I see in the bitcoin wiki there is something called "script" which compiles down to some bytecode to be run by a very very basic virtual machine.
Does this mean that each block is actually just a string/array of bytes when it comes in and is processed by a node?
so a block in its "true" format would look something like [0x01, 0x04, 0x0f, 0xa1.... etc. ?

and then the node that recieves the block just puts the bytes into the interpreter to be run by the bitcoin VM?
or is there some plaintext involved in the block as well? so it looks something like JSON;
{
   blockhash: 12983092....,
   transactions: [ {8123098...}, {12381923...}],
   timestamp: "08:00:23 12/09/2017"
}

which is correct? a block is pure bytecode or JSON? what would a bitcoincore node understand when receiving a new block?