In the premiere episode of Star Trek: Voyager, “Caretaker”, Tom Paris (Robert Duncan McNeill) was a prisoner of the United Federation of Planets serving time in a New Zealand penal colony. At the time, Paris was a former Starfleet pilot who became a jaded loner with low self-esteem, and lost trust in the system that had repeatedly failed him. Captain Kathryn Janeway (Kate Mulgrew) knew Tom Paris as the son of her former commanding officer, Admiral Owen Paris (Richard Herd), and specifically sought Tom out to pilot the USS Voyager’s risky Badlands mission in search of Chakotay’s (Robert Beltran) Maquis raider.
