Hey, folks.
I know I said last time that this video would be about a Star Trek: Voyager-related topic,
but I’ve been doing some thinking since then and, well – you all know that Voyager
is my least favorite Star Trek show.
And besides, last night I was watching an episode of Deep Space Nine and I got the best
idea for another--
Forget it, Kathryn, my mind is made up, I’m not--
What are you doing?
Is that supposed to--
No!
Captain!
Don’t do this!
Not Jean-Luc!
Don’t do him like you did Tuvix!
PLEEEEEEEEEEASE!
So, as promised today’s video will be about Star Trek: Voyager.
And since I usually give Voyager a hard time, I want to talk about one of the unsung heroes
of the show – a character so brave, so capable, so brilliant that, on the basis of his accomplishments
alone, he deserves to be hailed as one of Starfleet’s true legends.
I’m talking, of course, about the guy who drives the ship.
Let me expound on some of the reasons I think he deserves such accolades in this video,
which I’m calling
Why Tom Paris Is Actually Starfleet’s #1 Badass
If you ask Star Trek fans to list the most badass characters in the franchise, you’ll
probably hear names like Worf, or Sisko, or Picard in the movies, who was basically Rambo
with an antique collection by that point.
Jadzia Dax didn’t lose too many fights and was a science badass to boot.
Odo was no one you wanted to mess with.
Neither was Tasha Yar, though she wasn’t around very long.
Of course there’s the original space cowboy, Captain James T. Kirk.
And let’s not forget Spock – he was usually pretty even tempered, but the dude had the
strength of an orangutan on PCP – would you want him smacking you around?
And, like Dax, Spock was a science badass.
Chances are, the name Tom Paris won’t be on that list.
But it should be.
Let’s take a look at the resume.
First and foremost, the guy has maybe the most diverse skill set of any major Star Trek
character ever – with the possible exception of Data, who was an android who could master
new skills at will – it’s not that easy for biological life-forms, DATA!
Tom is a great pilot – so great, in fact, that after they get lost in the Delta Quadrant
Captain Janeway appoints him to be Voyager’s primary conn officer even though he’s technically
not even a member of Starfleet at that point on account of being on a day pass from prison!
To be fair, one of the reasons Tom was in that prison in the first place was that he
made a piloting error, which got three officers killed, which resulted in him getting booted
from Starfleet, after which he joined the Maquis and got himself arrested and convicted
of treason, which is how he wound up doing hard time in a penal colony on the coast of
beautiful New Zealand – that’ll teach him!
Anyway, that easily forgotten detail of his backstory is apparently the only piloting
error Tom ever makes, so yeah, he’s pretty good at flying things.
And that’s not all!
He’s also shown to be proficient at designing and building spacecraft.
He creates the Delta Flyer more or less from scratch – yes, I know, B’Elanna and Harry
and Seven helped, too – and Tuvok, I guess, though all Tuvok does is veto the sweet tail
fins – but it’s obviously Tom’s baby.
And not only does he build one Delta Flyer – when that one is destroyed, he just builds
another one off-camera to replace it, no big deal.
Speaking of things that are no big deal, a few years before building the Delta Flyer,
Paris modifies a standard shuttle and then all he does is, he uses it to fly warp ten.
My dedicated Star Trek nerds will immediately grasp the significance of that, but just in
case anyone else is watching: warp 10 is like the Star Trek equivalent of the speed of light.
According to our current understanding of physics, nothing can travel faster than the
speed of light.
But in Star Trek, ships travel faster than light all the time thanks to the invention
of warp drive.
The writers of Star Trek: The Next Generation wanted to establish an upper speed limit for
warp-capable ships, so they came up with warp 10 as the unattainable maximum speed.
And in an episode of Voyager – the infamous “Threshold” – Tom Paris retrofits the
class 2 shuttlecraft Cochrane with a multispectral subspace quantum transwarp infinite improbability
drive, and breaks the warp 10 barrier, attaining the unattainable speed, by the end of the
first act.
And the less said about the rest of the episode, the better.
Tom was also hard to beat when it came to combat.
Remember in the two-parter “Basics” that served was the second season finale and the
third season premiere when Tom escapes Voyager in a shuttle as Kazon were taking it over,
then takes a quick break from repairing the shuttle to destroy the Kazon ship that’s
chasing him, then persuades the Talaxians to help him re-capture Voyager, then sends
a secret message to the Doctor who was still aboard Voyager with instructions for how to
overload the phasers so Tom can easily disable the ship when he gets there, then retakes
control the ship, repairs it, and rescues the stranded crew?
And sure, he doesn’t do all of that by himself – The Doctor and the Talaxians help a little,
and Ensign Suder sacrifices himself carrying out the plan to overload the phasers – but
none of it happens without Paris.
He is the mastermind of the whole operation, he saves the ship and crew, and he makes it
look easy.
Tom has other, less obviously useful skills, as well.
For example, he is an enthusiastic and prolific creator of holodeck programs, including Sandrine’s
bar, where the crew is seen hanging out during their off-hours in the show’s early seasons;
Captain Proton; Fair Haven; and the smart-ass rewrite of The Doctor’s “Photons Be Free”
holonovel.
In fact, Tom is so good at writing holoprograms that he starts writing them full-time after
Voyager makes it home – at the crew reunion at the beginning of the series finale, Tom
is depicted as a successful holonovelist, happily retired from Starfleet, though that
particular development would have been a better fit for The Doctor, whose writing of a holonovel
was the sole basis for an entire episode, and it doesn’t matter anyway because Janeway
went back in time and erased that future because it’s Star Trek and that option is always
on the table and she thinks she’s God or something, I guess –
– I mean, imagine the hubris of using time travel to erase reality because you think
things should have turned out better!
Who the hell does she think – . . . Well, maybe that subject would be better addressed
in its own video.
But I digress.
My point is, Tom is good at pretty much everything we ever see him do – piloting, fighting,
engineering, designing and constructing spacecraft – okay, he wasn’t the ideal medic to assist
the Doctor, but Tom admitted that, and hey, isn’t knowing one’s own limitations an
important skill in and of itself?
Dirty Harry certainly seemed to think so.
And who am I to argue with Dirty Harry?
Tom is so absurdly competent in such a diverse variety of fields that if he was a woman people
would have complained that he was a Mary Sue.
Ain’t I tellin’ the truth?
In fact, Tom is such a peerless badass that the only argument against his overwhelming,
untouchable badassery I can come up with is that his blinding awesomeness is the probably
mostly accidental product of –
(It says "Bad Writing".)
Or more specifically, lazy writing.
See, the writers of Voyager never seemed to pay too much attention to developing their
characters in consistent, meaningful ways.
In fact, most of the main cast – including Tom – finished the series more or less exactly
the same people they were when they started.
True, Tom and B’Elanna eventually get married – off-camera – but when two characters
are randomly paired off into a romance with each other, that’s the dramatic equivalent
of two singles wrestlers being abruptly made into a tag team.
It’s creative’s way of saying, “We don’t know what else to do with ‘em, so let’s
try this!”
The members of the crew of Voyager are lost together in the Delta Quadrant for seven years,
cut off from their friends, family, and the rest of Starfleet, surrounded by uncharted
space and strange, hostile aliens, but generally speaking the experience doesn’t change them
at all.
And no, Harry inexplicably switching from the clarinet to the saxophone – does not
count as character development.
Yeah, you ever get an angry Janeway in your monitor, just cover it with a cloth and keep
quiet for a few minutes.
She’ll lose interest and leave on her own.
Instead of developing its characters throughout the course of its run, Voyager tended to assign
characteristics based on what was required for a given episode.
So when they needed someone to explain the 1936 Ford Truck they just found floating in
space to the rest of the crew, guess what?
Antique cars are one of Tom’s hobbies!
When they wanted to do a Hiroshima episode, oh, by the way, Neelix witnessed the horrifying
aftermath of a weapon of mass destruction being deployed on a populated moon of his
home planet!
When they wanted to do a boxing episode – hey, we forgot to mention it before, but Chakotay
boxed when he was younger – and guess what else?
Boothby was his trainer!
Yeah, that Boothby, the groundskeeper at Starfleet Academy who was Captain Picard’s mentor,
because we’re really bad at creating our own memorable recurring characters.
After seven years of this, each of the members of Voyager’s cast wound up with an eclectic
collection of character traits, skills, and bits of backstory that were extremely important
for one episode and then rarely if ever even mentioned again.
There were exceptions to this – the Doctor’s characterization proceeded in fits and starts,
but he did manage to grow a little bit from the start of the series to the end; and Seven
of Nine’s character development was actually handled fairly well for the most part, right
up until they decided to have her fall in love with Chakotay with like five minutes
left in the series.
But generally speaking, haphazard, quickly forgotten characterizations were the rule
on Voyager.
That’s how we wind up with a character like Tom Paris: a brilliant pilot; a courageous
and resourceful fighter who heroically saves the lives of his shipmates on numerous occasions;
a genius who has mastered advanced warp theory, starship design and construction, and holoprogramming;
an amateur historian with a vast well of knowledge of Earth history that frequently proves very
useful; and oh yeah, a pioneer whose name deserves to be spoken alongside those of the
greatest scientists and explorers who ever lived, who broke the warp 10 barrier in a
shuttlecraft he modified in his spare time.
And despite all those accomplishments, he’s still the guy who drives the ship.
So yes, judged on the sum total of his achievements and demonstrated skills, Tom Paris is actually
Starfleet’s all-time #1 badass – but only because he’s a character on such a shabbily
scripted show – so shabbily scripted a show, in fact, that they made unresolved daddy issues
a fairly consistent part of Tom’s character, introduced his father, Admiral Owen Paris,
as a recurring character about halfway through the second-to-last season, then ended the
series without Tom and his father having a single scene together!
I mean, they introduce Admiral Paris as the officer in charge of the Pathfinder project,
which is dedicated to establishing communications between Voyager and the Delta Quadrant, they
show us that Admiral Paris keeps a photo of Tom on his desk, and the series ends without
them even having a single on-screen conversation!
Admiral Paris didn’t have to be the guy in charge of the Pathfinder project!
That could have been anyone!
Why introduce that character at all unless you’re setting up some kind of resolution
involving him and his son?!
Was there no one at any point during the production of the series’ final episodes who raised
their hand and said, “Uh, we’re not gonna forget to tie up the story with Tom and his
father, right?”
Admiral Paris hails the ship when Voyager makes it back to the Alpha Quadrant in the
final moments of the last episode.
He’s on the viewscreen, for Christ’s sake!
And Tom’s right there!
Did nobody think any kind of meaningful exchange was in order at that point?
“Welcome home, Son?”
“Hi, Dad?”
Something?!
Were the producers even watching their own show at this point?
Who wrote this sh–