Redshirts - reading

Finished "Redshirts" by John Scalzi. This is the first book from Scalzi I've read. I went in knowing about Redshirts from Star Trek, and at the beginning, I had two possibilities in mind for how he might handle it. On the one hand, the Redshirts could behave like Redshirts in their own reality and deal with it in a way that is appropriate to a character. I think I would have liked that version more. On the other hand, they could have been written in a more meta way, the way Scalzi wrote them, which I felt was perhaps not as creative or engaging. Then throw in the codas at the end, and the fact that my exposure to Scalzi's writing comes primarily from his blog, and I came away thinking the book was on the lazy side, writing-wise. Yes, I'm aware that Scalzi has far more books written and published and loved than I do. But here we are anyway.