Redshirts

“Why?”
    “Because otherwise we’re dead,” Dahl said. “Mister Weinstein, when you kill off an extra in one of your scripts, the actor playing the extra eventually walks off the set and goes to get lunch. But where we are, that person stays dead. And people are killed off in just about every episode.”
    “Well, not every episode,” Weinstein said.
    “Jimmy,” Dahl said.
    “ Chronicles of the Intrepid has aired one hundred twenty-eight episodes over six seasons to date,” Hanson said. “One or more Intrepid crew members have died in ninety-six of those episodes. One hundred twelve episodes have death portrayed in one way or another. You’ve killed at least four hundred Intrepid crew members overall in the course of the series, and when you add in episodes where you’ve had other ships destroyed or planets attacked or suffering from diseases, your total death count reaches into the millions.”
    “Not counting enemy deaths,” Dahl said.
    “No, those would bump up the figure incrementally,” Hanson said.
    “He’s read up a lot on the show,” Dahl said to Weinstein, about Hanson.
    “All of those deaths aren’t my fault,” Weinstein said.
    “You wrote them,” Duvall said.
    “I didn’t write all of them,” Weinstein said. “There are other writers on staff.”
    “You’re the head writer,” Hester said. “Everything in the scripts goes through you for approval.”
    “The point is not to pin these deaths on you,” Dahl said, cutting in. “You couldn’t have known. From your point of view you’re writing fiction. From our point of view, though, it’s real.”
    “How does that even work?” Weinstein said. “How does what we write here affect your reality? That doesn’t make any sense.”
    Hester snorted. “Welcome to our lives,” he said.
    “What do you mean?” Weinstein said, turning his attention to Hester.
    “Do you think our lives make any sense at all?” Hester said. “You’ve got us living in a universe where there are killer robots with harpoons walking around a space station, because, sure, it makes perfect sense to have harpoon-launching killer robots.”
    “Or ice sharks,” Duvall said.
    “Or Borgovian Land Worms,” Hanson said.
    Weinstein held up a finger. “I was not responsible for those land worms,” he said. “I was out for two weeks with bird flu. The writer who did that script loved Dune . By the time I got back, it was too late. The Herbert estate flayed us for those.”
    “We dove into a black hole to get here,” Hester said, and jerked a thumb at Kerensky. “And we made sure to kidnap this sad bastard to make sure it would work, because he’s a main character on your show and won’t die offscreen. Think about that—physics alters around him .”
    “Not that it keeps me from having the crap beaten out of me on a regular basis,” Kerensky said. “I used to wonder why bad things kept happening to me. Now I know it’s because at least one of your main characters has to be made to suffer. That just sucks.”
    “You even make him heal super quickly so you can beat him up again,” Duvall said. “Which now that I think about it seems cruel.”
    “And there’s the Box,” Hanson said, motioning to Dahl.
    “The Box?” Weinstein said, looking at Dahl.
    “Whenever you write bad science into the show, the way it gets resolved is that we feed the problem into the Box, and then when it’s dramatically appropriate it spits out an answer,” Dahl said.
    “We never wrote a Box into the series,” Weinstein said, confused.
    “But you do write bad science into the series,” Dahl said. “All the time. So there’s a Box.”
    “Did they teach you science in school?” Hester asked. “I’m just wondering.”
    “I went to Occidental College,” Weinstein said. “It has really good science classes.”
    “Yeah, but did you go to any?” Duvall said. “Because I have to tell you, our universe is a mess.”
    “Other science fiction shows had science advisers and consultants,” Hanson pointed out.
    “It’s science fiction, ” Weinstein said. “The second part of that phrase matters too.”
    “But you’re making it bad science fiction,” Hester said. “And we have to live in it.”
    “Guys,” Dahl said, interrupting everyone again. “Let’s try to stay on target here.”
    “What is the target?” Paulson asked. “You said you had an idea you wanted to talk about, and all I’m hearing so far is a bitch session at my head