Advance Review — ‘Star Trek: Red Shirts’ #4 Doesn’t Give Readers Anyone To Root For
by Tom Smithyman
One of the reasons Star Trek has endured for over half a century is the characters and our emotional investment in them. What will Spock and Dr. McCoy argue about this week? What rousing speech will Captain Picard give the crew of the Enterprise-D? How high will Christopher Pike’s hair get?
Yes, we also love the crazy science fiction stories as well as the allegorical nature of the franchise. Ultimately, though, if we don’t love — or even hate — the characters, we’re just not going to be invested in what happens to them.
That has been an on-again, off-again problem with the limited comic series Star Trek: Red Shirts. The premise is clever enough: send a whole bunch of unknown security officers on a mission and watch them get picked off one by one. It works for a standalone issue. But for a five-issue miniseries? By the fourth issue, it’s feeling the weight of lots of characters who we really don’t care about.
It’s a shame too, because the creative team knows what they’re doing. Writer Christopher Cantwell spins a good yarn, and while we’re all in on the joke of red shirts dying each issue, there’s really no one to root for. Artist Megan Levens is tasked with depicting new ways to dispatch the characters — and in an amusing introduction to this issue — shows off the deaths to date. They range from a disruptor blast to the face to splattering on the ground from a great distance to a horrific transporter accident.
The story is allegedly about the theft of a Federation data disc with information the Romulans and Klingons both want. Cantwell adds in some questionable Starfleet behavior to make things interesting. But if we’re just here to see red shirts get eliminated, does the plot even matter?
Star Trek: Red Shirts #4 will be available in comic book stores and on digital platforms Wednesday from IDW.
Overview
It’s hard to get excited about a comic book when you only bought it to see the ways in which the main characters are killed off. The plot ultimately doesn’t really matter, just the manner of the deaths. And with so many characters, it’s difficult to hope that any of them survive the ordeal.
