It’s another edition of Trope Tuesday, the segment where we highlight a literary theme or device that makes our favorite fictional entertainment work. On the docket this week is an old standard: Red Shirts. Hit it, TV Tropes!
The color of shirt worn by the nameless security personnel on the original Star Trek series. Their only job was to get eaten, shot, stabbed, disrupted, sped up and killed, frozen, desalinated, or turned into a cuboctahedron and crushed. Their death would give William Shatner and DeForest Kelley a corpse to emote over, and Leonard Nimoy a corpse to, well, not emote over.
A Red Shirt is the Good Counterpart of Evil Minions and Mooks — set filler for our heroes’ side. Their purpose is almost exclusively to give the writers someone to kill who isn’t a main character, although they can also serve as a Spear Carrier. They are used to show how the monster works, and demonstrate that it is indeed a deadly menace, without having to lose anyone important. Expect someone to say “He’s dead, Jim“, lament this “valued crew member’s senseless death“, and then promptly forget him.
As you can tell, the trope namer is That Other Star Franchise. Isn’t that right, Ensign Ricky?
This trope tends to be used a great deal in the Star Wars Expanded Universe to prove that the heroes are in grave mortal peril (even though the only way the Big Three will ever die is if The Maker allows it to happen). Michael Stackpole’s X-Wing novels loved this trope. See someone new on the roster that wasn’t there in the previous book? Chances are fair that character is going to suffer a Red Shirt Death.
Of course, Star Wars has also subverted the Red Shirt once or twice …
