Star Trek: 10 Things You Didn’t Know About Harry Kim

Completed by Michael Piller at the end of September 1993, the very first draft of the Star Trek: Voyager series bible gave the following:

OPS/COMMUNICATION: JAY OSAKA. SF, young human male.

A name change would have to wait until February 1994, but that was the first glimpse of the character Harry Kim.

In an even later version of the series bible, exact date unknown, "HARRY KIM" is described in much the same way as we would know him in the beginning: an academically brilliant individual, with loving, if slightly overbearing, parents; thoroughly likeable and professionally diligent, but inexperienced, with "some growing up to do".

"When I first came on board Voyager, I was pretty green, right?" Harry then admitted down the road in Demon. "A deep, almost fluorescent green," replied "good buddy" Tom. In the episode, Harry had found a new, no-Vulcan-nonsense, confidence that was more than earned. In barely four years, the still-Ensign had done more than most Starfleet officers. He'd "fought the Borg," "been transformed into an alien," "helped defeat the Hirogen," and, as we know, "even come back from the dead".

It was the third element on that list that helped convince writer-producers Joe Menosky and Brannon Braga that Kim was the one to lead the one hundredth, and standout, episode of Star Trek: Voyager, Timeless. Speaking in Cinefantastique, vol. 31, no. 11, Menosky conceded that,

A year ago, Brannon and I were as down on Kim's character as any character. […] Kim just never did it for us. If someone would have said to me, 'The hundredth episode, next season, is going to feature Garrett and Ensign Kim,' I just would have laughed. It was just inconceivable.

The Killing Game changed their minds, however. The two-parter had come up short, and without the possibility to add to the World War II sequences, writers were left with a missing few minutes and only one senior officer not already part of the holodeck scenario(s) — Ensign Kim.

In the new scenes written, Harry was forced to work under the brutal (and large) thumb of the Hirogen, but he also proved "rebellious" against his predatory overlords. "It was a tough side to him that we had never seen before, and we really liked," Menosky went on to note in Cinefantastique. It was this "edgy" version of Kim from The Killing Game that became the direct inspiration for the out-and-out temporal lawbreaker Kim in Timeless. Harry had (quite literally) lost his "squeaky clean" image. Jay was walking.