Naruto: Shippuden Ep. 85 Review: Terrifying Secret

There is a point in "The Terrifying Secret" where Kakuzu stops looking like a man.

Kakashi has already driven a Lightning Blade through his heart. That should have ended it. Instead, one of the masked creatures that crawled out of Kakuzu's back took the hit in his place, and Team 10 realizes it has been fighting something much stranger than an unusually tough shinobi. Under the cloak and the stitches, Kakuzu is a collection of other people.

Five hearts. Five lives. A body held together with black thread and borrowed organs.

Then Hidan walks into the forest, draws a ritual circle in blood and gets ready to murder Shikamaru by stabbing himself. Somewhere around here, Naruto: Shippuden apparently decided Episode 85 was a horror show.

Where it came from

"The Terrifying Secret" adapts Chapters 335 and 336 of Masashi Kishimoto's manga, deep in the Akatsuki Suppression Mission. Asuma is dead, Shikamaru has stopped grieving and started planning, and Kakashi has taken the surviving members of Team 10 out to hunt the two Akatsuki members responsible.

Kishimoto supplies the bones. Kakuzu's five hearts, the organs he harvests from the shinobi he kills, his offhand claim that he once fought the First Hokage, and Shikamaru splitting Hidan away from his partner are all on the page. What sets Episode 85 apart is how hard the studio works to make that material move.

Toshiyuki Tsuru, the same director behind the quiet grief of Episode 82, directed and scripted it, with Hirofumi Suzuki as animation director. Three weeks earlier, that pairing proved it could hold still. Here it proves it can move. You can see it on screen. Characters don't just snap from pose to pose while someone explains which jutsu is being used. Kakuzu lurches, twists and changes direction with an awkward weight that makes his body feel assembled rather than born. Kakashi's close combat has rhythm. Fighters use the trees, the distance and each other's blind spots, and even small beats, like Kakuzu trying to stay ahead of Shikamaru's shadow, carry personality. This is one of those Shippuden episodes where you can feel the animators enjoying the fight.

The man with five hearts

Episode 84 gave us the image: Kakuzu's back splitting open and masked creatures pouring out on black tendrils. Episode 85 tells us what we're looking at. Kakashi's Lightning Blade did destroy a heart. It just wasn't the only one. Kakuzu carries five, one in his own body and four housed in those masks, and each gives him its chakra nature on top of keeping him alive. Killing him means doing something unreasonable in the middle of an already impossible fight: you have to kill him five times.

That explanation makes Kakuzu's design worse in the best way. The stitches covering his body aren't decoration. The black thread is a system that lets him tear himself apart, sew himself back together and fold pieces of dead shinobi into his own anatomy. He doesn't just kill people for money. He uses them for parts.

Even his age turns grotesque. Kakuzu mentions, almost casually, that the last Leaf shinobi he fought before them was the First Hokage. The man standing in front of Kakashi has survived across generations by replacing whatever wears out.

There is something wonderfully nasty about giving that ability to Akatsuki's most openly materialistic member. Hidan preaches. Pain will eventually philosophize. Itachi carries a whole political tragedy on his back. Kakuzu wants money, and if somebody dies along the way, he checks whether their heart is still any good.

Two completely different monsters

Hidan and Kakuzu work as a pair because their immortality has almost nothing in common. Kakuzu survives by refusing to remain one person. Hearts get swapped, limbs get sewn back on, and the line between Kakuzu and his victims has stopped meaning anything.

Hidan is the opposite. His body stays entirely his own; you just can't make it stop. Cut him, stab him, take his head off, and he keeps swearing. He has built a religion around inflicting pain on himself and someone else at the same time, which turns immortality into something close to a hobby.

That contrast gives the episode its October flavor without any ghosts. Kakuzu is body horror. Hidan is occult horror. One harvests hearts from corpses. The other drinks your blood, stands inside a ritual symbol and drives a blade through his own chest so the wound opens on you. These are Naruto villains. Somehow. 😛

It also shows why the pairing works so well in a fight. Kakuzu never has to protect his partner. He can level an area with elemental techniques while Hidan fights cheerfully inside the blast radius, because Hidan can't die. Terrible teamwork on paper becomes brutally effective in practice, and Shikamaru sees the only workable answer: pull them apart.

Shikamaru chooses the forest

This is where Episode 85 quietly changes hands. It started as Team 10's revenge mission, but Kakuzu's revelation has made Kakashi the adult in the room. He reads the threat fastest, saves the others more than once and has the experience to survive close range with two Akatsuki members at once. Shikamaru can't win that way, so he stops trying to fight their fight.

When Hidan starts mocking Asuma, Choji charges in blind with anger, and Shikamaru is the one who drags the team back to the plan. Then he uses his shadow to take control of Hidan's body, makes him drop his triple-bladed scythe and hauls him away into the trees, leaving Kakashi, Ino and Choji to handle the five-heart problem.

It looks reckless because it is. But the forest is already prepared. Explosive tags and wires are waiting. Shikamaru hasn't wandered off because grief finally beat his intelligence. He wants revenge. He just wants revenge that works.

The episode doesn't show the whole trick yet. It lets Hidan turn the tables instead. Shikamaru's chakra runs low, his shadow lets go, and Hidan's blade draws what looks like Shikamaru's blood. That is all Hidan needs. He drinks it, his skin goes black and white, the Jashin symbol goes down, and the person who watched this exact ritual kill Asuma is suddenly standing inside it.

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The horror is in knowing the rules

Hidan's ritual is scarier here than it was against Asuma because now everyone understands it, Shikamaru and the audience both. There's no mystery left. We know why he needs blood, why his skin changes and what happens once he steps into the symbol. The suspense comes from recognition.

That's a smarter use of a recurring technique than simply making it bigger. Nothing about the jutsu has changed. The context has. In the first fight, Shikamaru had to work out Hidan's rules fast enough to save his teacher, and he failed. Now he has walked back into the ritual on purpose. The difference is that this time he had time to think first.

November 2008 and the end of a fansub era

If you were watching Shippuden in English when this episode was new, it landed in one of the most important weeks in the history of online anime distribution.

Dattebayo was still the name attached to weekly Naruto for a huge share of the English-speaking audience. The group's founder put the first-week download count for a new Shippuden episode at about 450,000.

Earlier that same week, TV Tokyo, Pierrot and Crunchyroll had announced a deal that would have sounded impossible during the original Naruto fansub boom. Starting January 8, 2009, paying Crunchyroll subscribers could watch new English-subtitled Shippuden episodes about one hour after the Japanese broadcast. Free streams would follow seven days later on Crunchyroll and, through Viz, on Naruto.com, Hulu and Joost.

Episode 85 aired in Japan on November 20, 2008. The next day, Dattebayo announced it was done with Naruto. The detail that makes this archivally interesting: nobody forced it. Dattebayo's organizer said Viz had never asked the group to stop and had never sent a cease-and-desist. He framed the decision as the natural end of a long symbiosis, explaining to Anime News Network ↗https://animenewsnetwork.com/news/2008-11-21/dattebayo-to-stop-fansubbing-naruto-on-january-15 that "Viz and Crunchyroll have gotten their acts together." For years the group had argued that companies could compete with fansubs if they offered episodes quickly and cheaply. When Viz and Crunchyroll finally did, Dattebayo stepped aside.

That didn't make fansubbing vanish. Other groups kept going, and the relationship between official subtitles, rips and independent subs became its own mess afterward. But the question changed. For years it had been "How long after Japan will somebody fansub Naruto?" Within weeks of Episode 85, the industry's answer was "You don't need to wait for a fansub." The full story of that hand-off lives on the Naruto Fansub & Scanlation History page.

For an archive, that makes "The Terrifying Secret" a perfect timestamp. The episode is old-school weekly Shippuden at full strength. The world it was distributed into was already becoming something new.

Why it still matters

"The Terrifying Secret" isn't the end of the Hidan and Kakuzu fight. Shikamaru's real payoff is still ahead, Kakuzu still has hearts to spare, and Naruto hasn't yet arrived to turn the battlefield upside down. Episode 85 is the one that makes all of that possible. It defines exactly what Kakuzu is, turning "kill him" into a mechanical problem instead of a matter of hitting harder. It isolates Hidan so Shikamaru can fight on his own terms. And it takes the shared immortality gimmick of two Akatsuki partners and reveals two completely different kinds of monster underneath.

It looks fantastic doing it. With a long-running weekly show, animation quality usually gets discussed only when something goes wrong. Episode 85 deserves the opposite. Tsuru and Suzuki take two chapters built heavily on explanation and turn them into a fight that never stops moving. Kakashi feels fast. Kakuzu feels heavy and wrong. Hidan feels reckless. Shikamaru feels like a man trying to stay one decision ahead of someone who only needs one drop of blood.

Most importantly, the episode understands that Shikamaru's revenge can't become satisfying by making him stronger. He isn't stronger than Hidan. He isn't stronger than Kakuzu. He is smarter than both of them. So he looks at two immortal monsters who are nearly impossible to kill together and finds the simplest first move.

Separate them.

One monster stays with Kakashi. The other follows Shikamaru into the woods. And somewhere between the explosive tags, the stolen hearts, the black stitches and a circle drawn for a death god, Naruto: Shippuden accidentally made one hell of a Halloween episode.

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