Doubt

Aiming to study how his suspect behaves, L invites Light onto the tennis court, the two being retired champions who walked away from the sport, L once holding a British title. Each silently turns over who the other truly is. L reasons that a hard push for the win would mark Light as the sore loser he pegs Kira to be, while a deliberate loss could point the same way; Light, reading that trap, sets out to drop the match on purpose. Even so, a chance appears, and he sends the ball skidding past his rival to take it six sets to four before the watching school.

With the match done, L raises the Kira case directly, admits he counts Light among the suspects, and asks him to join the hunt. The two stop at a cafe Light picks, where L lays out the prisoner-experiment notes. Light cracks the buried sentence about death gods favoring apples, only for L to spring a forged fourth slip that rewrites the line and insists his suspect should have allowed for it. The defensive flash this draws sharpens the detective's doubt. Then word breaks that Soichiro Yagami has collapsed from a heart attack; at his bedside Light swears to see Kira seized and put to death, and his father assures him the detective is exactly who he claims.

Outside the hospital, L sizes Light up once more, still unsure of his guilt, and Light fires back a daring proposal: shut him in a television-free cell for a month to settle the question. The detective comes away both satisfied and intrigued. At the Sakura TV station, meanwhile, an unnamed sender claiming to be Kira drops off recorded tapes, warning that the whole staff will die unless the network airs them; hungry for a scoop, the channel's chief greedily consents. The episode first aired in Japan on December 5, 2006, and reached English viewers on December 22, 2007.