ignores all the stupid bickering

It should have been one normal episode. The pacing was a killer again. I can understand some long, fully drawn out scenes, but when it takes a ninja 2 full minutes to walk back onto a bridge... The staring contest was also somewhat tolerable, but could have had a better climax... Yamato's history, Sai's action (or lack thereof), Kabuto's attitude, Oro coming out from inside his outer body, and the visual effects used at the final forming of the 4th tail (not the heavy dark lines used on the bridge, but the skin peeling off and the blood making smoke in the forest) were the only things I enjoyed. The Kabuto investigation was cool too.

I don't think the 1st could make the Bijuu "his pets" in the literal sense. I think he could maybe control them a bit, especially by controlling the actual Bijuu by sealing its power and allowing the host to regain control... but I don't think he really controlled everything they did. I just don't.

DB's note about there being 247 lines of text in the entire special made me wonder.... just how many original lines did this episode actually have? When you consider how much talking was done in the flashback to the hospital scene (which was then added on), and on the few post-commercial break repetitions, and then Naruto's memory of his fight with Sasuke... Well, all together that was maybe 20+ lines of text there... (a cautiously low guess).

But the part about Kabuto's past, the preview, the stupid ending gag, and the keyword presentations contain another approximately 50 lines of text. That brings us down to somewhere in the 160-180 range of actual lines of text in a 40 minute episode.

Giving more leeway than the writers deserve (saying there was 180 original lines of text), that's just more than 4 lines per minute.

Silent films had more writing done for them than that...