Death Note - 30
You know, one major change between the current Light and the eighteen-year-old Light is that he’s much more reckless now. He’s taking a lot more risks, and his plans are no longer as careful as possible. His previous plans left nothing to the coincidence, but this episode made him reveal his identity to Near, even though he wasn’t fully sure that Near was the real culprit. I mean, what if the guy has some way to escape underground? Or comes out, wearing a mask?
Still, the part of the episode that made the biggest impression on me was the one shown at the beginning, where we see random scenes of the people who’ve gotten used to Kira, and are actually threatening each other with death. Especially the phrase “Lord Kira, please kill them”, followed by the scene of a woman crying made a lot of impact. This episode was definitely meant to illustrate this.
Also, only now do we see how large the impact of Shidoh’s visit was. Even though he himself wasn’t really doing much, the fact that some of the rules on the death note were fake has now been spread to all of the major characters in this anime. Still, I do wonder how Near found out about these fake rules in the first place. All of L’s data was supposed to be erased when Watari died, so he had to start all over. If Near had access to L’s data, he would have been easily able to figure out about Light.
One of the things I also liked was how this caused the people inside the investigation-team to start thinking about Light’s credibility. Finally they’re getting some brains of their own again. Especially Aizawa is going to have a major role in the future episodes.
I also am surprised to say that for the first time, Near actually became the most annoying character of the episode. Mello has definitely changed after the previous episode, with a huge scar on his face as a nice present. If I’m not mistaken, his voice also turned a lot lower since we last heard him.