Pursuit (Death Note episode)

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Pursuit
The bus hijacker panics after seeing Ryuk.
Episode Length:	24 minutes
Episode Code:	04
Episode Airdate:	October 24, 2006
Chapter:	006-007

"Pursuit" (「追跡」, "Tsuiseki"^?) is the fourth episode of the Death Note TV series originally aired in Japan on October 24, 2006.

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

Presented with the Shinigami Eyes deal, Light tells Ryuk that it is out of the question. He explains that he’s trying to create an ideal world with no criminals, and as the god of such a world, he has to reign for a long time. Light claims that he would consider a deal for wings, but he’s actually joking. He amusingly says that if he made those kinds of deals, he’d be made into a real Shinigami before he’d know it. In response, Ryuk tells Light not to worry because he feels that Light is already a splendid Shinigami. Light, however, doesn’t want to be put together with Shinigami because he is using the Death Note as a human for the sake of humans. Flipping through it, he suddenly comes to a realization that he thinks will allow him to learn the name of the person who’s following him. But first, he wants to test out the extent to which he can dictate the details of a death.

The next day, Light’s father gets a call at work that reports six new deaths. However, three of them were strange: one drew a pentagram in blood before he died, one wrote a note, and the final one escaped, but went to a restroom and died. After learning of all this from Watari, L thinks that tells the police not to announce anything on these aside from the usual heart attack. However, Kira already knows the results because he’s able to access his father’s computer and thus the police records. All of them had died just like he wrote down for in the Death Note. However, there were the other three criminals too, and Light had given them all unreasonable death conditions, such as dying in front of the Eiffel Tower when the person was in a Japanese prison. From them, Light learned that the Death Note cannot do the impossible, but can do whatever is humanly possible for the criminal. As for the pentagram and the dying message, those are both things to throw L and the police off his tracks. Indeed, L is at that moment noticing a hidden line formed by the first character of each line of the dying message.

As for Light’s real plan, it involves a man who failed to rob a bank and ended up shooting people before escaping. It also involves a phone call to a girl that Light knows. Ryuk finds out later that Light is going on a date with that girl, named Yuri, to an amusement park. Watching from the shadows at the bus station, the man following Light thinks that Light is normal and not suspicious. In any case, he’s not going to be doing this anymore after today, and so he boards the bus, sitting right behind Light and Yuri. At a stop further down the road, they pick up a seedy looking man who is the failed bank robber that Light saw on the news. As expected by Light, the criminal pulls out a gun and holds the bus hostage, ordering the driver to call the amusement park and demanding their sales money. While everyone else is being afraid, Light writes a note to Yuri saying that he’ll take on the hijacker. When the man following Light sees the note, he tells Light not to do it and decides to take action himself. Light first questions the guy for proof that he’s not an accomplice since there have been cases where a second criminal acts as a lookout from the back for the first. To prove who he is, the man hands over his FBI credentials to Light, which show that the man’s name is Raye Penber. Since Penber has a gun, Light decides to leave it up to him.

Just as Penber is realizing that the person holding them hostage is the one who was on the news, Light drops a piece of paper. Penber panics because he thinks that it’s the note that Light wrote to Yuri earlier, but when the criminal notices and picks it up, he finds out that it has only got Light’s plans for the date written on it. Suddenly, however, the hijacker is able to see Ryuk. At first, Ryuk is confused, but he soon realizes that Light had dropped a piece of the Death Note, and by touching it, the hijacker is now able to see him. The scared robber empties his gun into Ryuk, but all the bullets fly right through and hit the back window of the bus. Ryuk remembers telling Light that a person touching the Death Note allows him or her to see Ryuk, that Ryuk would always be behind him, and that the Shinigami won’t die from getting shot by a gun. All of these things have come into play here and have allowed Light to use a hijacker to figure out the name of the person who was following him.

Out of bullets and with Penber after him, the hijacker stumbles off the bus and right into the path of an oncoming car. Checking his watch, Light notes that it’s 11:45AM, exactly the time when the hijacker was supposed to die. Everything that had happened had gone according to what Light had written in the Death Note earlier. And next is Raye Penber's turn… [1]