A few days ago I saw a post of a picture from Star Trek where the crew was wearing masks but one member wearing a red shirt was not. The caption was “You know what happens to Red Shirts.”
Redshirts is a TV trope that originated with the original Star Trek series where characters wearing red uniforms were often killed one way or the other. 73% of those killed in the series were wearing red shirts. Their demise was used as an illustration of the danger posed to the main characters.
The legacy of the redshirt has found itself among pop culture, including TV shows, games, books, and comics.
For the TV show Lost, a redshirt refers only to a character type whose primary purpose is to be killed by a device in the plot. There’s also a novel called Redshirts by John Scalzi. It is a parody that explores the idea of what would happen if redshirts knew that they were expendable.
Looking into this there is a plethora of information on just this one subject but if you are not careful you will find yourself down so many rabbit holes along the way. So I’ll have to
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