Star Trek: 10 Things You Didn’t Know About Tom Paris

3. Let's Talk Turkey (Platter)

No doubt the biggest romances in Star Trek are bromances — Kirk and Spock, Data and Geordi, O'Brien and Bashir, Malcolm and Mr Tucker, and, of course, Tom and Harry. Most of those larger-than-life friendships have extended into real life, too. As Robert Duncan McNeill told Gizmodo in 2010,

Garrett [Wang] and I worked the first scene of the show together, and we immediately bonded. He was a young actor, and in a few ways I was a few years older. I was taking Garrett under my wing in the same way that Tom was taking Harry under his wing.

It was also Harry who gave Tom the one-time nickname 'Turkey Platter'. Well, he couldn't let Maxwell Burke have all the food puns!

Of romances, Paris and BLT's was one of the most well-developed put to Trek — never linear, never smooth, but always returning twice as strong after any subspace turbulence along the road. We've largely covered the genesis of the pair's relationship in our article '10 Things You Didn't Know About B'Elanna Torres'.

Speaking frankly to Gizmodo once more, McNeill noted that, at first, he didn't think the Tom-B'Elanna romance was a "good idea". He was concerned that such a coupling might limit the characters, preventing them from "exploring different opportunities and different stories". In time, both he and Roxann Dawson relished the chance to explore a relationship that, in McNeill's words, "expanded [the] world of Voyager". Of course, that's not accounting for a sentient computer program of a ship found in a junkyard. Who the f**k is Alice?