Having just come out of a major fight between the four-tailed Kyuubi Naruto and Orochimaru, Naruto Shippūden is starting to wind down. This episode focused mostly on the new Team Kakashi chasing after Orochimaru, who had escaped after the fight.
With Orochimaru escaping and substitute member Sai having joined him, Naruto, Sakura and Captain Yamato try to figure out Sai’s reasons for joining with Orochimaru. The assumption is that, under secret orders from Konoha’s ROOT organisation, ROOT are planning to gain Orochimaru’s aid in order to overthrow the
The episode is rather slow as most of it consists of the characters talking while running through the trees (a standard chase sequence often used in Naruto to serve as filler). There is more filler involved to build Naruto as a character that never gives up, something that this writer believes is pushed so much that it is not needed. However, nothing else is really established in this episode, other than the fact that Sai has joined with Orochimaru. The animation is really well done in this episode, which is a good thing, but at the same time it makes you wonder why they did not animate the fight between Naruto and Orochimaru like this. The new darkly orchestrated soundtrack to Shippūden fills out the episode and makes the series seem less child-friendly and more aimed at an older audience. These changes suit the overall new look of the series.
The end of the episode is fairly boring in that all it does is reveal to Naruto what the audience already knew – that he was the one that caused Sakura’s injury.
Ideally, this episode should have covered a bit more, but at the current pace, the anime will not catch up with the manga any time soon, meaning there will be less filler, unlike the nearly two years of pure filler that the Naruto series had before the Shippūden series began. For regular viewers of the series, it is an episode they should watch just for completion’s sake, but for a casual viewer, it is an episode that should be skipped. It is definitely not an episode to bring a new viewer to. Generally, it is a bland episode, but the wonderful animation improves its score.
