What They Say:
Gaara leads the Fourth Company into battle against the previous Kage, including his father, the late Fourth Kazekage. The Fourth Kazekage attacks Gaara in order to determine if his son is truly worthy to be the current Kazekage.
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
While Naruto is getting himself much closer to actually being in a real, full on battle here with the enemy, this episode spends its focus on Gaara. With him having taken on the lead role for the allied forces, he’s an interesting one in general because of his past. A past that is highlighted here fairly well as he comes across his father, who is being controlled on some level by the enemy. Gaara certainly has a lengthy and difficult history with his father and he makes it clear that growing up he was definitely afraid of him and hated him, but time has changed all things and he no longer at least hates him. His father, as Kage, was a difficult man for many reasons but the loss of his wife due to the birth of Gaara is the kind of event that can radically change someone.
What is surprise for his father is that Gaara no longer has the Jinchuriki within him, something that was dealt with a lot in his younger days as a big part of one of the problems of the village of Sand. Discovering that he’s lost that, and how he lost it, as well as the things Gaara says about his friends and Chiyo just seems to anger his father further. His own positions, friendships and experiences in his previous life have kept him from truly connecting with anyone, especially after the loss of his wife, and he just sees it as weakness. But looking back at Gaara’s youth, particularly when he killed as a boy while being tested, you see how so many things shaped him before Naruto came into his life.
There’s an extensive amount of back story worked into things here as Gaara relates part of the tale from his side, but we also get his father talking about what went on from his point of view, especially with the incident involving Yashamaru that really put Gaara on a particular path for so many years, to feel so outside, lost and unloved. This all gets more intense as it goes along as father and son verbally spar with each other and some physical aspects creep in as well. The tensions between the two is what drives it here and even though it does go for the physical towards the end, the bulk of it is all about the characters and their backgrounds.
In Summary:
I’ve always like Gaara, more so than most of the other characters in the circle that he belongs/belonged to and this episode certainly doesn’t change that. While it is largely a history episode with a look at what happened in the past, some of it as covered before and some bits here are new that helps to flesh the whole thing out and provide Gaara with some potential unknown truths about his mother, Yashamaru and his situation overall when he was growing up. While it does provide new things for him, it’s easy to see that even though it alters his view of it all, it’s still the past and he’s largely made peace with it in order to move into the future, something that came from all the time he spent with Naruto. The show is another quiet moment in the midst of some supposedly huge war, but it’s a good one that provides solid character material.
Grade: B
Streamed By: Crunchyroll
Review Equipment:
Sony KDS-R70XBR2 70″ LCoS 1080P HDTV, Dell 10.1 Netbook via HDMI set to 1080p, Onkyo TX-SR605 Receiver and Panasonic SB-TP20S Multi-Channel Speaker System With 100-Watt Subwoofer.
