I love this post.
It’s amazing how they made a different character for purely narrative reasons alone, and the fact that the characters are legally distinct so that the writers of that episode don’t get royalties for the entire run of Voyager is just a big wacky coincidence. Funny how that works out.
the characters are legally distinct so that the writers of that episode don’t get royalties for the entire run of Voyager
This is a very common claim, but I find it very dubious. You never hear about this sort of contract in American television. I don’t think anyone made a lot of bank when Chief O’Brien joined DS9.
Kirsten Beyer actually is on the record saying that this was confirmed to her when she was writing the Voyager Full Circle novels.
In those books, she has the incident and the consequences as part of Paris’ backstory that gets thrown in his face in a legal proceeding back on Earth.
My recollection is that she printed this in an author’s note in the specific book so it must have had legal clearance for the tie-in literature.
arnt fan novels mostly non-canon,
It’s not a fan novel.
The Full Circle Voyager series is official tie-in fiction published by Pocketbooks and CBS. Official tie-in fiction is beta-canon. That is, canon until overwritten by something onscreen.
The key thing in this is that the tie-in writer for this series Kirsten Beyer has significant credibility and authority within the franchise. Her research and statements on the legal situation around this are credible and official.
Kirsten Beyer was in the middle of writing the Voyager books when she joined the television writers as of the first season of Discovery. She’s officially got the mandate as the expert keeper of canon in the writers room — even if she’s not always listened too. More, she was made the liaison for the tie-in writers to the shows as of 2017. She’s now a CoExecutive Producer and cocreator of SNW.
When that book was published, and she chased down the history on Locarno/Paris, she had the greatest access to past Executive Producers and internal legal advice and archives. She wouldn’t have claimed that without solid evidence.
I find that absolutely fascinating if it’s somehow true - I would assume that anything written for Trek, like any other major franchise, is strictly “work for hire” and the individual authors have no rights to their work. It’s hard to imagine it any other way.
Not disputing that she said it, I just truly don’t understand it.
I suspect that it had to do with the WGA contract at the time that TNG was in production.
Writers with a script credit got specific residuals for characters they created in a script according to what Beyer wrote. So, taking a one-off character and putting them in a main cast role in a new show would be providing creator credits for the entire show.
Chief Miles O’Brien is a different story altogether. Colm Meany was originally contracted as a background regular as the transporter chief but without a name. These kind of roles are reliable and keep actors eating while allowing them to audition for other roles.
According to what I heard at a Creation Con panel back in the early 90s, the showrunners eventually decided to give the character a name. Colm Meany wasn’t advised, nor was his agent — so Meany actually was raising a complaint that he was being replaced without notice, only to find out he’d been upgraded to a named part.
Yeah, the official story is that Locarno was too fucked up for audiences to forgive. Jeri Taylor said:
“We had liked the idea of a character like Tom Paris ever since we had done “First Duty” and had Lecarno [sic.]. We didn’t make Lecarno the con officer, because he was somewhat darker and more damaged. We felt Lecarno couldn’t be redeemed and we wanted to be on a journey of redemption.”
Personally, I think Locarno would have been a great choice, because while I like Tom Paris just fine, Voyager utterly failed at selling the idea that he was in need of redemption or a “bad boy” of any kind.
I agree, Locarno at the con would have significantly upped the ante for Voyager. We did see a hint of it in the pilot when Janeway bails Paris out of the penal camp, but the over the course of the first season they pretty much shrugged it off and he is such a Milquetoast character for most of the show.
Yes! As with many things Voyager, it set up a good premise only to move on from it an episode or two later.
Four words, “The year of hell”. It was 90 minutes and immediately reset by the end of part 2…
And yet if someone tried to make a space show about a Starship stranded far from Earth with a Captain Marystreet who loves coffee, the lawsuit would be epic.
Ego the size of a planet on that kid. Must have impressed the Admiral.
Every time you hear the name “Nick Locarno”, it’s because Admiral Paris’ staff (so that he could claim plausible deniability) have used illegally obtained temporal technology (via Section 31) to “dub” that name over any mention of Tom Paris. Unfortunately, the device required so much power, it overloaded after one of the ST TNG transmissions, and could not be sustained for any of Tom’s admissions (visual or verbal) in the Voyager transmissions (likely due to being outside of the signal radius). :-P /s
i would honestly have bought them saying that Nick Locarno is a pseudonym he used at the academy to not be known as an admiral’s son. like Mariner not going by Freeman in the show that ironically now makes this impossible
Oh, you mean Nicholas Thomas Locarno-Paris?
