[Cancelled] Heroes Season 4 (Volume 5 : Redemption)


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With the finale next week we need some stuff on next season so with the first bit of news so a new thread is created! :D

NBC plans to cut the number of episodes of its superhero drama from 25 this season to 18 to 20 in its fourth season, Ad Age reports.

The reasons for the cutback are legion: Though the show's latest episodes have reinvigorated many fans, a series of complicated and wide-ranging storylines cost the show ratings in Season 2 and earlier this season.

Also, NBC will have five fewer prime-time hours to fill in 2009-10 season, thanks to Jay Leno's new hour-long program at 10 pm weeknights. And other networks are also experimenting with condensed seasons: ABC's Lost has kept to 16 or 17 episodes in recent seasons, and CBS's Harper's Island has a 13-episode format that could be repeated (with a new setting and cast) if the murder mystery succeeds with viewers.

Though Heroes debuted to strong ratings in 2006, since the 2007-08 writers strike its viewership has slipped to about 7.7 million viewers on average, four million fewer than it earned before the work stoppage, according to Nielsen.

Source

I think a shorter season will favor the show. It helps the writers keep the focus on the story without adding in filler. Though in the case of Heroes, it probably should go back to its roots and have the story encompass the entire season and do away with the abbreviated stories. It started doing that in season two, and you can see how it has affected the quality of the show.

I think a shorter season will favor the show. It helps the writers keep the focus on the story without adding in filler. Though in the case of Heroes, it probably should go back to its roots and have the story encompass the entire season and do away with the abbreviated stories. It started doing that in season two, and you can see how it has affected the quality of the show.

+1

This new volume sounds interesting and reminds me of the first season. I think it will be some kind of return to the origins. And from the last episodes of the third season I could clearly see that the show focused more on the characters. And from what I heard Claude will probably play a role in this season since he is suposed to appear in the last episode of the third season

And from what I heard Claude will probably play a role in this season since he is suposed to appear in the last episode of the third season

The producers said he won't be in the finale.

I just hope they ungimp Peter finally, jeez. And this "we won't time travel anymore" crap has to stop also. Some of the better episodes of the series are time travels episodes (Five Years Gone for one?) and plus it will help ungimp Peter and Hiro as well :D

I just hope they ungimp Peter finally, jeez. And this "we won't time travel anymore" crap has to stop also. Some of the better episodes of the series are time travels episodes (Five Years Gone for one?) and plus it will help ungimp Peter and Hiro as well :D

I think that was one of the main complaints about the show was that certain characters became too powerful. And the time traveling ploy, although very well used a couple times is an easy escape for anything drastic that happens. Ando gets killed, Hiro can time travel back and save him. Thats the reason those characters got gimped... the producers even said that.

I think that was one of the main complaints about the show was that certain characters became too powerful. And the time traveling ploy, although very well used a couple times is an easy escape for anything drastic that happens. Ando gets killed, Hiro can time travel back and save him. Thats the reason those characters got gimped... the producers even said that.

Except for the fact that the show sucks with a gimped Peter and Hiro. Hiro wasn't super powerful, but I can understand the time travel thing. Fine, remove his ability to do that, but keep the ability to freeze time whatever. Peter absolutely sucked when he had no powers, and now he has this one power at a time crapfest, which imo sucks worse.

And then have the most powerful person on the show be a bad guy? Fine, but stop trying to make Sylar into a good guy every other episode also. Either way, as long as Hiro can freeze time and Peter can take on Sylar at the very least and not get ripped to shreds, I'd be happy. But alas, I don't see that happening anytime soon.

all peter needs to do is give Sylar a big hug and copy his powers :D

But if Peter can only currently hold one single power, he wouldn't get all of Sylar's powers. He'd probably get Sylar's base power, the ability to understand how things work. Needless to say, unless they ungimp Peter, he's never gonna be "Peter" from S1 again, or even S2 (sans his little amnesia-fest).

Volume 5 - Latest Details and Spoilers!!

The report from TV Guide has the following line at the end of their post:

The show's writers have already started planning for the show's fifth volume, which will involve a series of mysterious deaths. Or could they be murders?

Fuller Confirms What Changed and What's to Come!!

Its a good read

In the couple years that you were away from Heroes, did you still watch it?

"I had been watching it very regularly. I think that there were always interesting ideas at work in the show, but for me, it became too intricate. As an audience member who watched that show for the characters, it became so specified that all the things that made it great - ordinary people doing extraordinary things - kind of went out the window. Everything about the show became extraordinary - from the viruses, to the formulas, to the catalysts, to the villains - it felt like they were forced to take a shorthand with the characters just to have the real estate to tell convoluted plots. Does that make sense?"

Definitely towards the end of season two and for most of season three, it was quite complicated. How did your return to the show come about?

"They called me before Pushing Daisies was even cancelled. They were like 'Jesse [Alexander] and Jeph [Loeb] are no longer on the show and we really need your help in the writers' room. Would you mind coming by and helping out?' I was like 'Sure!' - I had the back nine [of Daisies] already broken out and ready to go, I was just waiting for the order. So I would literally go over to Heroes at lunches and sit in the writers' room.

"First they sent me the remaining episodes of the Villains arc that I hadn't seen yet so I could catch up. I was like 'oh I don't know if I can do this, I don't recognise the show any more'. It just felt like a completely different show - it didn't feel like a network television show, it felt like it should be on the Sci Fi channel. I didn't have a foothold in to care about my favourite characters. Everyone was so mad, pulling guns and yelling 'you ruined me'. Everyone was bitching a lot. For a second there I was like, 'I gotta get out of this'. I strongly believe that you should not write a show if you wouldn't watch it.

"Then I started reading the Fugitives arc. I thought 'this is interesting, they're back in their real lives', but then it took another tumble down the rabbit hole of getting really dense and characters being angry. The characters' anger at their situations was such a barrier to entry for me, because I don't relate to ****ed off people. I have to know there's something in that person that makes me want to root for them and care for them. I thought 'well, if people are angry, let's understand why they're angry so we can sympathise with them.'

"The good thing for me when I came back is that the pendulum was already swinging back the right way and everybody on the writing staff recognised the problems with the show and how far afield it had gotten from where it was. Often that writers' room is like alchemy - you have the person with the crazy ideas, the person with the funny ideas, the person who defends the characters at any cost. When I came back, it was a little bit like coming home from college and realising 'oh, mum and dad don't talk to each other any more, little sis is a cutter and little bro is hooked on meth'. The room was a completely different room. What was a cohesive group had become divided, so it was a matter of someone coming in and saying 'let's work together'."

Was episode 20 your first episode back?

"I came back for episode 19, so we started breaking that. When they were breaking that, Sylar's dad was going to be the ultimate evil, the devil essentially. I was like, 'didn't you guys just do that with Arthur Petrelli?' They agreed, so we took it in a different direction. It helped having fresh eyes in the room. For me, one of the reasons the Villains arc didn't work is because I had no investment in any of the characters as villains. Right from the off, they were twirling their moustaches and frying people at gas stations for no reason whatsoever."

Then in the next episode, you killed off two major characters. Was that your decision?

"Well, we killed one. Just Daphne. Tracy shatters and then you see her blink and the tear goes down the drain. We will see Tracy again. I'm such a sci-fi geek so the tear coming out was totally a shout-out to Zhora from Blade Runner. When I came in, they were planning to kill Tracy off. She was gonna get shot in the back of the head! I was like, 'couldn't we have her go out in a way that is more dynamic, fun and open?' I guess I was trying not to have Ali Larter basically die in the same way she did in the second season - 'I'm a hero!' Then she dies. It felt redundant to have her go out the same way, so I was like 'let's not kill her, let's see how these events change this character and stay with her on the journey as opposed to just cutting it off.'"

You had Swoosie [Kurtz] from Pushing Daisies in for a cameo. It seemed quite brief!

"It was painfully brief, but originally in the pitch for that episode, you didn't see Angela Petrelli at all after she got out of the taxi. One of our NBC execs said he wanted to see what happens to Angela afterwards, so we crafted this whole story about her regrets. Again, Angela had become such an arch cold character, saying things like 'I'm going to feed you my child!' She used to be this sad lady who would steal thoughts and was haunted, but when she's twirling her moustache I kind of had a hard time tracking the emotional arc of that character. So I was like 'let's go back and see a woman with regrets, who is realising she didn't always make the best decisions, and see her try to get her and her sons out of this mess'."

We're very close to the finale now - what sort of an ending is it?

"I'm very excited about the finale of this season. I think it's the best finale the show has had. We were sitting in the room, planning the last couple of episodes, saying we know the mistakes we've made, we don't want to make them again, so how do we tell an effective story given everything we've done in the Fugitives arc? I think we came up with a really good way to pay off the season."

And how does it set up things for next season?

"Last week we had a writers' retreat to talk about season four. It was pleasing that there was so much juice left in the berry, as it were! By the end of this season we've set up a fantastic arc for HRG, for the Petrellis, the Bennets. All of the main characters that are surviving the finale have great ways to propel them into new stories. We'll keep it grounded - now they've gone through the Fugitives arc, they can have their lives back but what do they then do with those lives?"

Given the ratings issues and storyline backlash, how confident are you over the show's longer term future?

"It's so hard to say with viewership patterns and all that Nielsen bull****. Heroes is not a cheap show but it's gotten fiscally more responsible in the episodes we've done recently. Big parts of the conversation for season four are how we do this more cost effectively because right now with networks, they're like 'you've got to pull it in on budget or you're not coming back'. For Heroes, the budgets in the second season and the start of the third season just ballooned and ballooned. It was like 'How much did that episode cost? Are you kidding me?!' On Pushing Daisies we had a locked budget we couldn't go over and it was significantly less than the Heroes budget. So when I heard the Heroes budget was getting cut down to X amount, I was like, 'That is still a lot more than some people have! That's plenty to do the show'. All of those parameters are helping us corral the next season into a much more character-oriented pace. Much like the first season, because that wasn't big and sprawling. It was a lot of characters having chance encounters without blowing the lid off it every week. It's exciting."

Source: The ODI

A shorter season is for the better. I have one question though, What happened to the Webisodes? Anything being done on them?

There's a new webisode series called nowhere man that started last week

There's a new webisode series called nowhere man that started last week

Yeah. What I was asking was is anything being done with them? Are any of the webisode charecters being developed into a main character? Any of the webisode stories being further developed? Or will they just stay as webisodes?

Yeah. What I was asking was is anything being done with them? Are any of the webisode charecters being developed into a main character? Any of the webisode stories being further developed? Or will they just stay as webisodes?

No because the webseries "nowhere man" is based around Eric Doyle (Puppetmaster) trying to lead a normal life away from his abilities.

@Martyn You and many others but there is a minority that think the series has kicked back into gear and one of them is me.

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SPC for NAS (TOS 7) is basically the same principle as UAC in Windows; it blocks executables from being launched by non-Super Users. After reaching out to my contact about these issues, I received the following response: Anyway, this only became clear when I closed the OpenClaw app screen and clicked on the OpenClaw icon in the taskbar; that is when I saw the message about disabling SPC. I think, due to the fact that this is a requirement, this should be a prompt during the installation process, not when closing the App Market and then trying to launch OpenClaw. There's also no 'Getting started' guide for people like me who have never used OpenClaw. I tried to add an LLM and discovered the tutorial led nowhere. That's when I started looking around the official TerraMaster forums, and I found a guide that helpfully explains that you won't get anywhere with OpenClaw unless you have a paid plan, which is disappointing because I imagined there would be an option to use a local LLM as I do in SubtitleEdit with Whisper-XXL. In addition, with the marketing imagery on the official site, it says that the OpenClaw feature is "all processed 100% locally for absolute privacy." which led me to believe that I could install a local LLM, not one that required paid tokens. In any case, TerraMaster does not provide guidance for this new feature, which was also a selling point of the F4-425 Pro! My contact also provided clarification about the above points I raised with TerraMaster Since it is not in the scope of the review to add paid services, I'll leave that to the people who are more qualified with OpenClaw. F4-425 Pro Surveillance App TOS also comes with a Surveillance app, which is not installed by default; it can be found in the App Market recommended section. In addition, after installing, it doesn't drop a shortcut on the Desktop or top taskbar, but you can "Send to Desktop" from the App Market listing for the app for a quick way to open it. Adding my Reolink POE doorbell camera was painless. TerraMaster doesn't appear to have a repository of preconfigured cameras; instead, the camera must be added using ONVIF or RTSP. No mobile Surveillance app TerraMaster still doesn't have a dedicated Surveillance app, although from searching online, Surveillance can be used and managed through the TNAS mobile app. I tried this with the updated TNAS mobile app beta in combination with TOS 7 and got a message that Surveillance was "Only accessible through web browser," so I reckon this must be limited to the stable versions of TOS 6 and the mobile app. More quirks In addition, whenever I minimized the Live View window in the browser Surveillance app, the feed appeared to switch to the Low-bandwidth stream, and there was no way to get the High-quality stream back. To get the High-quality stream back, I had to close Live View and then reopen it. Benchmarking A pretty cool feature of the TOS 7 is that it allows you to install directly to the NVMe M.2 SSD. In order to do that, you would have to leave out any HDDs during initialization, and even then, the system partitions are always written to two HDDs when they are eventually added. With three NVMe slots, this also gives an interesting scenario where you could build a TRAID storage Pool for installing all your apps and Docker on, and keep the third for SSD cache on the HDD pool. Limitless options! SATA PCIe 3.0 X1 A CrystalDiskMark test on a mapped network drive from within a Windows 11 25H2 PC (image above) connected over a 5 GbE hub was well within acceptable ranges. Although the read result on SATA was a little less than with the F4-425 Plus, for some reason, while writes were generally better. SATA PCIe 3.0 X1 I also ran the NAS Performance tester, which tests the link speed performance. As you can see, it pretty much maxes out the 5GbE connection. Of course, you can also opt to bond the two 5 GbE connections for a bit more umph, but I didn't do that. TOS 7, which, as of testing, is still in Beta, comes with an App Center that has a bunch of handy programs you can install right off the bat, such as Emby, Plex, Docker, as well as in-house Backup and Surveillance solutions. As you can imagine, any media streaming services you would want to host off the F4-425 Pro will work great, thanks to the Intel Core N350 CPU and its 16 GB of DDR5 memory. Accessing from mobile is only possible if Security Isolation Mode is disabled, which can put your NAS at risk from external sources, so there was no way to access it from the TNAS Mobile app. It's also quiet. I had this sat next to my computer on my work desk for the past week, and I did wonder if the noise I was accustomed to with NAS devices would annoy me, but all I could hear was a soft whirring of the rear fan (which was a little annoying) when the disks were not actively copying or reading data. Conclusion So what have I learned? Unfortunately, this release raises a few important questions and concerns that I feel haven't been adequately addressed. What I didn't like Our variant shipped with TOS 7 beta, and it's advised not to use it in a production environment. I feel that's a bit limiting on an $800 device. The mobile app is also still in beta and does not support some of the first-party apps, like Surveillance, and it still has quite a few bugs. I am a bit confused about the OpenClaw marketing along with the F4-425 Pro. I feel like that if it's going to be a main selling point, then offer official guidance on how to get started with it. TerraMaster recommends enabling SPC, but then markets the NAS for use with OpenClaw, which requires disabling SPC to be able to use it, opening up genuine security concerns for the NAS; and that's before you get into the security concerns of OpenClaw itself. Of course, the above issues won't be a problem if you decide to install something else on it, or even go back to the stable TOS 6. I wish TerraMaster had just given TOS 7 as opt-in rather than shipping with it. TOS 7 has been available as a preview since December 2025 (so well before my last TerraMaster review), and according to a thread on Reddit where a user shared a screenshot from the TerraMaster Facebook page, it is scheduled to launch today, June 23, but there's nothing about that in the TerraMaster news blog. My contact confirmed over email that TOS 7 exits beta today. The rubber feet also deserve a mention as they continue to be a problem, with them coming unstuck the moment you shift the F4-425 Pro anywhere on your desk. What I liked What it comes down to, though, aside from what I already mentioned, you are still getting a quality, affordable device here, so recommending it will depend on the individual's use case. If you're just looking for a relatively small NAS device to manage virtual machines on, backup your files, and take care of your home theater streaming, then it is a great device that will certainly futureproof you for some time. It provides good performance, takes up little space, and is, on the whole, very quiet. Four bays afford proper redundancy using TRAID or RAID 5, and you can even expand on storage capacity by adding the 2-bay D5, or 4-bay D8 Hybrid DAS over a USB 3.2 (10Gbps) link. Considering the 2024 releases were more about power, with the likes of an Intel Core i5-1235U high-end laptop CPU under the hood, I asked my contact last time if we could expect more of the same in higher-end models and was told: It makes a lot of sense to use Intel's N350 chip inside a NAS; it is more than capable of doing what the F4-425 Pro is intended for, media streaming and backup. The only downside is still the clear lack of community and even staff support on the official forums. In the past, I have had topics go unanswered for days, or there would be generic-type "we've noted this and passed it onto our developer team" type responses. Along with the other things I mentioned, it all ends up costing it a couple of points. If you are comfortable with the command line, Docker, and setting up TrueNAS or Unraid, you'll be fine. You can do great things with this hardware. In TOS, the apps are a bit lacking, and things don't always work as expected.\ AI NAS?! What has become clear to me this year is that we are going to start seeing all kinds of "AI NAS" come to market, and while that might be good for us consumers, be diligent and research these claims. Although the F4-425 Pro technically comes with AI, it is really using a cloud service that is externally sourced off-device through the third party OpenClaw app. My colleague did review a newcomer to the NAS space earlier this year, and it includes a local AI assistant inside the Zettlab D4 NAS, and they do not even use AI in the product name, check out Chris' review here. Where to buy and a discount coupon However, it does not change the fact that this is truly a great entry-level home media-class NAS that you can buy right now. TerraMaster is having a 20% off launch discount, plus you can also still apply our unique 10% off coupon on checkout, which only works on the official website. So here is a breakdown of the pricing that is only valid on the official TerraMaster website. TerraMaster F4-425 Pro (N350) + 20% discount + 10% coupon = $575.99 TerraMaster F4-425 Pro (N305) + 20% discount + 10% coupon = $503.99 TerraMaster F4-425 Pro (N350) + 20% discount + 10% coupon = £525.59 TerraMaster F4-425 Pro (N305) + 20% discount + 10% coupon = £460.79 Use NEOWIN coupon code during checkout for 10% discount Over on Amazon US and UK, the F4-425 Pro also gets a 20% launch discount, but here, the above 10% coupon cannot be applied. TerraMaster F4-425 Pro (N350) for $639.99 at Amazon US (was $799.99) TerraMaster F4-425 Pro (N305) for $559.99 at Amazon US (was $699.99) TerraMaster F4-425 Pro (N350) for £583.99 at Amazon UK (was £729.99) TerraMaster F4-425 Pro (N305) for £511.99 at Amazon UK (was £639.99) As an Amazon Associate, when you purchase through links on our site, we earn from qualifying purchases.
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