Throughout the entire seven-season run of Star Trek: Voyager, Ensign Harry Kim remained at the same rank. Yes in the alternate future of Endgame, Harry Kim was a captain, but that moment of ranking up is the exception that proves the rule; though he was a brave and innovative officer, Janeway (and the Voyager writers) never thought to give Kim a promotion beyond the basest of Star Trek ranks. And if Kim was given more overt authority on the show, it would sometimes be thanks to an alternate timeline.
And now, as Star Trek crosses the multiverse in the penultimate episode of Lower Decks with a slew of legacy character cameos, the most prominent returning character is none other than Harry Kim. And this time, one version of him is a full lieutenant.
“It is a bit of an apology,” Garrett Wang tells Inverse. “It’s a long time coming!”
As Lower Decks redefines the Trek multiverse, Inverse caught up with Garett Wang to look back on Voyager and look forward to the future of Star Trek.
Spoilers ahead for Lower Decks Season 5, Episode 9, “Fissure Quest.”
Back when Star Trek: Voyager debuted in 1995, its pilot episode, “Caretaker,” featured Harry Kim perhaps more than any other character. As a young ensign fresh from the Starfleet Academy, Kim was, in many ways, the point-of-view character for younger viewers.
“I think Harry was the everyman on Voyager,” Wang says. “There’s a lot of people that could relate to Harry. I remember I got a backward compliment from the head of Paramount Television at the time — he walks up to me and is like, ‘You know what, I just don’t get it, but you are my son’s favorite character.’”
In some ways, because of his everyman status, Harry Kim was one of the original Lower Deckers, though, Wang points out that Kim was the lowest-ranking person among the bridge crew. “He is the lower decker of the officers,” Wang says. “The lowest of the officers is an ensign. So yes, he is the OG lower decker of officers for sure.”
In Lower Decks’ “Fissure Quest,” we quickly learn that Boimler’s covert multiverse ship, the Anaximander, is staffed by mostly alternate versions of Harry Kim, which they all refer to as “the Kim crew.” But when one Harry Kim arrives who has been promoted to lieutenant, the other Kims are totally freaked out. This leads to the basic conflict of the episode: The Harry Kim who has been promoted is suddenly mad with power, to the point where he nearly destroys everything. For Wang, this was a chance to do something that he almost never got to do on Voyager — go big with a certain kind of performance.
“In the beginning, we were told that as all the human characters, you need to stay as military, as two dimensional,” Wang says of the early days of Voyager. “The idea was that if we had flat line delivery, it would make the alien characters look more realistic. But in reality, when you're that flat and that monotone, it just looks like you're a bad actor! So, it's nice to do something like Lower Decks where I felt free.”
So all in all, for Garrett Wang, the revenge of Harry Kim is going very well. Unpromoted for seven seasons, and relegated to tamping down his acting, now Kim is being celebrated, but also he’s an over-the-top villain. As a huge sci-fi aficionado and longtime Trekkie himself, Wang hopes that Kim’s return to Trek feels like a gift for the fans.
“I think every fan has been sitting there, scratching their heads, wondering when they’re going to see Harry,” Wang says, noting that several of the newer Trek shows are set in the post-Voyager era. “Is it going to be Picard? No. How about Prodigy? No. How about Season 1 of Lower Decks? 2, 3, 4, 5? NOPE! So, I finally got in there — just under the wire.”
