father not to put himself and Sayu in danger, even for the notebook’s sake, and then goes home to Misa, with whom his relationship has somehow become even more openly abusive.

Despite the best efforts of a newly shorn Aizawa, the Mob kidnap Yagami and divert his plane to the Arizona desert, where they go through a hostage exchange and send off the notebook in a missile to a location where Mello can retrieve it. He immediately uses it to kill virtually every member of Near’s organization. Meanwhile, L is dead.

1. Though the symbolic birdcage is pretty bad, Light and Misa’s adult relationship is portrayed well, as is Misa’s transition from wide-eyed girl to forbiddingly lipsticked woman. Their moment on the plane — Misa leaning on a vulnerably sleeping Light as if he were a vulnerably sleeping bomb — is indeed very sad.

2. Light is much dumber in the second arc, or rather, his strategic weaknesses are exposed: he can react to abuse from above, but he cannot defend the heights once he’s reached them.

But the writing’s not as good, so in effect, he’s just much dumber.

2. Another thing that was probably meant to be interesting about Mello and Near is that they reverse L and Light’s age difference. Light is now a relatively steady adult genius, trying to comprehend a mind which resembles his before he got his safety valve.

Unfortunately, Death Note falls into the ancient trap of series about teenagers that introduce junior characters in the later seasons — the new characters are the same age as the rest of the cast were at introduction, but they act much younger. Brilliant though Mello may be, he’s essentially a boy, and would have been incredibly weak to mind games if Light had been awake enough to play them. It’s not the equivalent of the L/Light fight; it should be as one-sided as the L/cake fight, except that Mello inexplicably wins.

3. Near deliberately underrates himself when he tells Light that Mello’s plan was unbeatable. I’m pretty sure that he could have beaten it, for the simple reason that Near loves nothing and would have let the hostages die.

4. Light mentions that, having just arrived in LA, he’s “in no position to command the world’s police and military” as L.

Of the times that they’ve mentioned this ability, how many have actually involved L or Light using it, and how many have been justifications for their not using it? Would it not have been simpler just to have the police permanently abandon L during the Yotsuba arc, with Higuchi’s bribe as the catalyst? Would not a rational outsider have concluded that L was a charlatan by then, anyway?

As things are, they’ve given too much power to the character acting as “L,” to the point where they must depower him every time the plot requires him to have a problem. And what exactly is Light’s “no position” line supposed to mean? Is he jet-lagged?

5. Comparatively speaking, we don’t camp out much in Near’s head, so it’s hard to get a handle on his strategic thinking. His actions in this episode are transparent enough, though: he’s willing to sacrifice control (and, yes, let the hostages die) in order to test and possibly identify the new “L.” Near has very little respect for life, and almost no ego. He is of a strikingly passive nature (though hardly a pacifistic one).

In other words, though he’s superficially similar to L, his basic thinking is completely different. L’s first strike was a targeted, deliberate sacrifice of life; it was dramatic — it was televised – and it made L look omniscient, and probably feel that way, too.

This is another point the omitted “idiot” scene from episode 27 would have clarified a good deal. L’s ego is such that, to be effective, he has to keep it down by sheer force of self-awareness. Near suffers no such malaise, and he looks down on L for this reason. A demonstration of ego-control means as little to Near as would a demonstration of emotional control.

Roger, the administrator of Wammy’s House, informs two young boys of L’s death: hotheaded Mello and coldblooded Near. When Mello asks which of them L chose to succeed him, Roger says that L never made the choice. There’s some wrangling, but eventually Near is selected by default; Mello, who hates his cuter rival, chooses to defect and pursue the case separately.

Over the next few years, the boys investigate. Near hooks up with the American government, while Mello joins the Mafia, develops or affects chocoholism,  goes punk, and kidnaps a high-ranking member of the Japanese police, holding him hostage in exchange for the notebook. When Light manages to off the cop, Mello abducts Light’s sister Sayu instead.

There’s also some political shifting, and the Americans openly try to wrest the anti-Kira investigation from the Japanese. A special agency called the SPK is formed around Near. Meanwhile, L is dead.

1. Mello and Near’s introduction is very poorly written — it’s a surprising fumble, given the clarity, economy and brilliance of Light’s and L’s first appearances.

We learn their basic traits. Mello even describes them. But there are important questions which neither this scene nor any other bothers to answer; the manga helps, but not that much.

Here’s what I’d really like to know:

-How did Mello and Near feel about L before he died? Was he their friend, their distant idol, their mentor, or their hatefully overachieving older brother?
-Have they even met him?
-What involvement did L have in their training?
-What precisely is their training?
-How well do they know each other?
-Why is Wammy’s actively searching for L’s “successor”? Did they truly expect L to die so young? What are L’s duties, that he must be replaced immediately?
-What the fuck is up with Wammy’s House — a factory for making troubled orphans into detectives, which apparently has no qualms about allowing children as young as ten to begin working independently on the serial murder case that just killed an ultracompetent adult? Why are the Ender’s Game implications game of this never taken up in the primary canon, especially since the series is about deduction, and should take place in a remotely reasonable world?

This is a very strange hole in the characterization, and thus the plot. If the boys’ primary motivation is to succeed and avenge L, then we need at least a vague idea of how they felt about L. Is he a hero to them, or do they resent him, or is the succession just a MacGuffin, the prize in their competition? These decisions should drive the plot; instead, they’re stuffed into the trunk.

2. I do get the basic intent behind these characters. Light tends to lure his enemies into a cozy Cold War intimacy, and then eat them alive. No one who understands his thinking can defeat him. Hence, something radically different — children, who have different thought processes, different social ideas, from adults. It’s just that it’s not done well.

3. This deleted scene (from the second DN director’s cut) would have done an enormous amount to rectify the above (see the bottom of this post for a transcription; I know the subtitles are very hard to read):

I wish they’d sacrificed L’s clipshow for it. The art installation with the dominoes really establishes Near — it makes him funnier, and more villainous and extravagant, which (perversely) tends to make him more sympathetic. L’s “idiot” speech, likewise, is a good piece — a litany against superhuman pretensions, pitched to a child’s level — and Near’s mute disinterest in it says a good deal about him. He’s an absolute cynic; he finds L both dull and disingenuous. Most of all, he despises the same human weakness which the more experienced L has learned to value. L’s death only confirms his opinion.

Conversely, we have Mello, listening with interest, but trying not to look interested.

4. Both Mello and Near have lovely character designs; Mello’s relentless Norma Desmonding (you know the pose: face up, eyes down, crazy mouth) is a bit of a detraction, but they have expressive faces and are believably young. I just wish I knew what was going on with their costumes. Is Mello’s style meant to evolve slowly, from inexplicable jumpsuit to strange vest, and eventually to more mature punkwear? Or is that just tin-eared art?

And I wish they’d stuck with the pajamas Near wears in the manga; in the anime, it’s like they’re saying “look, this kid’s not L — he wears a white button-down.”

5. Mello and Near are strangely portrayed in terms of age. Death Note used to be oddly impressive in its age-realism. There were serious questions about Light’s presence on the task force, and he really seemed like a smug, clever, hardworking seventeen; likewise, when L wasn’t goofing off, he acted appropriately twenty-five, which was a conceivable age for someone in his position — not likely, but conceivable.

After all this, it’s odd to see Mello and Near working independently, and demonstrating an adult level of understanding — they aren’t morally adult, but this is presented more as “Mello and Near are problematic people” than “Mello and Near are very young.”

Am I being hard on them? I miss the Yotsuba Eight.

6. The Mafia den is cartoonish and ridiculous. What is that mirror? Why the zebra-striped sofas? Why does Ross hang around shirtless? His hooker is too small. How did Mello meet these people?

Again, who’d give a fuck, it’s a cartoon — except that, once again, it was done so much better in the first arc that you wonder if these are the same artists. The sets in the first arc were great. Light’s spot-on teenage room, with its impersonal magazine holders and cheap TV; the series of dead-eyed hotel suites, clearly seperate, but so generic that they were rarely even given establishing shots; the sad anti-Kira headquarters, largely composed of pegboard and stairs, a depressing glimpse into an atrophied part of L’s brain. And now we have Mello sprawled on a zebra-striped couch.  It’s a comedown. I want to like Mello, and I try, but it’s a comedown. Both he and the spaces he inhabits seem to come from an entirely different show.

7. From this episode on, the series features a number of American and European characters. The art reflects this well. In particular, though “McEnroe” is an overdesigned monstrosity, he does look very American next to the clearly Japanese Chief Yagami.

8. Light’s long-term impersonation of L should have broader consequences.

9. The task force get cute headphones when Light communicates with the Americans. My boyfriend prefers to imagine that they’re not really listening to the conversation; Aizawa is listening to a baseball game, Matsuda to a recording of a sexy woman saying “you’re sexy!” over and over. Mogi and Ide are listening to Mongolian chants. This is the best explanation for their intense expressions.

10. Chief Yagami spends the whole episode making expressions of shock and horror, just like every other episode. The man’s life is a funeral parade of pink, hot pain.

11. In a small bright spot, this episode does introduce Near’s team — all very charismatic characters, largely on the strength of design. This is especially true of Commander Lester, the sharkish, blond Special Forces type; he always looks properly worried about the fact that his job is to buy toys for a small child with no obvious guardians.

12. It tires me out that we have to watch an investigator figure out Kira’s identity all over again.

13. Likewise, the loss of the intimacy between Light and L automatically makes the ridiculous aspects of this series a lot more ridiculous. L was an ironist; we could count on a nod from him, and a twitch from Light, when things dissolved into Tennis With Kira. Now that we’re meeting the President and landing planes in the Arizona desert, and Light’s in a largely reactive role against two distant enemies, that ironic layer is gone.

***
THE “IDIOT” SPEECH
***

L is addressing a group of children through his laptop.

L: “You know, this investigation, it’s like when I get up in the night to look for the light switch, and I hurt my foot every time. Because I am an idiot.”
(Laughter.)
L: “Are there some questions?”
Kid A: “Yes! Is there anything that frightens you?”
L: “Things that frighten me?”
Kid B: “Huh? L isn’t afraid of nothing!”
L: “It’s because I’m an idiot, isn’t it?”
(Laughter.)
Kid C: “Me, too. I am like L.”
Kid D: “Idiot, you’re nothing like him.”
L: “Well, there are things which an idiot has to fear. An idiot is afraid that he’s being made fun of. Of his childhood. Of his dreams. Of the things to which he holds dear. And finally, that he’s being lied to. L doesn’t like being lied to. An idiot is always submitted to the fear, because he is honest with himself. The idiots are also the humans that submit to their desires. When they are hungry, they eat; when they want to read, they take a book; when they cry, they go for comfort. I am the type of idiot with all these desires and these fears. And I am proud of being an idiot.”

(This is very clumsy English, but I’m sure the gist is clear enough.)