Same reason Ltjg Picard was a mid 60s ltjg.
Why does Harry Kim never get promoted?
- Thread starter B. L.
- Start date
Don't get me started on that. He should have been an LT. In the USN, promotion that far is effectively automatic.
If Picard couldn't make the cutoff for full lieutenant after 30+ years, he would have to have been so incompetent, he'd be considered Cerritos fodder, not someone worthy of the flagship.
And in any case, not applicable. Harry is considered by Janeway to be an excellent officer, as opposed to one whom Riker had to struggle to find positive descriptions for. And, in an alternate timeline, he was potentially promotable after only 8 months as an ensign. So even if it's possible for a Starfleet officer that senior to be that low, Harry was not that type.
Harry was competent, but he only did what he thought other people expected of him. On the rare occasion he had an original thought it went in one of two ways. He either broke the rules without abandon, or he offered no inspiration to stay inside them.
They should have killed him instead of Kes, most attractive man list be damned.
They should have killed him instead of Kes, most attractive man list be damned.
Honestly, considering how little use they made of his character, his death would have cost the show very little. Indeed, they could have dispensed with Kes, Harry, and Chakotay, gone back to the traditional seven-lead format of TOS and latter seasons TNG, and the departures would have been scarcely noticed.
I've never disputed that Harry was underused, and far from indispensable. But since they didn't dispense with him, they should have had his rank progress realistically. We didn't want an "always an ensign never a lieutenant" meme, we wanted a show that didn't insult our intelligence.
Chakotay stood up to her.
He was sent to his room.
Then over her comatose body, he reversed her clear intentions to ally with the Borg.
In the same position, over his comatose body, T'Pol, in the pilot, stayed in tune with the dumb directives of the dumb human Captain when she knew otherwise better, because if she didn't that early barbaric version of Jonathan Archer might have spaced her moments after waking up.
Even Janeway herself recognized that the Borg were pure evil. She just ignored this painful fact. I can't really blame Chakotay for shutting down this most monumental of bad ideas.
She was quoting Picard.
I don't think the Borg are evil.
They just know what's best for you.
An unstabbed Picard couldn't go farther than Lieutenant Junior grade at past sixty!!! That's pitiful!!!
I know now why Harry wasn't promoted, he never was stabbed by a Nausicaan!!
I know now why Harry wasn't promoted, he never was stabbed by a Nausicaan!!
More like ridiculous. Even without a brush with death, Picard still had his intelligence and training and ambition. He might not have been a captain, but he would have had a successful, if conservative, career.
Maybe Q was stretching the truth, to make his point.
But he was blown out an airlock, tortured in a hardcore alien prison, and infected by Species 8472. So he definitely had some brushes with death. More than brushes, actually; the Grim Reaper pretty much sat on his head a couple of times.
Next argument?
Here's a new theory as to why they finally promoted Harry in Star Trek Online...
The "Ashes to Ashes" aliens supposedly found Harry's frozen, vacuum desiccated corpse floating in space and brought him back. So, there are two living Ensign Harry Kim's (shades of Will/Tom Riker there). Since only one person has to "be the ensign", they can promote the other.
The "Ashes to Ashes" aliens supposedly found Harry's frozen, vacuum desiccated corpse floating in space and brought him back. So, there are two living Ensign Harry Kim's (shades of Will/Tom Riker there). Since only one person has to "be the ensign", they can promote the other.
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There's only one problem each time ensign undead spoke her native language the others looked at her like she had farted loudly!!! What's wrong with these people? And how about that universal translator of theirs, can't it translate the undead people's language????
Found something else new on the Kes website, which actually has a halfway decent crew manifest (though you have to shift through book characters). It mentions that Lt. Pete Durst was an Operations officer.
Given that he had both rank and seniority over Harry, why wasn't he at Voyager's senior staff meetings instead of Harry (until his death in "Faces")?
There's another Ops lieutenant on the manifest as well, but that character was never seen, so I tend to regard them as an Easter egg, like "Commander Rick Berman", which seem to be the biggest obstacle against determining exactly who all was on Voyager to begin with. If anyone knows of an ACCURATE crew manifest, do let me know.
Given that he had both rank and seniority over Harry, why wasn't he at Voyager's senior staff meetings instead of Harry (until his death in "Faces")?
There's another Ops lieutenant on the manifest as well, but that character was never seen, so I tend to regard them as an Easter egg, like "Commander Rick Berman", which seem to be the biggest obstacle against determining exactly who all was on Voyager to begin with. If anyone knows of an ACCURATE crew manifest, do let me know.
Does anybody know how many unique crewmembers (including name-only references like Cmdr. Berman) were actually seen on screen? Fundamentally I don't see a problem with counting Easter eggs on the "actual" roster. A lot of crew were likely named after real people, in whole or part. The whole George/Geordi LaForge origin comes to mind,, for example. Lt. Jed Bartlett, or something like that (I think if I remember right the west wing staff showed up on a casualty list once in some capacity) admittedly is a lot harder to swallow, but logically, if I allow Berman, I have to allow them too.
It does make me curious though if that would give Voyager a 500-ish crew compliment or something crazy like that...
On a positive note for Harry, if those AtA aliens did revive dead Mr. Kim, maybe he got to have a relationship with Lindsay Ballard after all!
It does make me curious though if that would give Voyager a 500-ish crew compliment or something crazy like that...
On a positive note for Harry, if those AtA aliens did revive dead Mr. Kim, maybe he got to have a relationship with Lindsay Ballard after all!
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Voyager was pretty bad that way in that it had a relatively minuscule number of non-redshirt characters outside the main cast. Naomi, Samantha, Ayala, maybe Vorik. The Borg kids, while they were onboard. For a ship that was supposed to be a family, it sure had a lot of nameless strangers onboard. Even Chakotay and Harry were barely above redshirt status themselves.
Compare to DS9, which had Nog, Rom, Ishka, Zek, Brunt, Dukat, Damar, Kasidy, Vic, Keiko, Weyoun, Winn, Martok, Gowron, and probably others I don't recall offhand.
Compare to DS9, which had Nog, Rom, Ishka, Zek, Brunt, Dukat, Damar, Kasidy, Vic, Keiko, Weyoun, Winn, Martok, Gowron, and probably others I don't recall offhand.
Plus the dead Harry was a perfect corpse, he didn't suffer any damage before being ejected into the vacuum of space, The scavengers (aka corpse gatherers) should consider him an ideal candidate.
We were always finding out new things about Morn. Even though he usually just sat around and drank and yakked at anyone who would listen, apparently he and Worf sparred regularly.
True. I would have thought that Voyager's crew would have retrieved his remains when possible... maybe they did, but just put him in a torpedo casing and quietly ejected him into space. Maybe they did the same with Naomi's unfortunate counterpart.
Naomi would be too young to remember, but I wonder what it would be like for Harry to (like Tom Sawyer) attend his own funeral.
I believe Naomi would have been vaporized by ship self-destroying... Harry's corpse was ejected long before so it was at a great distance by the time the ship exploded.
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