Redshirts by John Scalzi (2012) Book Discussion

 Hey everyone, how's it going? I'm doing pretty well. Today I'm going to be talking about Redshirts by John Scalzi and published in 2012. I don't have much of an introduction for this one because I really just wanna start talking about it. So let's get into it.

I had originally planned to talk about this book on here when I first read it over the Christmas holidays, however I had so much going on that I just ended up not doing it. So this time around I read it specifically so I could talk about it here.

I probably first heard about this book about ten years ago. My sister told me about it even though she hadn't read it before. Fast forward to late 2024-early 2025, and I read my first Scalzi novel, Starter Villain, which I already talked about here on the blog and that book really got me excited to read more from John Scalzi because I'd never read anything written by him before I read Starter Villain. Honestly, that book was so insane and out there in terms of the story that I had to read Redshirts next, because obviously, I'm a huge Star Trek fan, and this book calls out the stupidest tropes that Star Trek ever had.

This book is about an Ensign aboard the Universal Union Starship, Intrepid, the flagship of the Union Navy, named Andrew Dahl. He's fresh out of the academy, but he notices some strange things going on onboard the ship. Then he and his friends discover they're characters on a TV show and decide to put an end to the crappy writing that caused the deaths of so many "Redshirt" characters. Hilarity and hijinks ensues. 

I'm not going into spoilers but that's my general synopsis of the book. It's hilarious. Also, you have to remember that this came out in 2012, before Seth MacFarlane ever came up with The Orville, but at the same time, it's also 2012, 13 years after Galaxy Quest. So this book sits right in the middle, between two Star Trek parodies. But I don't think anything, with the exception of some episodes of Stargate SG-1, and maybe Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda, had fully copied the Star Trek formula or setting the way Galaxy Quest, Redshirts, and The Orville have. 

My favourite character, who doesn't get as much to do as Andy does, is Maia Duvall. I know, it's not a surprise that I like the female character the best, but when they're well written, even if she isn't the main focus of a story, I like them the best. I guess it's because many of them remind me of the awesome women in my life. Not all, but many. In the case of Duvall, she's not the voice of reason, she's there for the ride, and takes things in stride, leaving Hester and Finn to be the doubters in this scenario. She's also a security officer. Not the ship's chief of security like Tasha Yar was in the first season of TNG and La'an is in Strange New Worlds, but a solid security officer. Again, no spoilers.

The crazy thing is is that this book specifically targets Star Trek because no other Science Fiction TV show has ever had the "Redshirt" character so frequently. Oh sure, the Stargate franchise has the nameless soldiers that got killed off protecting the main characters in whichever Stargate show the main characters were part of, but Star Trek was the only show, up until 2015 when The Expanse debuted, to have the starship setting be the main setting of a show. Yes, there was Firefly for like 12 or 13 episodes in the early 2000s, but that wasn't a Starship with a full crew complement, exploring space and meeting new species every week. Star Trek is the only TV show to have that. And, there are episodes that have really shitty writing in them, and really stupid things happen that kill characters off for no reason other than the sake of drama on a weekly television drama series. 

This book asks the question, "But, what if, in some other timeline that's affected by the writers of the show, those characters are real people?" They ask the question, "What if Ensign Ricky is real?" "What if Captain Picard is real?". It's an insane question to ask, but as a lifelong Star Trek fan, many of these characters are more real to me than some of the people I see in the news. Because I've lived with them on my TV screen for nearly 39 years. And so that question is a valid question for those of us who are fans of Star Trek, but makes less sense to those who aren't. 

This is Scalzi's third standalone novel, and it's very well written. It's exactly the kind of book I need these days. The funny thing is is that back in 2012, I would've stayed far away from this book as possible. The reason being that I felt that parody was pure evil because it always made fun of a movie, book, TV show, or comic book and I felt it was just unfair to the work being made fun of. Look guys, I was 25 years old, naive, and took this kind of shit way too seriously at the time. I didn't understand that it was supposed to be funny, because so much that has come out as parody for things that I love, has ended up being mean spirited, especially in the '90s and early 2000s, before The Big Bang Theory, The Dark Knight, and Iron Man finally made it okay to be a geek in the eyes of the outside world. Of course, we've swung back around on that again unfortunately it seems, but hey, society sucks, and we still gotta live in it, while still staying true to ourselves and never letting anyone else tell us what we should and shouldn't like when it comes to the books we read or the movies and TV shows we watch, if those are things that we like to do.

Scalzi is a geek. A full on geek. He worked on Stargate Universe, he loves Star Trek and Star Wars. And I think that's what makes it okay for this book to make fun of Star Trek a little bit. It's not someone on the outside making fun of this stuff, while making fun of the fans for liking it. It's one of us saying, "It's okay to be a fan of Star Trek, but Star Trek does a lot of dumb shit". Which is true. Star Trek has done a lot of dumb shit. In fact, they've done some of the dumbest shit ever in all of Science Fiction, but that dumb shit was done with heart and in a way that resonates with those of us who are fans. And we're not so uptight that we can't make fun of some of it ourselves. Like, Tasha Yar getting killed off by an evil oil slick is pretty dumb. But, it worked...sort of. 

Alright my friends, I think that's going to be it for my discussion on Redshirts. I debated doing this post on The Star Trek Journal, but since it's not a Star Trek book, I decided to post it here on Josh's Geek Cave. If you've never read it before, I definitely recommend you do so. It's pretty great. That's it for me for today. I'll be back over on The Star Trek Journal tomorrow discussing the state of Star Trek in 2026 in the wake of the cancellation of Starfleet Academy. Until then, have a great evening, stay safe out there, and I will talk to you all later. Take care.

Clerks Movie Discussion and DVD Review

 Hey everyone, how's it going? I'm doing okay. Today I'm here to talk about Kevin Smith's 1994 debut film, my history with Kevin Smith's films, and the DVD release, which I got last week. So, let's get into it and talk about Clerks!

 A few months ago I picked up Mallrats on Blu-ray and I also got it on VHS at Ottawa Comiccon. However, Clerks is a very different movie than Mallrats is. Probably because Clerks was made so independently and is much cruder than Kevin Smith's later films in terms of how it was made. The movie was filmed in black and white, which is probably the filmstock that Smith could afford in the early '90s when he was making this movie, being that filmmaking was still analogue, even if visual effects were starting to become digital. Of course by the time Clerks was being made, black and white movies weren't as common as they had been from the late 1800s (the dawn of film) to the early 1960s, when colour film was deemed too expensive for most studios to use, so it was a pretty unique choice to film this movie in black and white.

I really enjoyed watching Clerks. I've heard about it for so many years, yet I never got spoiled on the actual events in the movie. Not even by Mallrats. I don't really have a favourite character, but obviously I was excited to see the beginnings of Jay and Silent Bob, played by Jason Mewes and Kevin Smith. Mainly because of when I first encountered them and how I first encountered them. I loved Veronica (Marilyn Ghigliotti) as a character, but I wish she'd been in it more. I think it's because I saw Mallrats first and Brandi (Claire Forlani) and Rene (Shannen Doherty) played a much larger role in that movie than Veronica and Caitlin (Lisa Spoonauer) play in this movie, so I was anticipating that Dante's girlfriends, both present and past, were going to play a bigger role than they did.

I was surprised by the scene where Dante and Randal are talking about the contractors who potentially worked on the Death Star in the Star Wars franchise. I wasn't surprised by the scene, because in an issue of Star Wars Insider magazine from 2007 that had an article on the novel, Death Star, in it, they mention that scene. However, I was surprised because I'd forgotten that the article mentions that Dante and Randal are talking about the second Death Star from Return of the Jedi, not the original Death Star from Star Wars. I just looked up that article, and reread the first couple of lines which talks about the scene from Clerks before going on to the topic of the article.

My introduction to Kevin Smith actually came from the DVD for Spider-Man in 2005. I'd owned the movie on VHS but I'd gotten the DVD for Spider-Man 2 for my birthday or Christmas in 2004. So a year later, I picked up the DVD for the 2002 movie since I'd just gotten my first DVD player, which was a portable one. Kevin Smith is interviewed in the bonus feature covering Spider-Man's history and people's love of the character on the second disc. 

My next encounter with Kevin Smith came in the form of his guest role in season 5 of Degrassi: The Next Generation where he played a fictional version of himself, making a new Jay and Silent Bob film that gets filmed in Degrassi Community School. within the fictional movie, he also plays Silent Bob. This was actually my introduction to Jason Mewes. After this I've mainly encountered him through his work as a writer on the Green Arrow comic (reading it in trade of course), and as a director on several episodes of The Flash, Supergirl, and The Goldbergs.

 

Like I said, back in August I picked up Mallrats on Blu-ray and then I ended up watching it that night. This was the first Kevin Smith movie I ever watched and I loved it. To the point where I asked Brad to grab the VHS for me at Ottawa Comiccon in September, since I wasn't going until the Sunday and couldn't guarantee that the VHS would still be there when I got there on Sunday morning. And then I decided that if I found Clerks on DVD, Blu-ray, or VHS, I'd grab it too at the very least. When I was out with Brad a week ago I found Clerks on DVD, so I grabbed it.

I found the Canadian version of the 1999 DVD for Clerks, which is really cool since I don't have a whole lot of DVDs from the late '90s. It's a pretty decent DVD release for 1999. It doesn't have a ton of bonus features (they saved those for the 10th anniversary Clerks X DVD that came out in 2004), but it has the alternate ending and deleted scenes as well as a music video and a Film Recommendations section. One of the movies in that section is Chasing Amy, which has a "Coming Soon" tag beneath the title. Clerks was originally released on DVD on June 29th, 1999 while Chasing Amy was released on DVD on April 2nd, 2000. So almost a year apart. But I'm wondering if Chasing Amy was supposed to come out in late 1999, but got pushed back to April 2000 instead. That would make sense if the people who produced the DVD thought Chasing Amy was coming out sooner than it did, but didn't have any kind of release date for it, hence why they included the "Coming Soon" tagline under the movie's title (and VHS cover) in the Film Recommendations section on the Clerks DVD.

Overall this was a fun movie and I'm glad that I finally got to see it after all these years. I'm also glad that I found it on DVD. Physical media is very important to me. Particularly physical media formats from the '90s and early 2000s like VHS tapes, DVDs, and CDs. Those are the formats I grew up with and I love finding movies, TV shows, and music from that era on those formats. So finding the first DVD release of Clerks from 1999, albeit the Canadian version, is pretty cool. 

Alright my friends, that's it for me for today. I don't know when I'll be back on here or over on The Star Trek Journal, because I got stuff going on next week that may prevent me from posting. I promise that I'll be back as soon as I can. Until then have a great afternoon and I will talk to you all later. Take care.