The Spring 2026 Anime Preview Guide

Dr. STONE SCIENCE FUTURE Season 4

After the battle on Treasure Island, Senku and the gang return to the Kingdom of Science. With their sights set on the Moon, they must first voyage to the Americas in hopes of beginning to harvest the required materials. Through teamwork and science, they continue the fight to save humanity once and for all!

Dr. Stone: Science Future Season 4 is based on the Dr. Stone manga series by writer Riichirō Inagaki and artist Boichi. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Thursdays.

I do appreciate how this premiere just starts without any buildup or fanfare. The extended cast knows what the mission is, so efforts are now being made to bring the stone world to outer space, and even though this is undoubtedly going to be a task that could take a long time to accomplish, that doesn't necessarily mean that everybody has time to waste. I like how the first half of this episode goes to great lengths to extensively put Dr. Xeno firmly in this sort of anti-hero position. After being the big bad for so long, the show didn't try to defang him or anything as he's still a bit dubious but his love for science definitely wins out and his focus on some of the dark, more dangerous aspects of scientific development makes sense. I do hope that the show goes more into that as a way of better differentiating him from Senku since Dr. Xeno does sort of represent what he could've turned into if his love of science superseded any desire to be there for humanity on a more personal level. Given the way that this episode sets up the main cast being separated into three groups, I'm sure the next couple episodes are gonna focus on jumping back-and-forth between everybody as they all work on individual elements of the same goal.

But man, I never thought that the series would actually get to this point back when I first started watching it and when I first started reading the original manga. Dr. Stone is a series that is all about slowly rebuilding humanity from the ground up, going from a stone to advanced modern day technology. Having this voice come from the moon definitely makes things feel mysterious and other worldly but you could tell it's also an excuse to have this next major arc be about developing a rocket using materials from the Earth. I just think it's really funny considering that a lot of other franchises that I grew up with would usually use going into space as a means of jumping the shark or showcasing that they've run out of ideas, but this is a very logical evolution of everything that had come before. Plus, separating the main cast is probably a really smart idea considering there are so many characters now that it would've been impossible to showcase all of them at the same time anyway so delegating everybody to specific tasks in different regions of the world makes sense.

I think Chrome put it best when he explained how his journey started with just finding weird or interesting looking rocks. Now they're excavating as many materials and minerals as possible for the sake of building engines or building the shell for this rocket that's going to take them all the way to the moon. From Chrome and a lot of peoples perspectives, this was something that couldn't even have been considered just a few years ago but now Senku is talking about it like it's a casual absolute certainty. It really makes me wish that our modern day space exploration attempts were a little bit more advanced than where they are now but that's a conversation for a different day. The show continues to be an amazing source of comfort because I can just sit down and listen to the fun science explanations of how everything works. No matter how complicated things get or what incredible new contraptions need to be built, I can always count on Senku and the rest of the cast to explain it all to me in a way that the peanut brain can definitively understand.