My Hero Academia Season 8 Episode 4: Is This the End of All For One?
All For One vanishes in My Hero Academia season 8 episode 4—but is the ultimate villain finally dead? Bakugo’s blistering assault interrupts his all-quirks gambit, triggering a catastrophic rewind that leaves only an infant where the monster stood.
If you watched My Hero Academia season 8, episode 4 and thought the show just erased All For One from existence... not so fast. The final season is not wrapping its big bad by episode 4. What we saw was wild, dramatic, and very intentional misdirection.
What actually happened in episode 4
All For One tried to blow past his limits by firing off a pile of quirks at once. Bakugo dove in with those ridiculous explosion barrages and completely wrecked AFO's focus. Because AFO has been juicing himself with a stolen Rewind quirk, every time he took damage and lost control, his body snapped backward in time. Fast.
The result: his emotions spiked, his grip on those stolen abilities unraveled, and he started rewinding like a broken tape. Infant. Fetus. Cells. Then nothing. It's a striking visual and a clean narrative punctuation mark. But permanent? No.
So, is All For One actually dead?
No. He vanishes here, but this is not his exit. The series still has a lot of road left, and taking out the main villain this early would be strangely easy for a show that loves to twist the knife.
What comes next: after AFO blips out, Deku squares up against Tomura Shigaraki himself. It turns into a battle of willpower rather than just fists, and Shigaraki slips. That crack in his resolve is all AFO needs. The vestiges of AFO surge back through Shigaraki's mindscape and overwhelm him. AFO reasserts himself, mocks his own vessel for losing ground to Deku (a kid he still refuses to take seriously), and seizes the wheel again.
As AFO takes control, Shigaraki literally starts to come apart, and AFO hammers home the most unsettling reveal: Tomura's life has basically been his long con.
Episode 5 looks ready to go dark on Shigaraki's past
Expect next week to dig into the uncomfortable stuff. AFO has been shaping Tomura from the shadows for years, giving him the illusion of choice just to snap it away when it hurt the most. The breadcrumbs point to AFO nudging Tomura's family before he was even born, pushing Shigaraki's father to have another child, stealing Tomura's natural quirk, watching him grow, and eventually handing him Decay like a cursed gift.
If that sounds extreme, it is. The tragedies that defined Tomura's life were not accidents; they were engineered. And when AFO lays it all out, that psychological gut-punch is what shatters Tomura's defenses and lets AFO take full control.
Episode 5 release timing
Here is when season 8, episode 5 is set to drop on Saturday, November 1, 2025 (time zones vary):
- 1:30 AM PT
- 3:30 AM CT
- 4:30 AM ET
- 9:30 AM GMT
- 10:30 AM CET
- 5:30 PM JST
- 6:00 PM ACST
My Hero Academia is streaming on Crunchyroll.
Bottom line
AFO blinking out in episode 4 is a nasty trick of the Rewind quirk and a clean setup for an even nastier return. The real horror show is the reveal that Tomura's life may never have been his own in the first place. Did you buy AFO's 'death' for a second?