well i also thought this was pretty decent.

The new characters in this arc all seem to be pretty smart. The villains planned ahead to take over Nano, eliminated their untrustworthy allies and are even trying to track down this Shuu girl before she can get support to counter.

I could hardly believe it when people said Naruto actually was smart in a filler, but he really did some pretty good work. His fight was the best part of the episode. Too bad from the preview it looks like they're back to his stupid shinanigans again (Running Ramen? wtffruirtypebbles?)

I thought the new techniques were pretty damn ugly. The water shield was somewhat cool, but I thought the techniques those two used were pretty ugly...

Dare I actually look forward to the next episode?