Summary
Sai reminisces about his relationship with Team Kakashi while on his day off, surveying the damage around the village.
Impression
This felt like more of a recap instead of an actual episode, since if you take all the flashbacks, and cut them out, all you have is Sai walking through the village, entertaining kids with his ink animals and looking at the damage Pain did, all the time drawing different things. So instead of an episode where we were reminded of past info through flashbacks, we had the episode built after the flashbacks were put in. I’m not going to even bother talking about walking and Sai scaring little kids, I’ll talk about the flashbacks themselves and key bits during Shippuden that I never got to give impressions on.
Sai was such a dick when Naruto and Sakura first met him, both of them preferred Sasuke to him, and to be honest, I did too. I clearly remember the Sai and Sasuke arc, where even Sakura got pissed at him since he kept dissing Team 7 and the idea of bonds. Even now, I’m unsure whether Sasuke really wants to kill Naruto – back then at Orochimaru’s hideout I think he would have, but now, after everything that’s happened with Itachi his motive other than getting revenge on Konoha is pretty unclear. Sometimes I wonder how the show will end – it’s gone from a kiddy ninja show to something pretty deep, but I’m sure that in the end, everything’s gonna be focused around Team 7, and the bonds they have with each other.
Naruto only went as far as he did not only out of friendship for Sasuke, but also for that promise to Sakura back at the Sasuke Retrieval arc. Now this bit was where we really see how Naruto has matured – he was smart enough to realize that Sakura was trying to relieve himself of that promise, and all that about “loving” Naruto was just a lie to get him to do that. Sakura then tries to fix the problem herself, but obviously she isn’t strong enough, or still likes him a lot. I think out of all the Sasuke fangirls back in the original series, Sakura is the only one that has gone this far for him, but is it out of actual love?
I’ll be ranting a lot next week – remember the Thousand Year Old Genin filler? Yeah, that guy. Well next episode, Studio Pierrot won’t even come up with new filler characters, they’ll be REUSING CHARACTERS FROM OLD FILLERS.