Spinel

Pokémon Horizons Episode 136 'Stellar Finale': Umbreon Walks Away From Spinel

Pokémon Horizons: The Series wrapped its "Rising Again" arc with episode 136, "Stellar Finale" — the grand conclusion of Liko and Roy's journey — and Japan's most-liked reactions zeroed in not on the Mega Rayquaza spectacle but on the quiet gut-punch of the villain's ending. After Spinel is defeated and jailed, his lifelong partner Umbreon flicks his thrown Poké Ball aside and walks away. Japanese fans immediately read this through the franchise's own mechanics: this is an Umbreon, a Pokémon that only exists because an Eevee evolved through high Friendship — so being rejected by it is, as the top comment puts it, the single heaviest punishment the Pokémon world can hand down. From there the thread becomes a close reading of the staff's cruelty: the deliberate contrast with the lovable, never-truly-evil Team Rocket; the careful foreshadowing that Spinel's power-up item, Laquium, corrodes the very bonds Mega Evolution requires; and an unsettled debate over the final shot — when Umbreon glances at Spinel's prison cell, was it pity, lingering attachment, or pure coincidence from a Pokémon who'd already forgotten him? The argument over that one ambiguous glance is where the comment section truly lives, before someone lands the only verdict a Pokémon fan could.