Pokémon Horizons Season 3 Part 4: What to Expect From the "Rising Hope" Finale

Pokémon Horizons: Season 3 — Rising Hope is heading into its final stretch. Part 4, the season's finale batch of episodes, arrives on Netflix September 18, 2026, at 12:00 AM PT, according to Pokemon.com's official announcement. It closes out a season that's spent three prior parts building toward a confrontation with Laquium and the Explorers, and it does so with a lineup of returning characters, a handful of new power-ups, and at least one high-profile battle teased in advance marketing.

Because these episodes haven't released yet, this is a preview of what's confirmed heading in, not a recap of what actually happens. Here's everything that's been reported so far.

The release date, confirmed

Part 4 of Pokémon Horizons: Season 3 — Rising Hope drops on Netflix at 12:00 AM PT on September 18, 2026, per Pokemon.com's own news post announcing the premiere. Both CBR and Collider have independently corroborated the date and time in their own coverage of the release. That gives fans a firm, single-timestamp drop rather than a staggered international rollout — the whole batch becomes available worldwide at once, the way Netflix has handled the previous three parts of this season.

The official logline

Netflix and Pokemon.com are promoting Part 4 with the same synopsis across outlets: "Racing against the spread of the Strong Spheres, Liko, Roy, and the rest of the Rising Volt Tacklers move to stop Laquium and the Explorers once and for all!" That single sentence is doing a lot of work — it confirms the finale is framed explicitly as a race-against-time conflict, and it names the season's central threats directly rather than leaving them vague heading into the last stretch of episodes.

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Who's leading the Rising Volt Tacklers this time

The central quartet hasn't changed. Liko, Roy, Dot, and Ult remain the core of the Rising Volt Tacklers heading into Part 4. What has shifted, according to reporting from CBR and Collider, is who's steering the group. Professor Friede — voiced by Crispin Freeman — is described as transferring responsibility to the younger generation this part, stepping back from the more hands-on leadership role he's held across the season. Filling that gap is Roy, voiced by Anjali Kunapaneni, who's reported to take on more of a leadership role specifically in this batch of episodes.

That's a meaningful structural choice for a finale. Handing more responsibility to Roy right as the season heads into its climactic confrontation with Laquium and the Explorers suggests the production wants the last stretch of Rising Hope to double as a growth moment for one of its younger leads, not just a plot-resolution exercise for the adults who've been guiding the group all along.

The plot mechanics: Six Heroes and Strong Spheres

Beyond the broad "stop Laquium" framing, the specific mechanics driving Part 4's plot involve two elements that have been building across the season. The Rising Volt Tacklers are working to recover the "Six Heroes," who've been captured by the antagonists, while simultaneously racing to contain the spread of "Strong Spheres" — the same threat named directly in the official logline. Both plot threads point toward a finale that's less about a single decisive battle and more about a two-front effort: rescuing captured allies while also managing an escalating, spreading danger that the show has apparently been building toward across the earlier parts of Season 3.

A necessary caveat: what "Laquium" actually is

Here's where it's worth being careful. Coverage of Part 4 hasn't been fully consistent on exactly what "Laquium" refers to. Some descriptions treat it as the antagonist force itself — the group the Rising Volt Tacklers are moving to stop, alongside "the Explorers." Others use the term in ways that suggest it might instead describe the substance being spread, tying it more directly to the Strong Spheres threat than to a villain organization. Neither framing has been definitively confirmed by an official source in a way that settles the ambiguity, so the safest way to describe it right now is as a term that's been used variously across previews to mean either the antagonist force itself or the substance it's spreading. Whichever it turns out to be, the actual finale should clear that up quickly once Part 4 airs.

The first episode: "Mochi Mayhem!"

The batch kicks off with an episode titled "Mochi Mayhem!" according to reporting on the Part 4 release. No plot details beyond the title have been confirmed for that specific episode, but the lighter, more comedic-sounding title is a notable contrast to the higher-stakes framing of the season's overall logline — a pattern Pokémon anime has leaned on before, opening a serious arc's final stretch with a smaller-scale, tonally lighter episode before escalating into the season's bigger confrontations.

The teased battle: Kilowattrel, Skeledirge, and a Laquium-affected Moltres

The most concrete preview content attached to Part 4 so far is a promotional teaser reportedly showing Roy's Kilowattrel and a newly-evolved Skeledirge battling a Laquium-affected Moltres, according to CBR's and Collider's coverage of the released marketing material. A few things stand out here. First, Skeledirge's evolution being featured in the preview at all signals it's a meaningful development point for Roy's team heading into the finale, not just a background detail. Second, pitting that newly-evolved Pokémon and Kilowattrel against a legendary bird explicitly described as "Laquium-affected" ties directly back into the season's central threat — whatever Laquium ultimately turns out to be, it's apparently capable of affecting or altering Pokémon as powerful as Moltres, which raises the stakes for what the Rising Volt Tacklers are actually up against.

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The power-ups fueling the finale's battles

Part 4 is also being promoted around a handful of specific battle mechanics meant to raise the stakes for its climactic fights. Terastallization and Mega Evolution both feature, with a Mega Starmie specifically called out in reporting on the preview material. New moves used by the cast's Pokémon are also part of the promotional push, according to CBR and Collider's coverage — though, as with the plot specifics, exactly which characters' Pokémon get new moves and what those moves do hasn't been detailed beyond the general framing that they're meant to escalate the finale's battles.

Featuring both Terastallization and Mega Evolution in the same batch of episodes is a notable choice on its own. Those are two of the more visually dramatic power-up mechanics the modern Pokémon games and anime have introduced, and reserving them for the season's actual finale — rather than spreading them out earlier in Rising Hope — tracks with a production clearly trying to make Part 4 feel like a genuine escalation rather than a routine continuation of the season's earlier fights.

Captain Pikachu shows up in the promo art

One more detail worth flagging for longtime viewers: Captain Pikachu appears in promotional imagery released for Part 4, according to reporting on the finale's marketing rollout. Captain Pikachu has been a recurring, fan-favorite presence across Pokémon Horizons, and its inclusion in the finale's promotional material suggests it has at least some role to play in the season's closing episodes, even if specifics haven't been detailed beyond its appearance in the artwork itself.

Where this leaves Season 3 overall

Part 4 isn't just closing out a single batch of episodes — it's the finale of Season 3 as a whole, which carries the overarching subtitle "Rising Hope." Part 3 of the season premiered on Netflix in June 2026, meaning Part 4 arrives roughly three months later to close out the season's full run. Seasons 1 and 2 of Pokémon Horizons, along with Parts 1 through 3 of Season 3, are all already streaming on Netflix, so newcomers have a full backlog available to catch up on before the finale drops.

It's also worth noting the release-timing gap between Japan and Netflix's international rollout. In Japan, TV Tokyo's broadcast of the series entered the "Wonder Voyage" story arc starting May 22, 2026 — a different point in the story than where Netflix's Part 4 picks up internationally. That gap is fairly standard for how Pokémon Horizons has been distributed throughout its run, with TV Tokyo's Japanese broadcast running ahead of Netflix's batched international release schedule, but it's a useful thing to keep in mind if you're comparing notes with Japanese broadcast coverage or fan discussion referencing "Wonder Voyage" specifically — that's a different point in the story than what Part 4 covers for Netflix's audience.

Bottom line

Pokémon Horizons: Season 3 — Rising Hope wraps up with Part 4 on Netflix September 18, 2026, at 12:00 AM PT. The confirmed shape of it: Liko, Roy, Dot, and Ult racing to recover the Six Heroes and stop the spread of the Strong Spheres, Roy stepping into more of a leadership role as Professor Friede hands off responsibility, a battle teaser featuring Kilowattrel and a newly-evolved Skeledirge against a Laquium-affected Moltres, and a power-up roster that includes Terastallization, Mega Evolution — including a Mega Starmie — and new moves across the cast. What's still genuinely unclear is exactly what Laquium is and how the season actually resolves its two-front crisis, and both of those are things no amount of preview coverage can answer until the episodes themselves are actually available to watch.