10 Amazing Behind The Scenes Secrets Of Star Trek: Voyager

I'll just clear this up once and for all. Despite what the show's producers have tried to claim in the years since, Robert McNeil was supposed to play his Next Generation character Nick Locarno in this show, not Tom Paris. The disgraced former cadet was to have fallen out of the academy and in with the Maquis, before finally winding up in a penal colony and admitting he'd lost his way.

From there he was to be recruited by Voyager to help pursue his former associates, embarking on a redemptive arc for both his crimes against the Federation and the death of his classmate in The Next Generation's episode The First Duty. That was the plan.

However (as has happened a number of times with guest characters) the legal rights to the script which birthed them weren't entirely the property of Paramount, meaning that reusing them would require the studio to pay the writer for every episode in which they featured. Despite some wrangling with TNG Science Consultant and episode co-writer Naren Shankar, the rights for Locarno couldn't be freed up, and they had to come up with a new character for the already-cast McNeil.

The fact that said new character was virtually identical in premise to Locarno is, well, none of my business.