Star Trek

Just curious to see if there's ever been a dialouge here about the subject. I wasn't a huge Voyager fan, though enjoyed the series in syndication. And I always wondered why the producers of Voyager didn't just use Nicholas Locarno of the infamous Nova Squadron as Janeway's 'redemption' case. It would have been a perfect tie in to the continuity of being expelled from Starfleet for the Nova failure in TNG to Janeway giving him another chance on Voyager.

They were actually planning to, according to MA, but then they realized they'd have to pay royalties to the writers of "The First Duty" for each VOY episode so they made a new character instead.

it was due to a lack of good writing or anything.It was all about money and credit

Yeah, they didn't want to pay the money so they just changed the story... slightly... and renamed him.  I wonder if some similar "reasoning" was used for Taurik / Vorik.

HA! That aswers everything. 

Rule of Acquisition 287:  Change the name to avoid paying royalties.

Pffft...really?? Yeah, I thought it might be something like that. That's too bad it came down to money. Heck, The First Duty is such a great episode they should have paid them!!! One of Picard's best speeches.

I don't know if money and royalties is the whole storie. After all, they crossed over Mr. and Mrs. Obrien and Worf to DS9, and Barclay and Deana made repeated appearences in VOY as did Q.

Besides, would not the character as well has the episode he appeared in be the intellectual property of the studio and not of the writer?

No, the royalties thing could not have been it.

it really is a shame they werent able/wanted to pay.

On the other hand, the character of Nick only appared in one episode/story.

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They were actually planning to, according to MA, but then they realized they'd have to pay royalties to the writers of "The First Duty" for each VOY episode so they made a new character instead.

[/quote]

That's really a shame, because while I do love Tom Paris and I'm happy he was in Voyager, I think it would've made Voyager a stronger series if we could have had the character from The First Duty, stupid greedy writers...

Pay royalties to who? Themselves? the studio owns the rights.

Do they?Are you certin?

To tell the truth I'm not so sure.Writers have rights to the characters they create.Replaing the same episode over asnd over is one thing, but reuseing characters may call for different contracts.

It's not that simple. They would have had to pay royalties for the person who created the character Lacarno in TNG, for the use of their character.