Or maybe Captain Picard, realizing that going to an alert no longer inspired the appropriate level of urgency from his crew, increased the threshold of danger that constituted an alert in order to summon them less frequently. Or maybe the writers got more interested in exploring Picard’s sensitive, flute-playing side at the expense of alarm klaxons and battle stations. Maybe after Season 3, Starfleet started sending the Enterprise on less dangerous missons in safer parts of the galaxy. I can only speculate as to the reasons behind these trends. From there, Seasons 4-6 saw a steady decrease in episodes with alerts, before the prevalence of alerts spiked in Season 7, the last season. It’s hard to discern any real trend in alerts across seasons from the data, but if there was one, it would go something like this: alerts dipped from Season 1 to Season 2, then jumped up in Season 3, which had the most episodes with an alert among all seasons.

So with this big picture breakdown in mind, let’s see how those alerts were distributed across the show’s seven seasons and if there were any trends in the prevalence of alerts: This may be more frequent than a typical naval vessel reaches its highest level of alert during an ostensible peacetime mission, but at least for me, it was less frequent than I was expecting, given the amount of peril I remembered the Enterprise encountering. To answer that question, we retuned the OTI tachyon beam to analyze transcripts of all 176 episodes, look for occurrences of the phrase “yellow alert” or “red alert,” and categorized each episode by the presence of one or both of these alerts.* It turns out that 61% of all episodes had no alert whatsoever, and that only 32% of all episodes made it all the way to red alert. Recently, in the Overthinking It writers’ back channel, we were asking ourselves the question: just how dangerous was it to serve on the Enterprise as depicted on Star Trek: The Next Generation? Weren’t they constantly under attack from Romulans, The Borg, and those nefarious space entities? Or was the Enterprise supposed to be more of a scientific, diplomatic vessel that happened to get into messes from time to time?

But at some point, the danger makes itself clear, and you have no choice but to signal this to everyone in the least ambiguous terms possible. Maybe it’s just an anomaly, or a derelict Bird of Prey, or a bad headache. You’re going about exploring the galaxy and performing diplomatic functions on behalf of the Federation when danger and uncertainty start to creep up.

Red alert sound effect