Redshirt


Redshirt is a term used by fans and staff of Star Trek to refer partially to the characters who wear red Starfleet uniforms, and mainly to refer to those characters who are expendable, and quite often killed, sometimes in great numbers, often security guards. They are the unlucky victims of attacks and sicknesses. Some redshirts could have referred to a lucky set of crew members with privileged jobs, such as a captain or a bridge crew member who never died. 

In the era regularly depicted in , red uniforms were worn by members of the operations division. The duties they normally performed were in security, engineering, or other Support Services (such as communications officers, administrators, and yeomen) aboard starships and starbases.

Of these, the security personnel were quite expendable, because the Security And Tactical Division was an inherently high-risk assignment.  and , in TOS Season 2, both featured four security redshirts dying in each episode. "The Changeling" has the most anonymity involved; all but one of the redshirts that die are unnamed (1-2-3), the other being Carlisle. (The Nomad probe, after its merger with the Tan Ru probe, also "killed" Montgomery Scott, but was kind enough to restore him at Kirk's request.)

In "The Apple," , Marple, Hendorff, and Mallory were all on one security team, killed one-by-one by the dangers of Gamma Trianguli VI.

In , the dikironium cloud creature kills three security guards that are shown, all in red shirts, including Ensign Rizzo. One redshirt, however, is lucky enough to be transported to the Enterprise in critical condition. (The creature also kills one crewman aboard the ship, but the precise color of his shirt is never shown.) One of the vampire cloud's victims does not quite count – Lt. Leslie would have been a fourth redshirt killed in the outing, but a mention of him surviving was cut from the episode's final edit. He clearly appears in later episodes, so it is probable that he either has an identical twin brother, perhaps even two identical triplet brothers or three identical quadruplet brothers, or that he did indeed survive the attack.

In , the first female redshirt to die was Yeoman Leslie Thompson. (The infamous "Get A Life" sketch from when William Shatner hosted Saturday Night Live makes her being reduced to a polyhedral shape, which then gets crushed, thereby killing her, one of its jokes.)

 is the first to feature a redshirt and has the most associated deaths; twelve crew people were lost, nine of whom died instantly at the galactic barrier, and three more of the twelve victims perished in events at Delta Vega. We saw only the latter three die on screen, but we know that none of them were technically redshirts, as there were no red uniforms of the design they used in that episode, reused from  (which, itself, featured three off-screen deaths). The operations division was wearing beige (probably described officially as "sand") at this point.

 showed the  crew dead, with much being redshirts, making it the only non-Enterprise ship to showcase redshirts.

None of the officers were really killed in , but  introduced a new twist to the "redshirt" lore, as the uniform colors switched and operations division wore the gold, or rather bronze, uniforms while the command division took on the red shirts. They also became likely to die; a theme of crew deaths was dominated by the continuous loss of their conn officer. Lieutenant Torres probably survived , but the TNG era lost Haskell, Monroe, , Nell Chilton, , and Branson. Notably, Haskell, despite manning the conn officer position, wore command division red.

Non-Enterprise crew redshirts hardly fared any better, demonstrating an alarming propensity for being killed, possessed and/or otherwise coming to bad ends. Notable examples included Captain Tryla Scott, Commander Dexter Remmick, and the entire Senior Admiralty at Starfleet Command, who were taken over by alien parasites in . Admiral Mark Jameson was killed by a de-aging medicine overdose he administered to himself in , Captain Donald Varley was blown up in the  in , Calvin Hutchinson was killed by a renegade Arkarian in , Admiral Erik Pressman was arrested in disgrace for violating the Treaty of Algeron in , and Admiral Dougherty was murdered by his Son'a co-conspirators in .

The only TNG episodes to feature death in large numbers had to do with the Borg. , , and  noted eighteen off-screen deaths, although the latter probably totaled a few more in later scenes.

The Security And Tactical Division remained a high-risk assignment in TNG, despite their change to the gold/bronze color. Natasha Yar, the first Chief of Security of the USS Enterprise-D, was killed by Armus very early in the series (namely, in ).

The  kept the crew losses low for the most part, but the TOS era installments were dominated by redshirt deaths, as the dominant uniform style featured all personnel wearing red.  noted that crew losses from the destruction of the 1701-D were low. However, , , and  all featured scores of battle-related crew deaths. As noted, the The Wrath of Khan losses were all redshirts, but the TNG losses were more varied, while continuing their pattern of conn officer attrition. It should also be noted that Spock and Kirk died in The Wrath of Khan and Generations, respectively – and in each movie, the officers wore red uniform shirts.

 featured many security personnel – such as Ensign  in  – and engineers dying, sometimes in large numbers. However, while this maintains the tradition of TOS's most dangerous areas to work, these officers wore yellow shirts by this era. There was no pattern of redshirted crew loss until command officers were noted as dying in the war story arcs that dominated the last half of the series. However, the first known redshirt death on DS9 came when an unnamed officer was killed in Ops by the Cardassian counter-insurgency program in . The redshirted conn officer of the  also was killed during the ship's first battle with Dominion forces, in . Another good example of typical redshirts on DS9 can be seen in . In the Dominion War especially, entire fleets of starships were biting the dust, indiscriminate of shirt color.

In , the crew members who initially died on screen were wearing red uniforms, such as Stadi (who was another conn officer) and Cavit. However, over the seasons of Voyager, it became clear gold was a dangerous color in the Delta Quadrant, with most officer victims who died in the series doing so while clad in gold uniforms. Because  had no way to replace crew, the only massive number of deaths took place in alternate timelines, with the two exceptions being the first episode, in which a large number of the senior staff were killed when the Caretaker's array displaced Voyager, and a situation in the second season episode  wherein both the crew and the ship were duplicated, with one of the Voyagers being destroyed not long after, along with its entire crew.

In , more engineers and MACOs were lost than officers from any other division. In the case of the MACOs, this was consistent with their evolution into the Starfleet security forces. Both branches wore red as a department color (although MACOs seemed to wear splatter camouflage more than anything).

In the rebooted continuity beginning with the film , all Starfleet Academy cadets wear red. However, Enterprise Chief Engineer Olson, prominently wearing a red space diving suit, became the first notable redshirt death in the alternate reality, as depicted in the aforementioned film.

In , Kirk tells  and another security officer to "lose the red shirts" for their mission to Qo'noS to prevent them from being identified as Starfleet officers. Doing so apparently helps, as neither officer dies during the mission. At another point, Kirk tells  to don a red shirt when he's replacing , which Chekov shows obvious reluctance to.

In , multiple red shirts are killed in the Battle of Altamid. As swarm ships lodged in the Enterprise hull, boarding parties, led by Manas, were sent aboard and killed numerous crew members. Several crew members were also left "drained" of their life signs in attacks from Krall.

Appendices

See also 
 Star Trek parodies and pop culture references

Background information 

David Gerrold has often joked that the character he played in  must have been the luckiest redshirt ever, to have lived long enough for his hair to have turned gray. 

 producer and writer Mike Sussman, a longtime fan himself, fulfilled a lifelong dream by putting on an original series red shirt to portray a dead crewman aboard the  in . Sussman's trousers were the same ones worn by Gerrold during his DS9 cameo some eight years prior (Gerrold's name was stitched in them). Sussman's TOS-style boots had been worn previously by Avery Brooks.

"RedShirt" is the default player's name in the multi-player portion of the game Star Trek: Voyager - Elite Force.

Issue #13 of IDW Publishing's Star Trek: Ongoing comic series, "", explores how redshirts perceive themselves.

A recent talk at New York's Museum of Mathematics entitled "Star Trek: The Math of Khan" explored the probability that redshirts are more likely to die in TOS. By determining how many redshirts were aboard the ship at any one time, they were able to figure out though 58% of the dead were redshirts, only 10% of total redshirts died, as opposed to 18% of gold shirts and 6% of blue shirts. As for those in security positions, 20% died. 

In his review of , Star Trek author Keith R.A. DeCandido describes Lieutenant 's character as the the film's "redshirt".

Cultural references 
The icon of the doomed redshirted crewman has to an extent nestled itself in the awareness of the general public and has been translated into a number of other pop culture and literary media and parodies.

 During Season 5 when the Los Angeles headquarters for the Counter Terrorist Unit LA Domestic Unit is attacked with nerve gas, CTU security guards wearing red uniforms are among the dead.

 In the episode The Princess and the Pear, psychologist Dr. Lance Sweets, dresses like a Red Shirt to infiltrate a convention and find out who the murderer is.

 Throughout the series, red shirt-wearing Holographic baboons called Holo-Boons are sent out ahead of the crew and usually end up destroyed.

 In Season Five, Episode 12, "The Uncanny Valley", analyst Penelope Garcia says "Oh my God, she was doomed. Like Emily Brontë doomed. Like Shakespeare doomed. Like red-shirted ensign in Star Trek doomed." The episode features a cameo by TNG alum Jonathan Frakes in the very next scene.

 In the parody episode "Star TrEek", the title character (playing a Captain Kirk-like role) leads a landing party to an alien planet and says that they couldn't be walking into a trap, because "the extra would have been blasted already". The aforementioned extra (wearing a red shirt) is immediately crushed by a falling safe.

The Enterprise Blues Band A band led by Vaughn Armstrong, Casey Biggs, Richard Herd, William Jones, Ronald B. Moore, and Steve Rankin pay tribute with their song "Redshirt Boogie Blues". 

Family Guy  A red-shirted ensign named Ricky was understandably frustrated at being assigned to the landing party for a "dangerous mission", which will likely result in the death of a member, along with Kirk, Spock, and Dr. McCoy – but he ended up surviving long enough to announce "I did not see that coming!" from out of a crowd gathered around for the death of William Shatner.

One of the comics features Jason Fox offering his sister Paige gingerbread men decorated with Star Trek uniforms, all in red.

Futurama In a Star Trek parody episode, "", a character created to replace James Doohan as Montgomery Scott in the cast was named Welshie. He (or more specifically, the actor who played him) was killed, dismembered, and vaporized by three separate blasts from a cloud creature named Melllvar. In addition, the Democratic Order of Planets (D.O.O.P.) has a military force composed of men in red uniforms, who are often utilized as cannon fodder.

 Guy Fleegman (the actor who portrayed "Crewman Number 6" in one episode of the first television series) lamented in the middle of a crisis "I'm expendable! I'm the guy in the episode who dies to prove how serious the situation is!"

At another point Gwen DeMarco (Lt. Tawny Madison) comments upon seeing a group of innocent-looking aliens turn into savage monsters "We'd better get out of here before one of those things kills Guy!"

Guy survived the real-life adventure (in fact, he took the least amount of damage compared to the rest of his crewmates, such as being the only person on the bridge NOT shot by Sarris before the activation of the Omega 13), and became a regular cast member on the second incarnation of the show, portraying "Security Chief Roc Ingersol".

 In Gears of War, wearing a helmet is equivalent to wearing a red shirt in Star Trek. Specifically, the character Carmine (another name for a shade of red) dies on-screen, while another named Rojas (Spanish for red) is found dead early on.

Genki Wear Has a fragrance for men entitled Red Shirt. Its tag line: because tomorrow may never come.

Happy Tree Friends
to be added

How it Should Have Ended In the  episode of the internet cartoon series How It Should Have Ended, Kirk ordered all redshirts to be thrown out in space to make the Enterprise light enough to escape the black hole. Scotty is seen to protest, but complies shortly after putting on a yellow shirt. The plan failed.

 Kim, Ron, Dr. Drakken, and Shego are trapped in a reality created by cable TV shows. While jumping around the channel, Kim becomes a crewman of a Star Trek-like show. She talks to Wade (who's still in "reality"), and he reassures her that she'll be safe as long as she's not wearing a... Kim cuts him off, moaning, "... red shirt."

 Boone told Locke that redshirts always get killed and Locke commented that Kirk "must have been a piss-poor captain." Ironically, Boone was the first cast member to die later that season. Additionally, Locke was played by Terry O'Quinn, who previously portrayed Erik Pressman, a former captain of dubious merit who had lost most of his crew (presumably including several redshirts) aboard the .

Mobile Suit Gundam The Earth Federation's mass produced grunt mobile suits (GMs) have red torsos and often get destroyed in large numbers. For the opposing Principality of Zeon (and pretty much any of the franchise's antagonist factions) however, a character wearing a red uniform is entirely opposite of a Star Trek redshirt. Said character tends to be an enemy ace, one who usually pilots a unique machine (usually a mobile suit that is three times faster than grunt units) and is such a skilled combatant that he/she is nigh impossible to kill. The best example of this is Captain Char Aznable (aka the "Red Comet"), the original series' main antagonist.

 In the December 28, 2009 episode one of the myths taken on was the effectiveness (completely non-existent, as it turned out) of the makeshift cannon used by Kirk which would prove decisive during the battle with the Gorn in  – the crew outfitted the dummy (who would in fact be "injured" far more than his Gorn target) in a red shirt, since bad things usually happened to Trek characters who wore them.

 This novel, written by John Scalzi, contained a plethora of references to Star Trek including the title. The book is about the idea of what would happen if redshirts knew that they were expendable.

Robot Chicken In a twist on the standard, when the ship loses power to life support, Kirk, Spock, Uhura, Dr. McCoy, and Toby the Redshirt beam onto the nearest planet. The redshirt is the only member of a landing party to bring a phaser, and the only one to survive.

In another sketch a crew member is about to put on his redshirt upon hearing that they have met a species with various sexual advantages and disadvantages. After hearing one of the advantages he puts on the shirt and the door opens and a massive flame bursts in and incinerates him, a second later a voice announces that the ship is on fire.

South Park In episode "City on the Edge of Forever" (aka "Flashbacks") one of the children on a trapped school bus, on the edge of a cliff, waiting overnight for the bus driver to return with help, wore a red commander uniform, with an Enterprise assignment patch. He went outside the bus to scout around and was promptly eaten by a monster while TOS background music played. These elements of the episode tied into its being named for the TOS episode, .

 Several references are made, since the series is a spoof on science fiction with strong Star Trek roots. In Space Quest I: The Sarien Encounter, nearly all people killed (including the player) are wearing red, though the good guys are more purple than red. In the VGA remake, it is humorous to note the Sariens are heavily armored... and the armor is red. In Space Quest V: The Next Mutation, Roger's security officer refuses to follow him into danger because his shirt is red and it's bad luck. Again, almost all people who die (or mutate) wear red.

Stargate SG-1 In the episode "The Other Guys" two characters hide in a cargo bay and one of them, played by  actor John Billingsley, becomes skeptical, saying, "Oh come on Felger, we might as well wear be wearing red shirts!"

 In the episode "Unforgiven", Sam Winchester convinces Roy Dobbs to stand bait for an arachne. When Roy is kidnapped, Sam reveals he put a tracking device in his pocket before he was taken. At which point, Samuel Winchester responds "So Roy's just some redshirt to you? Spider bait?"

The Suite Life on Deck In the episode "Starship Tipton", the gang goes to the future and have to wear outfits that look like the ones from Star Trek. Marcus gets a red one and hates it saying "The guys in red always get killed", and then it shows a man in a red outfit who opens an airlock and gets sucked into space.

 The website Think Geek has a red shirt for sale. It is a normal Star Trek design, save for the word "EXPENDABLE" written in Star Trek font on the front.

 Myka:"To him we are just..."
 Pete:"Redshirts ?"
 Myka (unbaffled): "Yeah."
 Pete:"First, he doesn't think we're redshirts, and second, it's so cool that you knew what I meant."
Discussion between main characters Myka Bering and Pete Lattimer about their direct superior's propensity to keep them in the dark in first season's episode "Implosion".

 In the kill teams game, one of the wargear is named a redshirt. He has very low stats and the player will be rewarded if he lives until the end of the game.

 In the Twilight Highlands zone of the MMO, an Orc non-playable character (NPC) that is given to the player for the quest "Madness", when clicked, says the line "Hey, does this red shirt make me look expendable?" The "red-shirt" in question is actually the tabard with the colors and insignia of the Horde, one of the two major playable factions in the game. The NPC, funny enough, dies once you reach your destination, as the Warchief of the Dragonmaw kicks him into the fire. The NPC also delivers the quote "Once these negotiations are over, I look forward to a long prosperous life" en route, as well, to foreshadow what untimely becomes of him. Players must own the expansion pack, "Cataclysm", to access the zone and this quest.

Further reading
 "Under the Microscope: He's dead, Jim", , March 2000, pp. 42-43; A lighthearted analysis of just how many redshirts were killed in the making of the Original Series.

External links
 
 
 
  - a pictoral analysis of TOS crewmen deaths

de:Redshirt
fr:Redshirt
Star Trek and pop culture
 8