#Death Note review - Good idea - Terrible execution
Death Note series is based on a very cool idea - a notebook which can kill whoever name you write in it. It's a unique and interesting way to set up a good story.

And a lot of things were good. I liked the overall aesthetics, the characters, the "500 IQ moves", the music.

Unfortunately, the plot itself has many problems. The biggest one is how messed up author's ideas about morality are. As typical in the anti-cultures, positive things such as: strive for justice, individualism and action towards improving the world and the society are depicted as evil and at the same time moralism, egalitarianism, mercy and altruism are depicted as good and heroic regardless of the context of situation.

The story does very little to prove main character's actions as wrong on a factual basis, it feels almost like the author wanted to say "this guy technically put the end to crime/wars and made the world objectively a better place, but he did this for his own benefit, so screw him".

The idea that some action might be good and positive despite not being altruistic and self-sacrificing is outside the concept space of the author.

For the majority of time it isn't a big problem, because the two visions of justice fight with each other, and it's up to the viewer who he sides with. However, it was inevitable that eventually the plot would have to side with someone to conclude the story. Unfortunately, the author has not only picked the wrong side, but also desperately tried to show the other one as straightforward evil, insane and pathetic. It leaves a very bad aftertaste of a disappointing embarrassment.

Another problem is that the story gets progressively more inconsistent with each episode. At first everything makes total sense, the MC thought no one will be able to find him and got emotional, so he made a huge mistake, which drastically shrunk the area of search.

However, in later episodes, the MC just gives the detectives all information they need on a silver plate for no reason whatsoever.

And at the end the detectives are able to just magically guess who MC's collaborators are, without any plot backing. This is a very big problem from a story-telling perspective, it seems almost like the author had run out of ideas for continuation and decided to focus more on character design than the actual story.

So summing things up, in my opinion this series had a very great potential to be something good, but ultimately was just a huge disappointment. After the first episodes, I thought it would have some insightful moral about life and justice, but ultimately it turned into just a stupid action movie without any deeper meaning.