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why did they not name tom paris nick locarno?

Kai Winn

Kai Winn

Captain
Captain
because years before voyager, a younger mcneill portrayed a nick locarno in the tng episode 'the first duty'. locarno was the leader of wesley crusher's nova squad at the academy, a hot-shot pilot who didn't care too much about regulations. got himself expelled from the academy when a banned flight maneuvre ended with the dead of another cadet. would have made sense to stick to locarno.

Locarno.jpg
 
Some possible explanations to that can be found on the page "Voyager Mysteries and how to solve them" at: http://lynx677.110mb.com/Voyagermysteries.html :techman:

Otherwise there arre two explanations. One explanation is that if they had used the name Nick Locarno, they would have to pay a nice sum of money to the one who came up with the character Nick Locarno in "The First Duty" everytime Locarno did show up in a Voyager episode. However, I do think that it could have been solved in some way.

The other, more realistic explanation is that they were actually going for the option of Nick Locarno as one of the Voyager crew members but after a while they realized that the character, as he was presented in "The First Duty" was too unsympathetic and his crime too severe to become a main character n the series. So they rewrote his background story slightly and named him Tom Paris instead to make the character more acceptable and likeable.

Personally I think that they should have come up with a more different background story for Paris. The accident thing was too cloes to the Locarno story. They should have settled with him only joining the Maquis, thus disgracing his father and Starfleet or whatever.
 
Cop outs in recreating the same character all over again aside, I understand that Robbie showed up to the Tom Paris audition without an invitation from the powers that be and still had to beat down competition for the roll.

Locarno would have been excellent because that would have made a Will Weaton episode unaviodable, not that it shouldn't have been anyway since he was a pangalacticteleporting demigod by the time Voyager was lost in the badlands.
 
IIRC they wanted a Nick Locarno "type" for the role and auditioned lots for it, but none could hit it the way RDM could, so they went with him anyway. (Same thing happened with Julee Cruise for the Twin Peaks soundtrack).
 
They didn't want to pay the royalties every episode to Locarno's creators. It's the same reason we never saw a lot of TOS Aliens in TNG+ like the Tholians.
 
But they adamantly deny that Anwar.

They're fibbing, but still they're adamant.

A further excuse TPTB unloaded on the public was that Nick was irredeemable. Because of the horrible things Nick did, no one could ever forgive him, so they had to make a half mast Locarno character that was a little bad but not so bad that he could never be forgiven.

Forgiven by homicidal terrorists and decent citizens who forgive homicidal terrorists?

The Powers that be, their Kung Fu is weak.

You know what episode they should have brought up Nick Locarno?

(Nick was in an episode. Owen had a picture of Nick from the the first Duty in his room/office and we were supposed to assume that it was Tom, but I'm more thinking "parent trap".)

The Voyager Conspiracy.
 
I never quite understood what TPTB were trying to get by with the 'Paris was more redeemable' argument. If anything, his crimes were more atrocious than Locarno's, at least with the Maquis stint added on.

Only difference is that Paris had conscience enough to eventually own up...but then again, he was a little older and mature, Locarno was just a punk kid.

And yeah, the Wesley crossover potential was sadly wasted.
 
Rick Berman didn't want to give Ron Moore and Naren Shankar creator credits and/or money, because Rick Berman is a smart man when it comes to money. This is the true basis for Ron Moore's vendetta against Rick Berman, and this is why Rick Berman has security at his mansion 24/7. Well, that and Nemesis.

They were planning to use Ensign Ro in the place of Major Kira on DS9 presumably because Michael Piller and Rick Berman were responsible for creating her character in TNG so they wouldn't have had to pay anyone extra.
 
There's probably a sliding scale but how much does any given character kinda cost?

How much did Worf cost them every week on DS9?

When they finally put T'Pau from TOS in Enterprise in season 4, how did that cost compared to the original cost of not renaming t'pau into this "T'Pol" person every one was strumming over a few years back.

I also think that they Punk'd us in Concerning Flight by not having John Rhys davies playing the immortal Flint from TOS requiem for Methusela.
 
Worf didn't cost them anything because he was in enough episodes to belong to the show and not an individual writer.

T'Pau was only in 3 or 4 episodes so they were willing to pay for her that one time. Much less than every episode.
 
Nick Locarno seemed arogant and beyond redempion. Paris seemed genuinly sorry and was redempalbe for what had happened. Sometimes they say as for every person on the planet there's someone who looks similar. It may be possible that this was the case even though they are both played by the same actor, plus to casual viewers who don't follow the shows on a regular basis they wouldn't know. I think Tom Paris was more likealbe then Nick Locarno. Plus even in the end Tom's dad even forgave him. I don't see Nick Lorcano parents forgiveing him.
 
but if we watch Non Sequitor, we see that Tom wasn't sorry, he was acting out daddy issues. He didn't want to apologise, what he wanted was to embarrass his father and more importantly not to be a cookie cut replicant of the oldman and his square ideals.

If you take this into account...

There's a small probability that Tom didn't do anything wrong, and that that shuttle accident was just a shuttle accident, but also an opportunity to get out from under daddy's thumb and/or a desperate cry for attention from a lad raised by a father who didn't know how to communicate with his boy.

It was all there for a writer with half a brain to pick up on and carry through.

Actually, daddy issues, if Janeway was Owens most favourite child, as was alluded in the pilot, although I've also argued once or twice that Janeway and Owen used to do it, should have propelled him into a relationship with Janeway either to tarnish Owen's opinion of her in his fatherly eyes that she would settle for such a low life, or embiggin his own q rating, or to plough land that Owen either only wished furtively about in his youth, or Paris just wanted to squeese those magic words out her "You're a much better lover than your father."

Which beggars the question? How married was Own Paris when he took his junior Science officer under his wing?

Reverse the genders and this was a couple episodes of Seaquest DSV I saw as a boy.
 
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Lynx said:
Some possible explanations to that can be found on the page "Voyager Mysteries and how to solve them" at: http://lynx677.110mb.com/Voyagermysteries.html :techman:

Otherwise there arre two explanations. One explanation is that if they had used the name Nick Locarno, they would have to pay a nice sum of money to the one who came up with the character Nick Locarno in "The First Duty" everytime Locarno did show up in a Voyager episode. However, I do think that it could have been solved in some way.

The other, more realistic explanation is that they were actually going for the option of Nick Locarno as one of the Voyager crew members but after a while they realized that the character, as he was presented in "The First Duty" was too unsympathetic and his crime too severe to become a main character n the series. So they rewrote his background story slightly and named him Tom Paris instead to make the character more acceptable and likeable.

Personally I think that they should have come up with a more different background story for Paris. The accident thing was too cloes to the Locarno story. They should have settled with him only joining the Maquis, thus disgracing his father and Starfleet or whatever.
Click to expand...
Good points, Lynx. There is an awfully close comparison, but, eh, I could live with it....it'd hardly be the greates contradiction in Trek. And I still liked the angst it created for Robbie to play in Tom, as part of his own backstory, the rebel with a real cause, and a Family to fight for.
 
Of course, we can always argue that Paris is Locarno - and that enrolling at Starfleet Academy under a false name was one of his more harebrained schemes for getting back at his father.

Timo Saloniemi
 
Timo said:
Of course, we can always argue that Paris is Locarno - and that enrolling at Starfleet Academy under a false name was one of his more harebrained schemes for getting back at his father.

Timo Saloniemi
Click to expand...

You can get near identical cousins, or an illegitimate half brother.

Harder to explain Tuvok and his Generations Human being at the academy together though :D
 
Timo said:
Of course, we can always argue that Paris is Locarno - and that enrolling at Starfleet Academy under a false name was one of his more harebrained schemes for getting back at his father.

Timo Saloniemi
Click to expand...
I agree this is the most satisfying solution. It doesn't has to be a false name even. He could have used his middle name (never revealed on screen) and his mother's last name during Academy, for example, to distance himself from his father's legacy.

Thomas Nicholas Paris-Locarno has a nice ring to it. ;)
 
^^
I hate to destroy that scenario but wasn't his middle name Eugene? I think it was revealed in "Caretaker".
 
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