Tom Paris
Tom Paris is a male television character who features in Star Trek.
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Biography
Thomas Eugene Paris was a male human born in the 24th century in the United Federation of Planets where he was the son of Starfleet Admiral Owen Paris. (VOY: Caretaker)
Growing up, Paris often felt inadequate, due to the pressure his father put on him to excel and feeling like a failure as a result. The alienation continued throughout his adulthood to the point where Tom would just ignore his father altogether, 'tuning out' to what he referred to as yet another 'holiday sermon' about the Prime Directive. (VOY: Time and Again) Throughout Tom's life and career at Starfleet, his father remained tough and remote, telling him, for instance, that crying was a sign of weakness. Crying, incidentally, was the one thing Tom recalled doing the most as a teenager. (VOY: Threshold) As a result, Paris and his father had a rather troubled relationship, and, at some point, Tom just wanted him out of his life. Despite this, Paris loved his bedroom back home, as he often locked himself away in there, not only to cry, but also to play games and listen to music. After it landed on his windowsill next to his bed, young Paris also fed a baby bird water with an eye dropper to keep it alive. (VOY: Parturition) Moreover, he lost his virginity in his bedroom at the age of seventeen, while his parents were away for the weekend. (VOY: Threshold)
Thomas Eugene Paris was serving time at a Federation Penal Settlement in New Zealand when he was approached by Captain Kathryn Janeway, who offered to temporarily release him to act as an expert navigational observer to help track down a missing Maquis rebel vessel in the Badlands. Thomas Eugene Paris accepted the assignment and traveled to Deep Space Nine, where he successfully intervened at Quark's Bar to prevent the naive, newly graduated Ensign Harry Kim from being swindled by a local Ferengi merchant. After boarding the newly commissioned starship USS Voyager, Thomas Eugene Paris braced for transit as the vessel entered the volatile plasma storms of the Badlands, only for the entire starship to be suddenly struck by a massive, anomalous displacement wave that violently flung Voyager seventy thousand light-years across the galaxy into the uncharted Delta Quadrant. Emerging from the catastrophic transit into an absolute mechanical crisis that left the ship's original bridge crew dead, Thomas Eugene Paris volunteered to assume the role of chief helmsman, expertly piloting the heavily damaged starship through unfamiliar celestial obstacles under the direct command of Captain Janeway. He accompanied a surface away team to explore a colossal, high-tech space station controlled by an enigmatic alien entity known as the Caretaker, discovering that the entity was systematically harvesting unique biological data from abducted species before its imminent demise. When the Caretaker's sudden death threatened to leave the station's massive energy arrays vulnerable to an aggressive local raider faction known as the Kazon-Ogla, Thomas Eugene Paris coordinated directly with the surviving Maquis rebels, who chose to sacrifice their own vessel to safeguard Voyager from destruction. Following the definitive destruction of the Caretaker's array to protect the native Ocampa race, Thomas Eugene Paris expertly steered Voyager away from the exploding station and into deep space, subsequently accepting a formal reinstatement into Starfleet with the rank of Lieutenant Junior Grade to serve as the permanent flight control officer for their long journey back to the Alpha Quadrant. (VOY: Caretaker)
Afterwards, he attended a senior staff briefing room meeting presided over by Captain Kathryn Janeway to address the critical resource, power, and personnel deficits currently plaguing the stranded starship USS Voyager. Because the ship's Emergency Medical Hologram was structurally restricted to the boundaries of the primary sickbay facility and entirely lacked proper assistant staff, Thomas Eugene Paris was forcefully selected by the Captain to train as an auxiliary field medic due to his previous background of completing two semesters of biochemistry training during his youth at Starfleet Academy. This professional briefing was violently interrupted when a massive, unexpected spatial distortion wave violently struck the starship, prompting Thomas Eugene Paris to rush directly back to the main bridge to monitor the navigation consoles. He tracked a weak sub-surface distress call originating from a nearby alien vessel that was completely trapped within the event horizon of a massive type-G quantum singularity. While attempting to execute an automated tractor beam rescue sequence, USS Voyager was pulled completely inside the spatial trap, forcing Thomas Eugene Paris to manually maneuver the starship through a chaotic temporal loop where the crew's visual viewscreen repeatedly projected real-time sensor echoes of their own vessel. He maintained his rigid focus at the helm controls while Captain Janeway and B'Elanna Torres utilized a specialized warp-particle pulse sequence to artificially dilate a localized subspace rift, enabling Thomas Eugene Paris to expertly steer the starship out of the gravitational anomaly and into open space without sustaining critical structural casualties. (VOY: Parallax)
Paris completed his standard bridge flight shift at the conn console, detailing their immediate trajectory past a localized red dwarf system to his second-shift replacement before proceeding directly to the operations console to pester Ensign Harry Kim. He aggressively attempted to persuade his junior companion to abandon a tedious transtator assembly diagnostic scan to join him on a premeditated double date down in stellar cartography alongside a pair of twin crew members known as the Delaney sisters. The casual interlude was abruptly shattered when a massive, high-yield polaric ion shockwave violently rocked USS Voyager, forcing the crew to trace the kinetic blast back to an M-class planet that had been completely transformed into a desolate, radiation-scorched wasteland. Thomas Eugene Paris joined a specialized planetary away team to investigate the ruins of a subterranean power complex, where his physical coordinates accidentally intersected with a highly volatile temporal fissure. The anomaly forcefully threw Thomas Eugene Paris and Captain Janeway exactly one day backward into the planet's historical past, dropping them directly into the middle of a highly tense political civilian crisis involving localized protests against the implementation of unstable polaric energy systems. He was promptly captured, disarmed of his standard phaser sidearm, and held hostage by a radical anti-polaric sabotage faction who plotted to bomb the central power station to halt the program. Working in absolute unison with Captain Janeway, Thomas Eugene Paris broke free from his cell and engaged the saboteurs in a direct physical melee across the facility's main generator grid, successfully preventing the terrorists' premature detonation device from initiating a terminal chain reaction and allowing USS Voyager's modern sensors to safely close the temporal rift to permanently overwrite the catastrophic timeline. (VOY: Time and Again)
Paris' reputation continued to haunt him, however, and finally caught up with him while he was on a mission to Banea, to repair a damaged collimator. On Banea, Paris was convicted of murdering Tolen Ren – an elderly scientist whose young, beautiful wife he fancied. It was believed that Tom had killed Ren when he had been caught flirting with his wife, Lidell. As punishment, the images of Ren's last moments up to his death were imprinted in Paris' brain, and he was forced to relive his alleged victim's last moments over and over again – a punishment that was slowly resulting in permanent brain damage. Uncertain of his guilt, Tuvok began an investigation and eventually managed to discover proof that Paris had been framed for the murder, even though he had gotten closer to Ren's wife. (VOY: Ex Post Facto)
Later that year, Paris, along with B'Elanna Torres, was captured by the Vidiians. While Torres was subjected to an experiment that parted her Human and Klingon halves, Paris, after working at hard labor, was going to have his organs harvested. Finally, Chakotay, disguised as a Vidiian, managed to save them. (VOY: Faces)
Whilst at the Holodeck, he was with Harry and the Delaeney twins as they were using their free time to take part in a Captain Proton adventure. Their free time was interrupted by an alert from the bridge as the U.S.S. Voyager had uncovered upon a new wold that was a giant sphere of water that was suspended in space. The giant ocean was inhabited by an alien race known as the Monean Maritime Sovereignty who initially attempted to attack Voyager but Starfleet's advanced weapons caused them to stand down. Captain Janeway then asked to make peaceful first contact with the Moneans who revealed the history of their people. During a tour of Voyager, the Monean Riga revealed that the structural integrity field around the Waters was weakening and had experienced a loss in mass. The Moneans though were unable to investigate the matter as they lacked the technology to investigate the depths of the Waters. This was until Tom Paris suggested that they offer the use of the Delta Flyer to aid them in investigating the Waters core. Alongside Riga and Seven of Nine, they took the flyer into the Waters depths where they discovered an ancient field generator. After downloading its database, they discovered the origin of the Waters which was an artificial creation made by an ancient alien civilisation who used a field generator to maintain the integrity field of the ocean. They also determined that the Moneans oxygen mining refineries had placed an incredible strain on the alien generator which was the cause of the loss in water mass. Thus, the recommendation from the Voyager crew was that the Moneans shut down their refineries otherwise the integrity field would collapse in seven years thus necessitating the inhabitants conduct a mass evacuation. Such information was not politically inconvenient to the Monean leaders who refused to listen to the advice and intended for the recommendation to be buried under bureaucracy. Tom Paris came to challenge the Monean leaders over their willingness to bury this danger despite being reprimanded by Captain Janeway as his actions went against the Prime Directive. Afterwards, Janeway came to learn that Paris had taken the Delta Flyer and looked to force the matter alongside the Monean Riga where they looked to target the oxygen refineries within the Waters. The diplomatic incident led to Voyager intervening to apprehend the rogue Tom Paris with the Delta Flyer being disabled and he returned to the ship. Once on-board, he was demoted to the rank of ensign and confined to 30 days in the brig for the act of insubordination. (VOY: Thirty Days)
Overview
Personality and attributes
In appearance, Thomas Eugene Paris was a slender, athletic human male who possessed fair skin, short, neatly trimmed sandy-blonde hair, and highly alert blue eyes set within a strong facial structure. When operating in his official capacity aboard the starship, his attire consisted of a standard, form-fitting 24th-century Starfleet duty uniform jumpsuit featuring a solid black torso and trousers, broken up by deep burgundy or red fabric panels spanning across his shoulders and upper chest to denote his assignment to the command and flight control branch. The left breast of his uniform jacket featured a metallic, oval-shaped Starfleet communication insignia plate pinned securely above his ribcage, and the right side of his stiff, raised collar collar displayed a pair of small, metallic rank pips indicating his provisional status as a Lieutenant Junior Grade. His facial features usually maintained a highly relaxed, confident expression, and he carried no visible weapons or external tools on his uniform belt unless explicitly executing a high-stakes away mission onto an unfamiliar alien planet surface. (VOY: Caretaker)
He said that he had a deep love of nautical stories which stemmed from the stories of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea that his father used to read to him as a child. When he was growing up, he developed a deep love of ships and in fact wanted to join the Federation Naval Service. However, as he was growing up, his father had other ideas about his future career as he wanted him to join Starfleet. (VOY: Thirty Days)
Tom Paris was noted for being the son of Starfleet Admiral Owen Paris. (VOY: Caretaker)
Powers and abilities
Thomas Eugene Paris was born a member of the human race where he belonged to a highly prominent, multi-generational lineage of distinguished Starfleet military officers. His primary attribute was elite starship piloting and advanced navigational expertise, which granted him the absolute capability to manually execute complex, high-velocity maneuvers through volatile plasma storms, dense asteroid fields, and unstable spatial anomalies that would easily overwhelm automated computer tracking systems. He possessed a high degree of spatial awareness and rapid reflexes under extreme stress, enabling him to instantly calculate alternative orbital trajectories and manage complex engine propulsion matrices during active space combat scenarios. Following the severe personnel losses sustained during their initial galactic displacement, his baseline capabilities were augmented by his practical knowledge of biochemistry and emergency field medicine, allowing him to efficiently assist in treating traumatic injuries within the starship's primary sickbay facility. Additionally, his background featured formal tactical training at Starfleet Academy alongside subsequent practical operational experience within both the standard Starfleet fleet and the Maquis resistance movement, providing him with a highly flexible, unconventional mindset when analyzing hostile alien engineering and navigating unfamiliar social dynamics throughout the galaxy. (VOY: Caretaker)
Notes
- Tom Paris was portrayed by actor Robert Duncan McNeill and featured in the setting of the Star Trek universe.
In other media
Books
Appearances
- Star Trek: Voyager:
External Links
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