Boruto Episode 67

Boruto Episode 67

Introduction

With the conclusion of the last major arc last week, we now move onto the filler between major arcs. Unfortunately, this first filler arc focuses on one of my least favorite of the “Boruto 12,” Cho-Cho Akimichi, daughter of Choji Akimichi from Naruto.

It’s unclear how much filler there’s going to be until the next major arc, but if it’s anything like Naruto: Shippūden, there’s going to be quite a lot. Shippūden tended to include a season of filler between each season of main story content. I just hope we don’t get a season of Cho-Cho.

Anyway, today’s episode is titled, “Super Cho-Cho Butterfly Mode!”

Summary

The episode started off strong with a short scene of a butterfly going past the screen. For those of us who are familiar with Naruto and Shippūden, this alone is enough to tell us what the episode is going to be about: the Akimichi clan, and specifically, Cho-Cho using their secret technique.

However, as we quickly learn, Cho-Cho isn’t interested in the secret technique for the same reason her father is. But, before we get to that, we see Choji demonstrate the tremendous power granted to the user of “Butterfly mode” as it’s known.

I still don’t really understand why the Akimichi’s secret technique has to do with butterflies, but that’s a topic of discussion for another day.

While Choji is attempting to train his daughter in this secret technique, she isn’t paying attention because she’s too busy watching a drama based off Romeo and Juliet. This scene shows us the vast difference between this generation and their parents when it comes to training.

As a contrast to this training scene, we then cut away to a scene of Mitsuki fighting against his parent, Orochimaru (probably for training, but with Orochimaru we can’t ever really be sure). The dialogue which ensues next is probably the most interesting part of the episode due to the nature of filler.

Mitsuki asks Orochimaru whether he is his Father or Mother, and Orochimaru responds by saying that it doesn’t matter because he has been male, female, and something not of this world (probably referring to his snake form or the time he spent essentially dead after Sasuke killed him.

This may not seem like an all-that-interesting conversation, but I enjoy seeing the ways in which the writers use the older characters to tell stories. In this case, Orochimaru’s gender ambiguity could simply be a reference to his past, or it could be the authors using his past as social commentary. I don’t know the right answer, but it’s something to think about.

We then learn that today’s mission is going to be a joint operation between Teams 7 and 10 (that’s Boruto, Sarada, Mitsuki, Shikadai, Inojin, and Cho-Cho for those who don’t already know all the teams and their members). The mission involves protecting an actor, something only Cho-Cho seems to be looking forward to.

It’s at this point that Cho-Cho debuts her secret Butterfly mode technique because one of the side effects is that it slims down her figure, and she wants to impress the actor she’ll be protecting. Little does she know, he’ll turn out to be the one who plays Romeo in the drama she loves.

Cho-Cho Akimichi in her "Super Cho-Cho Butterfly Mode" from the anime Boruto: Naruto Next Generations
Super Cho-Cho Butterfly Mode

When the two teams gather in the Hokage’s office to hear the details of their mission, they learn that they’ll actually be protecting the pair who play both Romeo and Juliet. Team 10 is assigned to Romeo and Team 7 to Juliet (I can’t be bothered to go back and figure out their actual names).

As it turns out, the actor and actress who are in need of protection have received a death threat, and their producer believes it’s from someone who doesn’t want the drama to be completed. It only seems to be the producer who’s concerned, as the actor and actress believe it’s no big deal.

The rest of the episode goes about as you’d probably expect. The actor who plays Romeo is annoying, but Cho-Cho continuously tries to get on his good side, and the actress who plays Juliet turns out to be spoiled despite Boruto thinking he got to protect the better of the two.

I actually really liked seeing the difference between how the genin boys imagined the actress would be, and how she actually was. While not the most interesting scene, the most entertaining scene was her forcing Sarada to fan her, Boruto to hold her water, and Mitsuki to read her fan letters aloud.

But wait, there’s some action to be had in this episode yet! A shinobi from the Hidden Rain village blows up part of the set and attacks, only to be chased off by the quick thinking of Team 10 (except Cho-Cho, he got away because of her). I’ll talk more about this scene in my “Next Episode” section.

After the attack, one of the staff is injured (it didn’t look like the actress who plays Juliet, but that’s who they make it seem like it is), and Cho-Cho has to take her place in the drama. This is where the episode leaves off, meaning that next week we unfortunately have more of this same filler arc.

Next Episode

Now, going back to the part about this Hidden Rain ninja, we have to ask ourselves, “why is a shinobi of the Hidden Rain attacking this drama set in the middle of the Leaf Village?” Once we do that, it should become clear that things simply don’t add up.

I’ll also take a quick second here to break down for any newcomers to the series how I know the shinobi (pictured below) is from the Hidden Rain. You see, every village has a logo they use on their forehead protectors, and the symbol for the Hidden Rain is made up of four vertical lines (resembling rain).

We also know that gas masks like the one this attacker wears are fairly standard for Hidden Rain shinobi. If you’d like to know more about the ninja from the various villages and what makes them unique, let me know in the comments below and I’ll consider writing up a post about them.

Hidden Rain Shinobi from the anime Boruto: Naruto Next Generations
Hidden Rain Shinobi

Now, back to the episode at hand, there’s no reason for a Hidden Rain shinobi to be attacking this drama set. This leaves one unfortunately predictable outcome. The “Hidden Rain shinobi” is going to turn out to be none other than someone who is working on the drama, potentially Juliet’s actress or the producer.

It’s a classic Scooby-Doo move, and one I’m predicting will happen in the next episode, although I’d also like to think the writers would be a little more original than that. However, that’s not my only prediction for the next episode.

This episode was all about Cho-Cho disguising who she really is in order to impress Romeo’s actor. Because of this, it seems all too predictable that in the next episode she’ll learn a valuable lesson about just being herself or something stupid like that.

Of course I’d like for my predictions about the next episode to be wrong because they’re just too predictable, but at the same time we have to remember that this is just filler so we can’t expect too much from it. In fact, just look at the quality of those screenshots I used, they’re in 1080p and they still look that pixelated, probably because filler doesn’t necessitate looking as good as possible.

Conclusion

Now, since it’s the beginning of the month, I have a Crunchyroll 48-hour Premium Guest Pass code which can be redeemed once before September 14, 2018 (they didn’t give me one for the month of July for some reason). The code is: 83U8W64XC3S

I would have posted it yesterday, but considering that Kiki’s Delivery Service isn’t available on Crunchyroll, I figured I’d save it for something that is, Boruto. As always when I give away these codes, this is in no way sponsored by Crunchyroll, although if they wanted to sponsor I wouldn’t be against it.

Finally, let me know your thoughts on this episode in the comments below, and if you enjoyed this post consider scrolling down a bit and clicking the little heart button under this post. Likes let me know what kind of content my readers like best and can influence what I write in the future.

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My review of the next episode is available here.

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