Do "Red Shirts" die more often?

April 15, 2008 by dave

In our house, when watching a television show or movie where we can clearly see that a character is about to get killed, we say, "Red Shirt", meaning that they're like the red shirted characters in the original Star Trek series whose primary purpose in being in the scene was to allow a death without an impact on a major character.

We've always thought that these "Red Shirts" had a high mortality rate, but now we know for sure. In this post Analytics According to Captain Kirk, Matt Bailey does a careful analysis of crew member deaths in relationship to other common Star Trek events such as Captain Kirk getting lucky, presence of Klingons, fights and beaming down to a planet.

The short version, Red Shirts made up 73% of the crew-member deaths on the show. Beaming down to the planet increased the chance of death for Red Shirts. Captain Kirk getting lucky, decreased that chance, but only if there wasn't a fight. The author found a clear solution for Red Shirt deaths:

We can reliably improve the survivability of the red-shirted crewmen by only exploring peaceful, female-only planets (android and alien females included).

I'm glad he cleared that up.

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