[crabapple]

Y'see, here, what ya need is "Red Shirts."

You probably know what those are. "Red Shirts" are the guys on Star Trek who show up at the beginning and get briefly introduced, only to be killed sometime early in the episode. They generally get the Green Weenie shortly after an away team beams down to the planet to investigate.

They aren't really characters, they are pseudo-characters who are there to illustrate that the conflict is serious, and they are killed so that major characters don't need to be killed.

Quite often on the original Star Trek series, these characters wore red shirts, and after a while fans started noticing that newly-introduced characters in red uniforms were likely to get offed.