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 Xeno does sort of represent what he could've turned into if his love of science superseded any desire to be there for humanity on a more personal level.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.

With barely a moment to catch its breath, Dr. Stone Science Future's third cour launches at rocket-propelled pace into the stratosphere, cramming an unbelievable number of new developments into its compact run time. Last season ended with tiny melon-head Suika spending several years alone in the Amazon rainforest, working her little butt off to save her petrified friends. Upon doing so, Senku takes charge once again, and surprisingly revives his arch-rival Dr. Xeno, only to team up with him to tackle a common goal. What goal? To conquer the moon, of course!

Escaping the Earth's gravity well and surviving the journey across the vacuum of space isn't exactly an easy task, so Senku and Xeno have their work cut out. Just as well then that the Amazon Basin is rich in mineral deposits easy enough to locate with a homemade Geiger counter “even a middle schooler could build”. Um… ok? My middle-school-aged son barely has the attention span to build Lego models unprompted. Perhaps he's not a great example.

All previous antipathy resolved, Xeno and Senku now collaborate, though each with very separate roles. Xeno's busy working himself up into a frenzy building skull-shaped material refinery plants that produce horrifically poisonous gases, while Senku gets to work using explosives to create spherical fuel tanks to fill with poop-derived petrochemical substitute. They're both like little kids playing with new toys, and their enthusiasm for all the new exciting metal alloys they create is infectious. Who knew stainless steel was so intoxicatingly awesome? I'll never look at my cutlery in the same way again.

All of this metallurgy culminates in the fabrication of a brutally powerful rocket engine, and an implausibly modern-looking new version of the Perseus ship. Apparently this shiny new metal vehicle can propel its crew across the entire Atlantic ocean within seven days, as opposed to the forty days its predecessor took to traverse the Pacific. At this juncture, the non-petrified members of the Kingdom of Science split into three complementary teams, though I'm unsure of the wisdom of leaving Xeno to his own devices, with some of his old pals, and only Ginro to keep an eye on him.

Dr. Stone's always so bright, breezy, and full of life that it's easy to forgive its more exotic flights of fancy. I'm not sure the pace has always been quite so hyperactive as this inaugural episode (it takes until nine minutes for the new opening sequence to a great new tune by Asian Kung Fu Generation to even begin), yet it's so much fun I'll forgive it.

It's also nice that the show debuts with a release-day dub, which is, as always, excellent. However, Crunchyroll continues to insist on neglecting to translate any of the on-screen text in the English dub version, which is actively detrimental to multiple on-screen jokes and essential clarification material. This is a science-based show, with diagrams and labels. It's almost unwatchable without adequate translation. I gave up within moments and switched to the sub. This seems like a massive oversight, likely caused by the limitations of the awful closed caption software Crunchyroll uses in its dubs, as opposed to the far superior sub captioning. For this reason, I'll likely stick to the sub for the rest of the season too.