Friday, April 18, 2008

Red Shirt Expendability


Joe Carter confirms what every Star Trek fan knows- It was dangerous to be a Red Shirt on Kirk's Enterprise! Well, D'oh!

5. As fans of Star Trek will tell you, anyone wearing a red shirt and beaming down to a planet with Captain Kirk is probably going to die. But Matt Bailey has actually done some in-depth analysis of the "Red Shirt Phenomenon":

* Yellow-shirt crewperson deaths: 6 (10%)
* Blue-Shirt crewperson deaths: 5 (8 %)
* Engineering smock crewperson deaths: 4
* Red-Shirt crewperson deaths: 43 (73%)

So, the basic segmentation of factors allows us to confirm that red-shirted crewmembers died more than any other crewmembers on the original Star Trek series.

(HT: Danger Room)
More comments at The Corner:

Fear the Red Shirt [Mark Krikorian]


Even Kathryn must know that crewman wearing the red shirt dies on Star Trek. But now there's detailed data analysis of the phenomenon, complete with a PowerPoint presentation featuring tables and graphs, showing that, indeed, 73 percent of crew deaths in Classic Trek were red-shirts. But there is hope for them


Besides not beaming down, another factor that showed to increase the survival rate of the red-shirts was the nature of the relationship between the alien life and captain Kirk. When Captain Kirk meets an alien woman and "makes contact" the survival rate of the red-shirted crewmen increases by 84%. In fact, out of Captain Kirks' 24 "relationships" there were only three instances of red-shirt vaporization.

(h/t Joe Carter)

No comments:

Post a Comment