"Episode 72/Rebirth/The Messenger From Kyoto/Raging Bullshin, etc."

I've been a bit hard on Bleach these past few weeks. Partly because I have a lot of hate in my heart, but mostly because it's a series with a lot of potential–a rich mythology, likeable characters, terrific monster design–that spends too much time running after its own tail. The Bount plotline seemed to herald a change in the right direction, but I remained skeptical; maybe that potential was empty, a come-on from a eunuch, a line that, no matter how well-presented, had no place to go by nowhere.

I can't say I'm ready to rent a hotel room, but "Episode 71" was–um–okay, I'm just going to leave the increasingly uncomfortable sexual metaphors behind here and say, good show, Bleach. Damn good show.

With Uryu still stuck in the hospital (his dad's, apparently), Ichigo and the others settle into guard duty waiting for the next strike. There's a dripping water faucet in Uryu's room that drives Rukia to distraction, but when she and Ichigo try and fix it, they only make the problem worse. Water pours out faster and faster, overflowing the sink and spilling out on the floor. The rest of the group comes running with buckets, and then Orihimie hears a noise in the bathroom–a rumbling–and she opens the door. More water from the shower rushes in. Before anyone can move, the water rises and envelops Uryu, suffocating him. Ichigo is only able to save him by switching to his Soul Reaper form and slicing Uryu free. The problem is, though, he can only disperse the water, not defeat it. And there are so many other faucets on that floor…

"72" has the usual bad comedy, with Kon snapping and Lirin mocking him, as well as Renji and Ichigo yelling at each other, but none of it distracts from easily the coolest threat I've seen on the show this arc. The water "dolls" are eventually revealed to be under the control of two new Bounts, Ban and Ho, who look like a pair of grade schoolers; they're spooky enough on their own, but what really clicks is how cleverly the writers exploit the threat they represent. As they tell the heroes, water is everywhere. No matter how many times Rukia uses her powers to beat it back, or how fast they run, they can't escape it. And as far as cliffhanger endings go, having the group finally make it outside the hospital–only to discover it's raining—actually had me pumped for next week for the first time I can remember with Bleach. High marks all around.

Death Note finished up last week, and normally, TV Club only covers first-run shows (exempting the classic stuff, natch). But since Cartoon Network is re-airing the series from the first episode, and since I was gonna watch it anyway, we'll make an exception this time around. As others have noted, there's something fun in going back to the beginning, once you know how it all ends up.

In "Rebirth," we meet Light Yagami for the first time, a brilliant high school student whose frustrated by the constant crime reports on the news and bored out of his mind at the tedium of the day-to-day. Luckily (?) for Light, the Shinigami Ryuk is bored too; there's not much for him to do in the Shinigami Realm but nap and gamble, so Ryuk, after tricking his boss into giving him an extra Death Note, drops his first notebook into the world of the humans. Light sees it fall, and the gears start turning; the over-achiever with an exaggerated sense of self gets the power of death, and wackiness ensues. Like Ryuk says, "Humans are interesting."

"Rebirth" does an expert job of setting up its premise as engagingly as possible. Light reads the rules inside the Death Note–and while those rules would eventually get a bit too convoluted, how elegant they are to begin with! Write a name in the notebook, picture the face of the person who belongs to that name, and they die of a heart attack in 40 seconds. For the especially creative, you can even work out a cause of death; Light only uses this once in the first episode, having a jerky biker get run over by a truck, but that level of control will become hugely important later in the run.

The look of Death Note is strikingly different from any other show in the anime block, lots of shadows and grays. You can see that paying off in the conversation between Light and Ryuk in Light's bedroom; it's spooky in a way that never seems forced. I love the look of Ryuk as well, appealing in a way that never completely stops being unsettling. Already we see how the animators bring action to the actual use of the Death Note. Basically just a guy writing names on paper, but here it has an operatic force, almost like an Argento stalk-and-slash sequence without any direct contact between attacker and victim.

But what really makes Death Note work is that it takes its central premise in such a surprising direction. Given the male-empowerment fantasies that populate so much of pop culture on either side of the ocean, it seems inevitable that a show (or manga) about a teenager who can kill anybody he wants would immediately turn into a wet-dream of revenge and sadism. Instead, Note gives us an anti-hero obsessed with justice–a kid growing up in a world that demands constant perfection from him–and shows us the monster without wallowing in the muck.