Naruto 126

Man…it’s pretty incredible to see how much Gaara has progressed since the Chounin exam. Although Lee attempts to try and attack Kimimaro, Garra recognizes Lee is no condition to fight, so he faceplants Lee with his sand and marches foward to tackle Kimimaro. Gaara’s “taijutsu” sand abilities seem to be much faster as Kimimaro has to do a smorgasborg of flips and dodges to get out of the way, and Gaara is able to deflect the finger-bone bullets from Kimimaro rather easily. Kimimaro makes a mistake of thinking Gaara can only manipulate the sand in his gourd, which lets Gaara lock Kimimaro’s feet into the ground and bring on some sand rain to cover him up for the Desert Coffin!

While suffering some injuries inside the Desert Coffin, Kimimaro gives viewers a flashback into his troubled past. His clan had locked him up for seemingly no apparent reason, and Kimimaro has trouble finding an identity and reason to live on. Later, Kimimaro is called upon by his clan to invade the Mist Country as his clan is basically composed of barbarians who fight for the sake of fighting. When his clan begins the invasion, Kimimaro runs into some old faces (Zabsuza and Haku) and his future guardian Orochimaru, who’s strangely happens to be at the Mist country during the time of the invasion. Kimimaro begins to realize his will to fight, and he fights his way out of the desert coffin with his level 1 seal.

Unfortunately for Kimimaro, Gaara unleashes a towering tsuami of sand, and all Kimimaro could do was watch as the sand swept him away like a rag doll. After sweeping out an entire forest, Gaara tops that off with a seisemic version of the desert coffin on the sand he released in the sand tsunami to finish off Kimimaro. Despite that, Kimimaro still finds himself alive, and finally activates the level 2 seal to break out and launch his close ranged attack on Gaara and Lee!

Although I sorta wished this episode had some more action (the title of this episode was Gaara vs Kimimaro after all), there was some good expository background given on Kimimaro and how he had become the person he is now. However, it seemed like in the flashback, Kimimaro was about as old as Haku at the time, and Haku only seemed to be a teenager when fighting Naruto and the gang, while Kimimaro seems much more grown up. Also, the cave symbolism of Naruto finding his way through the darkness to catch up to Sasuke was quite strange, but I guess it works.

Related posts:

1. Naruto 127-128
2. Naruto: Shippuuden 4
3. Naruto: Shippuuden 5