Star Trek’s Newest Series Isn’t Flinching Away From the Brutal Reality Of A Career in Starfleet

Star Trek is exploring the full, harrowing truth of being a Starfleet Security Officer in the new Red Shirts comic series from IDW Publishing, which debuts this week, and the preview for the first issue offers an eye-opening glimpse at the full potential for gore baked into the book's premise.

Star Trek: Red Shirts #1, written by Christopher Cantwell, with art by Megan Levens, opens with the startling image of a Red Shirt having his face graphically clawed to shreds by the alien beast known as a Mugato.

The character, Ensign Miller, survives, and is branded "lucky" for a Red Shirt, considering he only lost an eye.

Star Trek Is Exploring Starfleet's Full Potential For Bloodshed In "Red Shirts"

Star Trek: Red Shirts #1, Written By Christopher Cantwell; Art By Megan Levens; Available This Week From IDW Publishing

This opening scene sets an immediate, and appropriate, precedent for the series, which is set to explore the lives of Trek's notoriously short-lived Red Shirts, who operate on the front lines of Starfleet's most dangerous missions. And if that weren't enough, Red Shirts #1 quickly moves on to a montage of even more brutal deaths to establish its tone.

In a sequence of nine panels, a string of unlucky Security Officers are shown being shot, blown up, vaporized, eaten by giant bugs, thrown off cliffs, and in two particularly gruesome instances, having their heads fully crushed by robots and aliens. "Yes, we all have a shelf life," Ensign Miller grimly narrates.

Of course, this is the selling point of Red Shirts. The series has the potential to explore the truly violent reality of this infamous Star Trek trope in a thrilling new way. For the most part, Trek has been beholden to the standards and practices of major network television, but now IDW is boldly going where no TV show could before.

Red Shirts Is An Overdue Look At The Lives Of Starfleet's Most Endangered Officers

Exploring The Brief Lives And Violent Deaths Of Starfleet Security

The idea of Red Shirts being synonymous with frequently ill-fated minor characters goes all the way back to Star Trek: The Original Series, and it has become a ubiquitous term in popular culture. Those unnamed characters who get killed off quickly and graphically? "Red Shirts," no matter what the story is.

Yet over the past sixty years of Trek history, the franchise has rarely taken advantage of the dramatic potential for these characters beyond just their utilitarian use in the story. Red Shirts changes that, and the result is already shaping up to be as emotionally resonant as it is action-packed and gore-filled.

Red Shirts centers the characters with the most dangerous job in the Star Trek universe, and it is not shying away from the implications. The series will go to some dark places, but in the process, it will shed new light on the lives of the "expendable" crew members who Star Trek's main characters and fans take for granted all too often.