Meeting

Meeting brings Naruto face to face with the true Pain — Nagato — as the hero, restored by his father and remembering Jiraiya's faith, returns to confront the man behind the six bodies. The episode is the threshold of the arc's climax: Naruto's defeat of the Paths leading him at last to their controller, the war-orphan whose grief became a god's nihilism. The two students of Jiraiya, on opposite sides of his teaching, meet. It's the canon arc's pivot from battle to argument, force giving way to the confrontation of two philosophies.