VivisQueen

Enter the mind of a sociopath, Light Yagami. A remarkable teenager, he's devilishly handsome, twice junior tennis champion, and ranks first in the national exams. In other ways, though, he's quite the simpleton: a textbook megalomaniac with delusions of grandeur. Oh, and he's just been handed the power to kill individuals simply by writing their names in a notebook.

Death Note is a cat-and-mouse suspense-thriller with a paranormal twist and hints of schizophrenia in its concept design. It requires that viewers suspend their disbelief and common sense in order to fall in love with it. For example, we must believe that there are teenagers more intelligent than the world's best detectives; that death gods exist and give humans said notebooks just for fun; and that the man assigned to solve the mystery of the death gods, and has seasoned police officers drooling after his knowledge, is an emo. Rather than waste time excusing itself, the show prefers to sidestep these chasms of logic and run straight for the action - the onus is thus on the viewer to choose to follow.

What sold me on this escapist journey was not the cliffhangers or the sumptuous animation, but Mamoru Miyano's incredible incarnation as Light. He evokes just the right balance of charisma and pure evil. Take this line for instance: 'Then, behind the fact that deserving criminals are dying of heart attacks, I'll gradually start killing off people who cause problems for innocent people, through illness and accidental death... Then I'll have created a world filled with those I've judged to be kind and hardworking.' In the universe of crackpots, this speech is nothing remarkable. However, when Light says it, I start to believe that taking the world on this collision course to hell would be the most invigorating accident I've had since Jackass. His performance is infectiously gleeful, as though he really had started to go mad in the recording booth and the tape just happened to catch him talking. When Light cackled, I cackled too; when he became angry, I froze. Even if Light is the bad guy, Miyano makes him so convincing, it's difficult not to root for him.

Light kills convicted criminals under the pseudonym 'Kira' (a reworking of the word 'killer') with the aim of creating a pure world. Let's face it, most viewers will cheer the death of Shibutaku, for example, who attempts to rape a girl one fateful evening. The show even puts a mirror to this instinctive moral hipocrisy; as police trawl the city to bring the murderous Kira to justice, grateful citizens dedicate websites and television shows to him, calling him a hero of the people. Light himself is not particularly meticulous about his moral code - very soon, they're dropping left, right, and centre just for getting in his way. However, the question still remains: is his moral reasoning kinked or is he the only one thinking clearly in a world where murderers and rapists retain the same rights as law-abiding citizens?

On the other side of this psychological war, the genius detective L proves to be a strange one, too - although not to the same level of fascination as Light. Judging him by his scraggly black hair, pale skin, and ferral posture is probably more favourable, since underneath it all he's rather hollow. He reveals nothing of himself except that he's a friendless eccentric with a child-like vulnerability the fangirls will like. Mainly, for his part in the chase after Kira, he talks about probabilities in exact percentages. 'Well, when I say "suspect", it's only about one percent,' he says with the deadpan certainty of a supercomputer. I just heard mathematicians everywhere wince in unison, but I'm sure his teenage viewers appreciate the general gist. In any case, he is necessary simply for the fact that, without his cunning interventions on the side of justice, Light's plan for world domination would be too easy. Moreover, despite his relative shallowness, he does end up delivering the best episode of the entire series.

I could not close this discussion without mentioning Death Note's excellent grasp of suspense. It churns out in droves the kinds of edgy cliffhangers other shows could dream up only with the aid of drugs. While it handles these twists with the same regard for truth and logic as, say, Alice in Wonderland, it never forgets to do so in style. Viewers can thank the wizards at Madhouse for the outstandingly rich concept design, which thrums with hallucinatory overtones and brings to life some stunning set-pieces. I lived for those moments when Light delivered one of his crazed monologues, his eyes glowing red while behind him loomed shadows of a vast, empty, hellish landscape. Indeed, Death Note may not be cerebral, and its main characters are pure fantasies, but it's skilful and witty and packed with the kind of brazen spectacle an audience damn well deserves.