It’s really no secret, Robert Duncan McNeill’s character on Voyager is directly tied to his appearance as Cadet Nicholas Locarno on The Next Generation’s “The First Duty” Season 5, Episode 19. The premise of the episode is that Starfleet Cadet, Wesley Crusher is involved in an accident that claimed one of his fellow cadet’s lives when their squadron decided to go against Starfleet rules and attempt a banned formation in flight school. The squad’s leader, Cadet Nicholas Locarno is the one behind all this, and after the loss of a fellow cadet, Nick instructs his team to lie to the inquiry panel to save their own tails and put all the blame on their deceased friend.
Wesley, having the generally good moral compass he does, isn’t keen on lying to the panel of Starfleet Admirals, however he is also pressured by Locarno into believing that the team must stick together. It’s not until Captain Picard figures out what the squad was attempting, and threatens to out the cadets to the inquiry panel, that Wesley ultimately does come clean about the whole ordeal. In the final scene of the episode, we’re told that Locarno ended up taking all the blame for the incident and the brunt of the punishment as he continues to believe that the team comes first…before the truth.
That episode first aired March 30, 1992, almost a full 3 years before the launch of the Voyager series, as “Caretaker, pt 1” first aired January 16, 1995…clearly, production saw something they liked in McNeill’s acting during that episode since they cast him as Thomas Eugene Paris just a short time after on the new series. However, due to the Locarno character being created by a writer for only that one episode of The Next Generation, if Voyager were to use & expand on that character, they would owe that writer royalties for the use of that character for every episode in which he appeared. Considering he was going to be a main cast member on the new series, a new name with a slightly tweaked backstory needed to be created.
But let’s not kid ourselves here, there’s so many ties back to “The First Duty” that they left in that it’s clear who exactly Tom Paris was intended to be. When we first meet Tom, he’s being held in a Starfleet Penal Colony down in New Zealand and is being called upon by Captain Janeway to help hunt down some of his former Maquis colleagues in the Badlands. Paris reports to Deep Space Nine to be an “observer” on the mission, which he’s unhappy about not being tabbed to be the helmsman because, as he puts it, “Observer’?! Oh, hell. I’m the best pilot you could have!” …harkening back to Nick’s lofty belief & expectations in Nova Squad being able to pull off the banned Kolvoord Starburst maneuver.
After saving Ensign Harry Kim some latinum when Quark was trying to swindle him on a deal for some Lobi Crystals, Harry believes he’s found himself a friend. However, after meeting up with a few senior officers, he’s brought up to speed on “Tom’s” past and questions him on it. Tom’s reply, “Was the accident my fault? Yes. Pilot error. But it took me a while to admit it….I’ll tell you the truth, Harry. All I had to do was keep my mouth shut and I was home free. But I couldn’t. The ghosts of those three dead officers came to me in the middle of the night and taught me the true meaning of Christmas. So I confessed. Worst mistake I ever made but not my last. After they cashiered me out of Starfleet, I went out looking for a fight and found the Maquis. And on my first assignment, I was caught.” So he’s falsifying information and instead of it being just a singular dead cadet, it’s three officers, but really…it’s largely the same story.
Once stranded in the Delta Quadrant, the redemption of Tom Paris begins. He is awarded a field commission rank of Lieutenant Junior Grade and is made the helmsman of the USS Voyager due to the personnel losses Voyager took while being pulled to the Delta Quadrant. He’s also assigned to be the ship’s field medic (because of his two semesters of biochemistry he had taken at the Academy) since the ship’s new Chief Medical Officer is the Emergency Medical Holographic System and is restricted to existence within the walls of Sickbay.
Tom begins making a name for himself onboard Voyager while palling around with Harry Kim. Early on, he’s quite interested in the women onboard Voyager, as he’s constantly trying to get a double date for him & Harry with the Delaney Sisters — it’s understandable since he’s portrayed to be in his mid-20s & marooned some 70 thousand lightyears from home. Essentially, the crew of Voyager would logically be his only options for mates.
As such, he does settle down and marries Voyager’s Chief Engineer, Lieutenant B’Elanna Torres, the half Human/half Klingon former member of the Maquis. By the end of their trip back to the Alpha Quadrant, Tom becomes a father in the final episode of the series. However, that’s just his love life. Let’s look at a few other areas in which Tom grows during the 7-year arc of the show.
Tom also manages to settle in better with his fellow crewmates once he’s made a member of the senior staff. During numerous meetings in the conference room, Tom often is shown offering insights on how they should attempt to tackle the weekly predicaments the ship finds itself in. Many times, his suggestions are well received by Captain Janeway and help to lead to the solution. And though he might not click so well with Commander Chakotay as the two of them have some history from Tom’s brief stint with the Maquis, this is exploited in a successful attempt to expose Crewman Michael Jonas as a spy onboard Voyager who was leaking important information to Seska after she had defected to join the Kazon-Nistrim.
Tom’s technical know-how and piloting expertise come into play in a few episodes as well. First, he becomes the first Human to cross the Warp-10 threshold, which ultimately took us down a road in which he fathered some salamander babies with Captain Janeway — a storyline never once mentioned after the fact. Tom also decides to take on a personal task to salvage and restore a shuttlecraft found in a debris field that he names Alice. He does a great job restoring the ship in his spare time, which he finds out has a neurogenic interface…however, ultimately it takes control of his decision-making abilities and forces him to take vital components from Voyager to complete the rebuild.
Tom’s also an excellent holographic novel creator. During his time on Voyager, Tom created a number of environments in the holodeck, most notably: Sandrine’s, the Captain Proton series and Fair Haven. Sandrine’s was based off a real life wharf-side bar that Tom had frequented in Marseille, France. The Captain Proton series was a classic 1930s era black and white sci-fi series starring Captain Proton (Tom) and his sidekick, Buster Kincaid (Harry) with their main antagonist as Doctor Chaotica, who was always plotting the destruction of Earth. While Fair Haven was a small seaside town based in 19th century Ireland. Almost every member of Voyager’s crew partook in the environment, each taking on a persona from that era.
And finally, the crew of Voyager had come to the conclusion that for a number of away missions, the standard-issue shuttles that Voyager had been outfitted with just didn’t cut the mustard in the Delta Quadrant. For these reasons, Tom Paris in a collaboration with Seven of Nine, Tuvok, Harry Kim and B’Elanna Torres were tasked to design a new spacecraft from scratch that would be suitable for said usage. They created the Delta Flyer: a ship that was larger than a shuttlecraft, but smaller than a Danube runabout. It was specifically designed to be able to handle the harsh environments they had found in the Delta Quadrant. With a mix of Starfleet and Borg technologies, this new craft was everything they had been missing along their journey home.
As had become his demeaner from his history as Nicholas Locarno, Tom started off the series being quite self-centered, but as the series progressed, we start to see Tom’s empathy for others and their surroundings. There’s an excellent Tom-centric episode titled “Thirty Days”, Season 5, Episode 9, in which Tom has to serve 30 days in Voyager’s brig because he went against direct orders from Captain Janeway to fight for something he believed.
As Voyager continued on their way home, they came across a planet that was all water, inhabited by a species called the Monean. The Monean had made their home beneath the surface of this all-liquid planet and farmed underwater vegetation and extracted oxygen from the water. However, as they find out, unbeknownst to the Moean, the planet has been slowly losing it’s cohesion due to these practices and if they continued to to do so, the planet would eventually cease to exist. Tom felt so strongly about preserving the ocean planet that he steals the Delta Flyer and intends to damage the oxygen refineries so that when the Monean attempt to repair them, they likely would do so and make them safer for the planet as well. Ultimately, Paris is unsuccessful on this quest, is reduced in rank to Ensign, and is forced to spend 30 days in Voyager’s brig…during which, he dictates the entire story in a letter to his father, Admiral Owen Paris at Starfleet Command. Throughout his telling of the story, you see that he was certainly not thinking of himself, but intending to not only help the planet, but also force the inhabitants to change their ways to preserve the ocean planet.
By the time we get to the final episode of Voyager, Tom Paris is a FAR cry from the Nick Locarno character he was originally based upon, which is why I largely view the 7-year series of Voyager as the redemption of his character.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this, I hope to expand on a Trekology series here in the coming months & years. Thanks for reading.
Trek on, fellow Trekkers! 🖖
Marcs Two Cents 
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