Red Shirts Always Die?

[aalenfae]

I think not!
People always say that when beaming down to a planet, the red shirts are bound to die. But actually running the numbers tells a different story.

The real difference is plot armor. When you account for the fact that fewer main characters are red shirts, and that MOST of the time, only Kirk, Spock, and McCoy beam down to the planet, red shirts appear to die more than other shirt colors. But take out the invincible main characters, and immediately red shirts become the safest color. Basically... if you're not a main character... you'd better hope you're wearing red!

 

[MarsWeeps]

Why are you excluding the main characters? Assuming your statistics are correct, what would they be with the main characters included?

Isn't that like the famous quote from the late mayor Marion Barry?:

"If you take out the killings, Washington actually has a very very low crime rate." -- M. Barry

Edited to add:

Oh, in the original series, they were called landing parties, not away missions, so for that reason alone, your statement is invalid.

 

[aalenfae]

Why are you excluding the main characters? Assuming your statistics are correct, what would they be with the main characters included?

Isn't that like the famous quote from the late mayor Marion Barry?:

"If you take out the killings, Washington actually has a very very low crime rate." -- M. Barry

Because main characters are invincible, they throw off the statistics. By nature they CANNOT die, so they fundamentally skew the results. Including the main characters doesn't answer any questions, because if you're a main character in TOS, you will never die on an away mission - regardless of the color of your shirt.

In order to answer the question for those who are NOT main characters, you need to exclude any main characters from the statistics. What this study answers is this:
"If I am NOT a main character, what is the safest shirt color on an away mission?"
And the answer is red.

However, if you're curious about the overall numbers, let's include main characters:
Gold shirts die 5% of the time, blue shirts 7% of the time, and red shirts 17% of the time. Definitely more than gold or blue, but still a far cry from "always" or "usually." It's even something of a misnomer to say that red shirts "often" die, since it's still less than 1/6 of the time.

 

[MarsWeeps]

Because main characters are invincible, they throw off the statistics. By nature they CANNOT die, so they fundamentally skew the results.

You are skewing the results by not including them.

However, if you DO include main characters, gold shirts die 5% of the time, blue shirts 7% of the time, and red shirts 17% of the time. Definitely more than gold or blue, but still a far cry from "always" or "usually."

Who exactly is crying "always" or "usually?"

Also, see my edit in my previous post. Nobody is going to take your claim seriously when you call them "Away Missions" - They were never called that in TOS.

 

[aalenfae]

Because main characters are invincible, they throw off the statistics. By nature they CANNOT die, so they fundamentally skew the results.

You are skewing the results by not including them.

However, if you DO include main characters, gold shirts die 5% of the time, blue shirts 7% of the time, and red shirts 17% of the time. Definitely more than gold or blue, but still a far cry from "always" or "usually."

Who exactly is crying "always" or "usually?"

Also, see my edit in my previous post. Nobody is going to take your claim seriously when you call them "Away Missions" - They were never called that in TOS.

The plot armor of main characters makes them fundamentally different. Would you include deaf people in a study of the average sound frequencies a human can detect? Deaf people CANNOT hear, so their presence in the study would skew the results.
Similarly, main characters literally CANNOT die on an away mission, so they impede any study on mortality. Their mortality rate is always 0%, so they always skew the results towards 0%. For instance, nameless gold shirts are nearly always bolstered by Kirk's immortal presence, and blue shirts are usually bolstered by McCoy and Spock. But red shirts are almost never "helped" by Uhura or Scotty, who usually remain on the ship. Thus, by including main characters, we've made the comparison unfair, because blue and gold shirts will always have lower mortality rates, because their average is unfairly helped by immortal characters. Removing main characters means creating a more fair test.

And pretty much everybody says "always" or "usually" when referring to red shirts.
Google
Wikipedia
And at the very end of this article:
Memory Alpha "Away Team"

And with the "away mission" nitpick... it's what a landing party DOES. They're not synonyms. The TOS cast doesn't refer to "away missions," but that doesn't change what they're doing. They're taking a landing party on a mission away from the ship.

 

[tharpdevenport]

I don't know, I se 15, which is higher than five. That 'way more red shirts. And these away teams didn't occur in just one color uniform. So, I added up the numbers above and came up with 88 people. Then I used 15 red shirts and the percent calculator at math.com and came up with:

17.045454545454543% (red shirts)


For good measure:

5.681818181818182% (blue and gold shirts)


Your'e statistically what we like to call a goner if you beam down in red. Unless of course you live into hte TNG uniform color usage era.

 

[Captain Crow]

The shirts are avocado green not gold.

 

[tharpdevenport]

Yes, yes, but "gold" is the nick name we use.

 

[aalenfae]

I don't know, I se 15, which is higher than five. That 'way more red shirts. And these away teams didn't occur in just one color uniform. So, I added up the numbers above and came up with 88 people. Then I used 15 red shirts and the percent calculator at math.com and came up with:

17.045454545454543% (red shirts)


For good measure:

5.681818181818182% (blue and gold shirts)


Your'e statistically what we like to call a goner if you beam down in red. Unless of course you live into hte TNG uniform color usage era.

Your calculation shows something a little different. By combining all three departments into the same figure, it assumes that all the nameless shirt colors have an equal chance of dying - which they don't. We would need to assign some kind of point values to the different colors based on their individual mortality rates in order to correct for that.

But even so, 17% isn't nearly enough to equate wearing a red shirt to a death sentence - at least by Trek standards. The study shows more that not being a main character is far more lethal than having a red shirt. And if you're a one-time minor character, you'd fare better in a red shirt than in another shirt color.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

What is the source of the statistics regarding "away mission" fatalities?

 

[aalenfae]

What is the source of the statistics regarding "away mission" fatalities?

Essentially just me watching each episode with away missions, counting who goes down, and counting who lives/dies.

But errors might have crept in places. For instance, I didn't know how to count shirt colors in "Return of the Archons," since all the characters are wearing disguises. Or in "This Side of Paradise," where the ENTIRE CREW beams down (minus Captain Kirk). Because I'd have to guess in both cases, I decided to omit those numbers rather than use inaccurate ones.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

Memory Alpha has this page, which I found after one second of Googling. I wonder how the OP's results tally with it.

On thing to glean from it is that people died even when not on landing party duty.

 

[aalenfae]

Memory Alpha has this page, which I found after one second of Googling. I wonder how the OP's results tally with it.

On thing to glean from it is that people died even when not on landing party duty.

(I do admit I might have made some counting errors, but looking at these pictures, I think I recognize all the faces)


Yes, a number of crewmembers die on the ship - but we can't get useful statistics from them, because we need to compare deaths to the number of crewmembers total wearing that color - something for which there is no canonical evidence. I focused on landing parties because there is a concrete and canonical sample number by which we can run statistical analysis. (Number of a particular color that die compared to the number that beam down, for instance)

 

[MarsWeeps]

So, you are counting only those that beamed down to a planet, not any other deaths? For example, there were deaths in The Galileo Seven and we know the uniform colors. There are others.

 

[aalenfae]

So, you are counting only those that beamed down to a planet, not any other deaths? For example, there were deaths in The Galileo Seven and we know the uniform colors. There are others.

I counted any sort of measurable off-ship death, so that includes shuttlecraft, or any crewmembers that go to other locations - whether that be a planet or a ship, or wherever.

 

[Shawnster]

Oh good grief. Leave it to Star Trek fans to argue over the validity of a topic because a user said "Away Team" instead of "Landing Party." That's OK, aalenfae, I'm picking up what you're laying down.

Ex Astris Scientia has a section about Red Shirt Deaths in TOS

Summary

56 crew members can be confirmed to have died on the original Enterprise's five-year mission (or, to be precise, during the about three years shown in TOS). This gives us 0.7 casualties per episode, or roughly one casualty every three weeks. 26 of those 55 killed men or women were wearing a red shirt or an equivalent red engineering/security uniform. Considering that the shirt color of 15 deceased crew members remains unknown (because they were killed off screen or were not wearing a standard uniform), redshirts easily make up more than 50% of all casualties. The myth that redshirts are more likely killed than other colors can be confirmed. Some of the redshirts were engineers but most performed the duty of a security officer, which may be rated as intrinsically more dangerous and more likely lethal.

Looking at the subtotals we can notice that in season 1 only 4 crew members with red shirts were killed, 4 wearing blue shirts and as many as 7 with yellow shirts. Considering that a couple of the two latter groups effectively acted as security officers, especially in "The Man Trap", it is possible that the red color for this department was not yet set in stone at the time. Season 2 had by far the most redshirt deaths of the series, 16 altogether. 12 of those 16 were killed in just three episodes, "The Changeling", "The Apple" and "Obsession".

Only 4 women were killed under Kirk's command, as opposed to 39 men. This is significantly less than the ratio of female to male Enterprise crew members. Considering that in the 1960s women were obviously not deemed fit for a position in the security department with its high casualty rate, the low number of female deaths appears plausible though.

The clearly most common cause of death among Kirk's crew was an attack or sabotage by aliens (38 casualties). 12 crew members died in accidents, but if we take into account that as many as 9 perished when the ship crossed the Galactic Barrier in "Where No Man Has Gone Before", accidents were otherwise not that common at all. 6 of the crew died of diseases. Regarding the places in which crew members were killed, the Enterprise proved to be just as unsafe (29 casualties) as the surface of an unexplored planet (27).

 

[tafkats]

The problem with these percentages is that they reflect the likelihood of being killed if you're sent into a dangerous situation -- not the likelihood of being sent into a dangerous situation in the first place.

If you take two crewmembers on the Enterprise, one a security officer and one a scientist, the security officer is in more danger because they're more likely to be sent on hazardous missions. If you take two crewmembers who you already know are being sent on a landing party, it could be that the security officer has a higher chance of survival due to being more trained to deal with danger. However, that doesn't make being a security officer a less dangerous assignment overall, since it seems to dramatically increase the chance that you'll end up in danger in the first place.

To make a rough analogy, if you take me and a U.S. Marine and drop us both in the middle of a firefight in Mosul, I'm far more likely to end up dead, since he has much greater training for dealing with that sort of thing. That doesn't change the fact that overall, the Marine is in much more danger than I am, because in the course of day-to-day life, he encounters situations that I never will.

 

[aalenfae]

The problem with these percentages is that they reflect the likelihood of being killed if you're sent into a dangerous situation -- not the likelihood of being sent into a dangerous situation in the first place.

If you take two crewmembers on the Enterprise, one a security officer and one a scientist, the security officer is in more danger because they're more likely to be sent on hazardous missions. If you take two crewmembers who you already know are being sent on a landing party, it could be that the security officer has a higher chance of survival due to being more trained to deal with danger. However, that doesn't make being a security officer a less dangerous assignment overall, since it seems to dramatically increase the chance that you'll end up in danger in the first place.

To make a rough analogy, if you take me and a U.S. Marine and drop us both in the middle of a firefight in Mosul, I'm far more likely to end up dead, since he has much greater training for dealing with that sort of thing. That doesn't change the fact that overall, the Marine is in much more danger than I am, because in the course of day-to-day life, he encounters situations that I never will.

That is true - and "in-universe" redshirts put their lives on the line in a much more tangible way than other departments.

But the age-old adage that "the redshirt always dies" isn't really based on the realistic implications of a boots-on-the-ground security officer, but rather the dramatic on-screen usage thereof. Popular wisdom demands that "redshirts always die," or that they represent expendable characters in general, and statistically, that's not strongly the case from a narrative standpoint.

While it is true that redshirts generally find themselves in greater peril by default given their roles, it doesn't seem fair to label them as the "expendable" characters, because as far as the episodes are concerned, it's not redshirts specifically, but no-name crewmembers in general that suffer the "expendable" curse.

 

[MarsWeeps]

Oh good grief. Leave it to Star Trek fans to argue over the validity of a topic because a user said "Away Team" instead of "Landing Party."

Of course it would be Star Trek fans who argue over it. Why would the Star Wars people care about it? Besides, if someone is going to make pretty charts about a topic, the info should be accurate. Besides, didn't you see the smiley? That usually means the preceding statement isn't meant to be that serious.

Was "The Cage" (or "The Menagerie") included? They didn't have red shirts back then.

Also, I think the perception that red shirts are more likely to be killed is because people saw more red shirts killed over the course of the series. Nobody was really calculating percentages, they were just counting total deaths. All we saw was a red shirt dying, not that 3 red shirts survived.

It's sort of like when a plane crashes, it's in the news for weeks or longer, maybe because of the total number of people killed in one instance, but statistically you have more chance of being killed in a car crash on the way to the airport than you do of being killed in a plane crash.

 

[Green Shirt]

Yes, yes, but "gold" is the nick name we use.

Count me out of the "we" crowd.