Shoot To Kill, Men!
Drifted across an intriguing site today—or rather, two, since fanboys often duplicate one another’s ideas—addressing the question of who would win in a showdown between the disposable ensigns (“redshirts”) from the Star Trek series and the disposable “elite” stormtroopers from the Star Wars movies.
It’s quite a dilemma; the redshirts exist only to die at the hands of some alien menace, true, and do so at the slightest provocation. The stormtroopers might qualify as just such an alien menace, although the movies prove them incapable of shooting the broad side of a barn. As one poster notes, it’s the inverse of the old conundrum of what happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object. Or another: “How can the redshirt die if the stormtrooper never hits him?”
Discussions like these rarely end conclusively, and often drag in subjective and irrelevant measures of “cool factor,” such as whether Captain Kirk was cooler than Han Solo, or that the redshirts have individual names while the stormtroopers have serial codes, or that stormtroopers have cool blaster rifles that go *peoww*, while the redshirts have wimply little phasers that go *zeeeeee!*. Still, I have to say the “off-screen/on-screen” argument is pretty forceful. Essentially, it holds that the stormtroopers were capable of victory in battle, but that it only happened off-screen, and the audience sees (or merely hears about) their handiwork after the fact. Maybe they’re terribly camera-shy, and the distraction undermines their elite training. The redshirts, by contrast, occasionally put up minor resistance in firefights on-screen—in Deep Space Nine and other later generations of Star Trek, if not the original series—and drop like flies when the camera turns away. The moment the cameras turn from the battle, the stormtroopers would wipe the redshirts out.
The argument presumes a little too much, however. We have no immediate reason to presume the cameras would turn away. Granted, it would be a boring fight, what with everyone missing their targets all the time, but boring alone doesn’t turn the cameras away. They televise bowling matches, for crying out loud. It seemed we were back at square one. Fortunately, a seeming irrelevancy which provides the key to the whole dilemma.
The stormtroopers have a badass soundtrack. The poster who made this point missed its significance; he felt that the soundtrack alone settled the argument. It does not, any more than any “cool factor” does. Nevertheless, in conjunction with the camera argument, it resolves the whole dilemma.
Kirk only includes redshirts in a landing party to trigger some hidden alien menace. As previously noted, they always buy the farm off-screen. Dying on-screen would give away too much mystery too quickly. But—and this is important—ominous music is the cue for the camera to turn away, and for the senior officers to receive the cryptic message spelling the redshirts’ doom.
Mystery solved. A showdown between stormtroopers and redshirts would open with a lot of inconclusive phaser and blaster fire. The fight would drag on, ensigns periodically dying of alien viruses or being dragged off by foam rubber monsters, but occasionally dropping a stormtrooper unable to see out his helmet’s eye-holes. Eventually, Lord Vader would get impatient and call to offer vague threats for failure. Cue Vader’s theme music. Triggered by the ominous music, the camera suddenly flips to Kirk and Spock and Bones, respectively flirting with the native women and arguing about the value of a pre-industrial lifestyle. Their communicators squawk to life, and every redshirt shouts, in unison, “Captain, I’m getting a strange reading…wait…it’s…it’s…No! Aaaaaaghgh!” The senior officers would rush to the scene, but it would be too late: the redshirts would all be dead, the only clue to their demise being a countryside riddled with stray blaster fire and bantha tracks, riding in parallel. Victory: stormtroopers.