Lieutenant Harry S.L. Kim was a Human Starfleet officer who served as the operations officer aboard the starship USS Voyager during the seven years it was lost in the Delta Quadrant and, in the 2380s, he served as a tactical officer aboard the USS Dauntless. (VOY: "Caretaker", "Non Sequitur", "The Disease", "Warhead", "Nightingale": PRO: "Supernova, Part 1")
Early life and education[]
Harry Kim as an infant in the virtual reality
Prior to his birth, Kim was lucid enough to form memories of being in the womb. (VOY: "The Cloud") He was born in 2349, the only son of John and Mary Kim. (VOY: "Caretaker", "Eye of the Needle", "Favorite Son") While Kim was born on Earth in South Carolina, he grew up in another location. (VOY: "One")
Growing up, Kim's parents used to tell him how special he was, as they had been trying to have a baby for years until he came along. To them he was their miracle child, they spoiled him rotten, and made sacrifices so he could have everything he wanted. When he was older, Kim claimed that he never felt like he deserved kind of devotion his parents gave him. He didn't see what was so special about himself, so he used to imagine that he had hidden powers, and thought he would grow up to be stronger than a Klingon, or was able to read people's minds– anything to make him more than just an average kid. (VOY: "Favorite Son")
In 2355, Kim visited a haunted house with his family. (VOY: "Collective")
In the third grade, Kim had to memorize the greeting recorded aboard Friendship 1. (VOY: "Friendship One")
Kim as a boy
In 2358, Kim suffered from a case of the Mendakan pox. (VOY: "Favorite Son") The same year, he joined his parents on a humanitarian mission to a colony that had just suffered from a radiation disaster. While there, the Kims visited a hospital, and Harry wandered off by himself to an area where he wasn't supposed to be. In this area, he saw many sick and dying, including a little girl on an operating table. As he watched, the doctor called for a scalpel, and the little girl looked at Harry, her face was filled with fear. (VOY: "The Thaw")
Despite of his parents being "practically tone deaf", Kim loved music. (VOY: "Favorite Son", "One") Kim played clarinet in the Juilliard Youth Symphony. When he served on the USS Voyager, he forgot his clarinet. (VOY: "Caretaker") He later replicated one with his replicator rations and went on to perform with a jazz combo of officers, "Harry Kim and the Kimtones". (VOY: "Virtuoso") Kim also later played the saxophone. (VOY: "Ashes to Ashes", "Lineage")
Also among his personal interests were sports. Kim participated in tennis and Parrises squares, but his favorite sport was volleyball. (VOY: "One")
Starfleet Academy[]
All his life, all Kim ever wanted to do was join Starfleet, so that could go into space and explore the Galaxy. (VOY: "Caretaker", "Favorite Son")
He aced the quantum theory portion of the Starfleet Academy entrance exam. (VOY: "Imperfection")
Kim attended Starfleet Academy from 2366 to 2370. (VOY: "Non Sequitur")
While at the Academy, Kim was warned about the Ferengi. (VOY: "Caretaker") He also learned about the self-aware Moriarty hologram and how it took over the Enterprise-D. (VOY: "Alter Ego")
Among his Academy curriculum was a survival course taught by Commander Zakarian, someone who he later admitted never really liking. (VOY: "Caretaker") After he took Starfleet History at the Academy, Kim always wondered what it would be like to live during the late 23rd century. (VOY: "Flashback")
During his Academy years, he became close friends with Lyndsay Ballard, who lived across the hall in the student dorm. He even changed his class schedule so he would be in the same classes as Ballard. She taught him to ice skate, despite his dislike for cold weather. He never mentioned to her that he had a crush on her, not until he met her again in 2376. (VOY: "Ashes to Ashes")
As a cadet at Starfleet Academy, Kim was involved in numerous athletic events as both the captain of the Velocity team and a three-time Academy champion of Parrises squares player. (VOY: "Tsunkatse")
Kim was a member of the Falcon Squadron, a training squadron assigned to the Third Academy Training Wing. Upon the successful completion of the program, was awarded a Flight Proficiency Award. (VOY: "Non Sequitur" set decoration)
A certificate related to the Quadcentennial
On Earth, the quadricentennial of Apollo 11's landing on the moon in 1969 was celebrated. Starfleet Academy gave out a certificate in relation to it in some way. As a cadet, Kim was one of the recipients. (VOY: "Non Sequitur", "Nightingale" set decoration)
During his last year at the Academy, he had a roommate named James Mooney MacAllister, who was known to study algorithms until dawn. This forced Kim to wear a mask to help sleep, which he grew fond of, as it reminded him of his mother's womb, of which he still retained memories. He retained the practice of wearing the mask at night throughout his Voyager assignment. McAllister helped Kim get through his fourth year quantum chemistry. (VOY: "The Cloud")
Kim was editor of the school newspaper his senior year. As editor, he monitored subspace transmissions, where he got reports from some of the first activity by the Maquis against the Cardassians after the signing of the Federation-Cardassian Treaty. Without advising his professor, Kim wrote an editorial on the potentially controversial topic and the cadets became polarized on the issue. They debated the pros and cons of the subject and through his article, gained an insight into the entire history of the Maquis political rebellion. (VOY: "Investigations")
Harry graduated from the Academy as valedictorian of his class, having earned Interstellar Honors on Stardate 47918. He requested duty aboard the USS Voyager on Stardate 47923 and was given his first field assignment as a bridge officer aboard Voyager early the following year. (VOY: "Non Sequitur", "The Disease")
Aboard Voyager[]
2371[]
Kim on the Caretaker's array during his first mission as a Starfleet officer
In 2371, Kim was assigned as operations officer aboard Voyager. He joined the ship at Deep Space 9, and was very nervous about his first assignment, to the extent that he did not know how to address Captain Kathryn Janeway. Tom Paris, who was the polar opposite of Kim, befriended him.
During Voyager's maiden voyage, the ship was transported to the Delta Quadrant by the Caretaker's array, along with the Maquis ship, Val Jean. After both crews were subjected to various medical tests, they were returned to their respective ships. However, Harry Kim and B'Elanna Torres, a Maquis, were not. They were transferred to an underground Ocampan medical facility by the Caretaker. It was at this time that Torres would refer to Kim as "Starfleet," a nickname she would frequently use during their Voyager commissions. Kim and Torres persuaded an Ocampan nurse to show them a route that could lead to the surface. They were eventually rescued by Voyager. (VOY: "Caretaker")
Kim with Ayala
Kim later discovered a micro-wormhole in the Delta Quadrant that led to the Alpha Quadrant, Tom Paris proposed petitioning the Federation Astronomical Committee to officially designate the wormhole Harry discovered as the "Harry Kim wormhole." It was later determined that wormhole was a dry well, as travel through it would have placed the crew twenty years in the past, to a time when Kim was only two years old. (VOY: "Eye of the Needle")
On an away mission to an asteroid, Kim found an alien burial ground. When the team was beamed up, Kim was switched with one of the bodies in the burial capsules, and a dead alien was beamed aboard Voyager. The real Harry Kim found himself on the Vhnori homeworld. The Vhnori believed he was from the afterlife. When he told them he was from a place where there were just dead bodies, he shook their belief in the afterlife. He persuaded Hatil Garan, a Vhnori, who was going to submit to euthanasia to ease his family's burden in caring for him, to change his mind about dying. He took Garan's place and was returned to the asteroid and rescued by Voyager. (VOY: "Emanations")
When Voyager visited the Sikarians, Kim met a woman named Eudana, who was using an instrument which Harry mistook for being musical in nature, but when she said it measured weather patterns, he correctly deduced that nonlinear resonances in the atmosphere allowed the device to function. She then asked if he was a scientist, to which he responded that was sort of right. She wanted to be alone with him and took him to a planet that was thousands of light years away. Her people could fold space and travel great distances in a short time. This technology could have reduced the length of Voyager's return home. The Sikarians, however, would not give up the technology due to their laws. (VOY: "Prime Factors")
During a holoprogram of the epic poem Beowulf, Kim, who had assumed the title role, was captured by photonic lifeforms who had assumed one of the characters, Grendel, in the program. The Doctor rescued him, along with Chakotay and Tuvok. (VOY: "Heroes and Demons")
2372[]
In the attack by the Botha, who could cause hallucinations, Kim believed he saw his girlfriend Libby. (VOY: "Persistence of Vision")
Voyager was accidentally duplicated by a spatial scission phenomenon. Each ship was unaware of the other's existence, and both tried to stabilize their rapidly draining antimatter supply with a series of proton bursts. One of the two ships, slightly phased apart from the other, fired the protons first, heavily damaging the other in the process; the damage also caused the infant Naomi Wildman to die in her failed delivery operation. The Harry Kim from the damaged Voyager was killed after being blown through a hull breach. When the undamaged ship was forced to self-destruct after being overrun by Vidiian forces, that ship's Harry Kim took the infant Naomi Wildman and transferred to the other ship. (VOY: "Deadlock")
Unlike those who died aboard the Voyager which self-destructed, Kim is the only member of Voyager's crew whose dead body apparently remains intact, having been left to float through space, though it may have been retrieved at some point off screen. According to the game Star Trek Online, his body was later claimed by the Kobali.
The Clown turns Harry's fear of growing old into a reality
At one point, Kim entered an artificial reality stasis created by Viorsa's species. They had created it to survive a natural disaster. When he entered, in his subconscious state, he was confronted by The Clown. The Clown was fear personified and survived by being linked to humanoid sensory functions. He had already killed some members of Viorsa's species in stasis by literally frightening them to death. Kim could not wake up and became a prisoner of the entity. He was rescued by Janeway when she tricked The Clown into releasing the prisoners in exchange for her. She substituted her hologram for herself. (VOY: "The Thaw")
2373[]
Kim warning Janeway of a volcano erupting on Hanon IV
In 2373, Kim and Paris were falsely arrested and were incarcerated in an Akritirian maximum security detention facility, where they suffered great physical and mental abuse. Even though Janeway found the real terrorist who had actually committed the crime, the Akritirians refused to release them. Kim attended to Paris's wounds when he was stabbed by an inmate. With no medical assistance available, Kim made a deal with another inmate for some supplies to clean up his crewmate and friend. Later, Kim almost killed Paris when he found a delirious Paris taking apart the tool that Kim had used to neutralize the force field surrounding the prison. He regained his composure and fought furiously to defend Tom against the other inmates when Voyager attacked the prison and freed them both. (VOY: "The Chute")
Kim taken ill by a macrovirus
In 1996, when Voyager was in orbit of Earth after entering a temporal distortion from 2373, Captain Janeway left Kim in command of the ship while she, Chakotay, Paris and Tuvok went to Los Angeles to locate Braxton. Kim later took Voyager down into Earth's atmosphere to beam Janeway and Chakotay from Chronowerx Industries and from Henry Starling and Dunbar, as the long-range transporters were offline. Janeway later told Kim that he didn't do too badly for his first time in the command chair. (VOY: "Future's End")
In early 2373, he fell in love with a holodeck character, Marayna, who was actually an alien remotely manipulating the character. He became very jealous of Tuvok when the holodeck character became infatuated with Tuvok. The alien was a lonely operator assigned to a deep space array near a nebula. (VOY: "Alter Ego")
Kim discovering his Taresian spots
Later that year, Kim began to exhibit the appearance of alien spots on his face. When Voyager visited a planet inhabited by the Taresians, they explained that Kim was conceived on their world, but his embryo was implanted in an Earth woman, to bring an infusion of new genetic material back to their race. At first, Kim decided to stay on his "true homeworld", but later Kim realized that Taresian men are killed on their wedding night after the women extract enough genetic material to conceive children. In fact, he was not Taresian at all but was infected with a retrovirus that produced his supposed Taresian DNA. The crew was able to disrupt a force field around the planet and beam up Kim and leave the area. (VOY: "Favorite Son")
Kim infected with Species 8472 cells
At the end of the year, Voyager arrived in Borg space. They found a passage that seemed devoid of any Borg. After a fleet of cubes had passed Voyager, ignoring it, Kim determined that the fleet had been destroyed. Upon investigating the debris, he was attacked by Species 8472 and wounded. His body was invaded by alien cells that were destroying his own cells. He was cured when The Doctor used Borg nanoprobes to cure him. (VOY: "Scorpion", "Scorpion, Part II")
2374[]
Kim, with Paris as Bobby Davis
Kim and The Doctor were two of the members of the crew not put into the Hirogen holoprogram hunts after the Hirogen captured Voyager. Kim was forced to continue to expand and upgrade the hunting holoprograms. He worked on a way to disable the neural blockers used by the Hirogens, so the crew could remember who they were. He was successful and helped rescue the crew by disabling the holoprograms. (VOY: "The Killing Game", "The Killing Game, Part II")
Kim and Paris examining the Silver Blood
On exploring a demon planet, his DNA was used by Silver Blood aliens to duplicate him, so they could experience consciousness. (VOY: "Demon")
2375[]
In 2375, Kim helped build a technologically-advanced shuttle called the Delta Flyer. That same year, Kim encountered the Malon. They attempted to steal an advanced multi-spatial probe belonging to Voyager. Kim, along with Paris, Seven of Nine and Torres, used the shuttle to retrieve the probe and fight off the Malon. (VOY: "Extreme Risk")
Kim with Seven of Nine in 2375
He became involved with a Varro female named Derran Tal who was a rebel planning on separating the Varro generation ship. This affair brought him in conflict with Captain Janeway who disapproved of the relationship. He defied Janeway and continued to see Derran. Kim developed a biological bond that the Varro called the shared heart. The Doctor developed an antidote for the condition. After the Varro ship left and he and Darren parted, Kim refused to take medicine for his lovesick condition, because the pain would remind him of the happiness he felt. (VOY: "The Disease")
About nine months after the events on the demon planet, Kim's Silver Blood duplicate and the rest of Voyager's duplicate crew, experienced severe cellular degradation, initially believing they were the real crew and operating the real starship. Kim spearheaded the drive to return to the demon planet when Chakotay became too sick to function, ultimately convincing the dying duplicate Janeway. After most of the senior staff ranked above him died, he became acting first officer and later acting captain after Janeway died. Kim then tried to hold together a quickly-disintegrating ship, until it could return to the Demon Planet and safety. In the duplicate Voyager's last minutes, the desperate crew detected glimpses of the real Voyager through degraded sensors, and Kim sent a final plea for help – tragically warranting only a vague distress call entry in Janeway's captain's log. (VOY: "Course: Oblivion")
Harry Kim as Buster Kincaid in the holonovel The Adventures of Captain Proton
He and Paris discovered that their favorite holoprogram, The Adventures of Captain Proton, had mistakenly been taken seriously by an alien race of photonic lifeforms. They believed that they were about to be attacked. They had to defeat the program's villain, Doctor Chaotica, to stop the alien attack on Voyager. (VOY: "Bride of Chaotica!")
2376[]
After receiving a distress call on the night shift, Ensign Kim diverted Voyager to the site. After confidence-boosting approval from Chakotay on "doing the right thing", senior command crew granted Kim the opportunity to expand his leadership skills, by leading an away mission for assistance. They found an artificially-intelligent probe-like machine, known as a Series 5 long-range tactical armor unit, which had crashed on the planet. At The Doctor's insistence that they beam the device aboard for repairs – after some debate, Kim prudently added security measures to the investigation, and transferred it to sickbay due to the probe's bio-neural components. Torres discovered the device was actually a weapon of mass destruction, and the warhead then hijacked The Doctor's program, trapping Torres and Kim in sickbay with The Doctor's control abilities. Using persistent diplomacy, technical analysis and citing The Doctor's growth as an AI, Kim was instrumental in showing and reasoning with the warhead that its launch was a mistake, and that the weapon's intentions and stubborn denial of rescinded orders could cause it to fail its mission to protect its originating people, by inciting an accidental second war. The weapon failed to convince its newly arrived identical warp-capable warheads about the rescinded orders – these new weapons then threatened Voyager's destruction if the damaged warhead was not re-integrated into their fleet for final blind destruction of their enemies. Kim's sadness was soothed, when despite the potential loss of its new-found enlightenment, the weapon found a new way to protect its people: destroying its brethren while traveling in subspace. (VOY: "Warhead")
Kim often found time to relax on the holodeck. He and Paris created a new holoprogram called Fair Haven. He dated one of the characters, Maggie O'Halloran, who Paris turned into a cow as a prank. When the other characters in the program saw it, they believed that Kim and Paris were evil spirits and attempted to send them back to the otherworld. The characters had become self-aware due to a hologram failure. (VOY: "Fair Haven", "Spirit Folk")
Later, he became reunited with a crewmate for whom he had romantic feelings. Ensign Lyndsay Ballard had been killed in an away mission, only to be discovered by the Kobali who resurrected her. They reanimated her by altering her DNA and transformed her into a Kobali. The Doctor used medical techniques to begin the transformation of her back to Human form, but too little of her Human DNA remained for him to complete the procedure. He was, however, able to use cosmetic techniques to make her appear Human. Her Kobali father boarded Voyager and asked her to come back; when she refused, his ships opened fire on Voyager. Kim tried to persuade her to stay, but she had been transformed into a Kobali and wished to save Voyager from future attacks, so she left. (VOY: "Ashes to Ashes")
As a member of an away team Kim retained memories of a massacre which took place many years ago. The memorial was put in his neural pathways by a synaptic generator left as a monument on the planet he visited. Kim suffered terrible guilt because the memories of the soldier, who had killed two civilians, was transposed on him. (VOY: "Memorial")
Kim, along with Paris, Chakotay, and Neelix, were on the Delta Flyer, when a Borg cube tractored the shuttle inside the cube. The cube was piloted by Borg children who were left alone after a virus had killed the adults. Kim was injured, but recovered and attempted to destroy the cube's generator. He and the others were rescued by Seven of Nine after she persuaded the children to let them go. (VOY: "Collective")
He was stranded on a pre-industrial planet with Torres. He was able to restore the shuttle, when Torres was able to secure minerals and metals for stories she gave to the local playwright. He and Torres returned to Voyager. (VOY: "Muse")
2377[]
In 2377, Kim helped defeat the Borg and destroy Unimatrix Zero. (VOY: "Unimatrix Zero")
In testing out the new Delta Flyer, he and Paris entered themselves in the Antarian Trans-stellar Rally, only to find out that the woman he had feelings for, Irina, was a terrorist trying to sabotage the race. (VOY: "Drive")
Kim's ready room
Kim assumed his first command when he took over a Kraylor medical transport, so-named Nightingale, during a conflict with the Annari. He believed that the ship was carrying medicine, but was really a prototype ship carrying a newly developed cloaking device. (VOY: "Nightingale")
Kim congratulated his friend Tom Paris on his impending fatherhood and joked with him that his life would soon start spinning out of control. After Paris and his wife B'Elanna Torres started having problems, Kim accepted Paris' request to sleep in his quarters. (VOY: "Lineage")
Kim took command of Voyager when nearly the entire crew was kidnapped and brainwashed by the Quarren and put into their workforce. Taking command also put Kim into conflict with The Doctor, who had been in command after Janeway re-activated him as an ECH. Kim and The Doctor put their differences aside after the crew was successfully recovered. (VOY: "Workforce", "Workforce, Part II")
2378[]
Kim and Chakotay investigate a missile silo
In 2378, Kim was part of an away team sent to an alien planet to retrieve an early Earth probe called Friendship 1. It was Voyager's first official mission from Starfleet in seven years. However, Neelix, Tom Paris, and Joe Carey were captured by the natives, whose atmosphere on the planet had been poisoned by radiation from the probe. However, Kim and Chakotay were able to escape back to Voyager aboard the Delta Flyer. Kim later assisted Voyager's crew in removing the harmful contaminants in the atmosphere using modified photon torpedoes. (VOY: "Friendship One")
The Doctor incapacitates Kim in the holodeck
Later, Kim was in command of Voyager when the Delta Flyer II sent an emergency message to the bridge from Captain Janeway. Janeway told Kim that she wanted to see Commander Chakotay in her ready room as soon as possible. Janeway told Chakotay and the rest of the senior staff that a species called the R'Kaal demanded that Voyager be disassembled, as warp travel through their region of space was forbidden. Janeway claimed that she barely made it back to Voyager in one piece from them. She also claimed that she had made a compromise with them; that they would surrender their warp core and settle on the nearest M-class planet. However, Chakotay had become concerned about Janeway's behavior and asked Kim to decode a transmission from the R'Kaal's Supreme Archon, Loth. Kim discovered on the holodeck with Chakotay that Loth was merely a holodeck character created by The Doctor. Suddenly, The Doctor, disguised as Chakotay, subdued Kim with a hypospray.
Harry Kim in command of Voyager
The Doctor, who had also disguised himself as Janeway, hid Kim in Voyager's morgue, where he also hid Chakotay's body. Kim and Chakotay were later found by Tom Paris, after The Doctor escaped with Voyager's warp core to deliver to Nar and Zet, who were holding Captain Janeway hostage. After the hostage crisis was over and the warp core was recovered, The Doctor's program began to malfunction after he had taken on many holographic templates of the crew. The Doctor, believing he was about to be lost forever, recounted to Kim when he told B'Elanna Torres that his saxophone playing during his recital the previous month reminded him of a wounded targ. Fortunately, The Doctor was saved after Torres deleted all the extraneous data from his program. (VOY: "Renaissance Man")
Kim is overcome with emotion after arriving at Earth
Later in 2378, Kim began to get excited about returning home again, when Seven of Nine discovered numerous neutrino emissions inside a nebula, which translated into a number of wormholes. Paris jokingly told Kim that one of them could lead into his parents' living room. Voyager entered the nebula, but found it to be infested with Borg. Janeway ordered Voyager be taken out of the nebula at once. Kim, not wanting to give up on the possibility of returning home, tried asking Paris to help him take the Delta Flyer inside the nebula. Paris, about to become a father, refused. However, a short time later, Admiral Kathryn Janeway time traveled from the year 2404 to try and get Voyager home sooner. With the advanced technology she brought from the future, Voyager dealt a crippling blow to the Borg by infecting them with a neurolytic pathogen and destroying one of their transwarp hubs. Voyager emerged from a transwarp hub in sector 001 after destroying a Borg sphere and Kim returned to Earth after seven years lost in the Delta Quadrant. (VOY: "Endgame")
Later career[]
Sometime after Kim returned home, Ensign Brad Boimler was able to procure a Voyager plate that Kim had signed. (LD: "We'll Always Have Tom Paris")
By 2384, Harry Kim had been promoted to lieutenant. In that year, he was serving aboard the USS Dauntless as a tactical officer. His name was listed with other crew members on an information panel in the ship's transporter room. He was listed as on a mission and off the ship. He was on a planet for analysis. (PRO: "Supernova, Part 1")
A clear view of the information panels were provided by Dominique Rossier of Wardenlight Studio. [1],[2]
Alternate realities and timelines[]
In one alternate timeline created in 2371, after his shuttle entered an alien time stream that changed his timeline. Kim found himself back in San Francisco, assigned to the Starfleet Engineer Corps, living with Libby, who was at the time his fiancée. Instead of taking a posting aboard Voyager, he worked as a starship design specialist who received the Cochrane Medal of Excellence for Outstanding Advances in Warp Theory, a certificate of completion for completing Academy Extension Course #4077, and a Flight Proficiency Award from Starfleet Academy. His first major accomplishment was designing the new tetryon plasma warp engines for the USS Yellowstone. He was helped by Cosimo, one of the aliens, and the Tom Paris of that timeline (without Kim, it was Paris who Quark tried to rip off – he attacked the Ferengi, was arrested by Odo, and was still in the brig when Voyager left DS9), to return to Voyager. (VOY: "Non Sequitur")
In another timeline, Kim married Linnis Paris, the daughter of Tom Paris and Kes. The couple had a son named Andrew. He had previously served as the best man at Paris and Kes' wedding. (VOY: "Before and After")
In yet another timeline, Kim and Chakotay flew the Delta Flyer to Earth after Voyager was destroyed due to a mistake of Kim's, an erroneous phase correction to the slipstream threshold of the quantum slipstream drive he chiefly designed. Fifteen years later, as fugitives, they found Voyager and "fixed" history. With a Borg temporal transmitter that they stole from Starfleet they sent a message back in time to prevent the crash. Kim had blamed himself for what happened to Voyager, and as such was more aggressive to The Doctor (the only survivor of the crash because he was a computer program). For example, he threatened to shut him down for good if he didn't help save Voyager, something The Doctor was reluctant to do since it meant altering the timeline. After Kim failed yet again to save Voyager, and with the Flyer, damaged by the USS Challenger, three minutes from a warp core breach, he completely fell apart, bursting into tears and bitterly accepting his final failure. The Doctor, however, would have none of it, and gave Kim the idea (which, due to his obsession with trying to get Voyager home, had not even crossed his mind) that, rather than preserving the slipstream, he should try to avoid the disaster by ending the flight before it was too late, a suggestion Kim excitedly realized was in fact possible. His broken spirit rejuvenated by the knowledge that, while a return to the Alpha Quadrant was out of the question, the ship and crew could still be saved, Kim succeeded at the last possible second by using The Doctor's mobile emitter to power the transmitter and send a message to Voyager, dying with his arms raised in triumph. (VOY: "Timeless")
Captain Harry Kim in an alternate 25th century timeline
In yet another timeline, Kim commanded the Nova-class starship USS Rhode Island in the early 25th century. He was on a four-year mission, missing a number of events, including Chakotay's funeral.
His return by 2404 coincided with the ten-year reunion of Voyager's return to the Alpha Quadrant, where he met, for the first time since she was an infant, Naomi Wildman's daughter, Sabrina.
Later was sent by The Doctor – who contacted Kim directly to keep the matter "in the family" – to stop Vice Admiral Janeway from interfering with the past 33 years of history. However, she convinced him to assist her by holding off two Klingon ships. (VOY: "Endgame")
Relationships[]
Family[]
Kim was very close to his parents, Mary and John Kim. He was in contact with them every week, even during his training missions. His mother was a schoolteacher. She became upset because Harry had left his clarinet behind when he was assigned to Voyager, and she did not have enough time to send it to him. (VOY: "Caretaker", "Eye of the Needle")
On his mother's birthday in 2377, he got to speak to his parents face-to-face for the first time in seven years. During the conversation his mother stated that Kim was very popular with her eighth graders. Kim's parents were bothered that he hadn't been promoted. (VOY: "Author, Author")
Harry had a cousin on his father's side named Dennis Kim. They had a mutual friend, Maxwell Soroyan, who was killed by the Maquis a few years prior to 2377. When the USS Voyager reestablished communications with the Alpha Quadrant, Dennis wrote a letter to Harry in which he talked about Soroyan's death. (VOY: "Repression")
Harry also had an ancestor named Uncle Jack who was a starship pilot. (VOY: "11:59")
Friendships[]
Tom Paris[]
Friends through the best of times, and the worst
After Voyager became stranded in the Delta Quadrant, Kim became good friends with Tom Paris. They often spent much time together in the holodeck. During their time on Voyager, Kim became Paris' best friend.
Paris, trying to get Kim to go on a double date with the Delaney sisters
Paris first met Harry Kim on board Deep Space 9, where a Ferengi bartender named Quark wanted to sell Kim some crystals. Quark was about to scam Kim, when Paris sunk the deal the Ferengi wanted to make and prevented Kim from paying too much for the crystals.
When Paris reported on board Voyager, Kim noticed the cold behavior between some of the crew and Paris. Kim found out that there was an accident as a result of a pilot error which Tom tried to hide by falsifying reports but which he finally admitted was his fault. After Paris told him to stay away from him, Kim told him he could choose his own friends and their friendship started. (VOY: "Caretaker")
They had double dates with the Delaney sisters and spent a lot of time in the holodeck. Kim was shy and unsure around the opposite sex, and went to Paris for relationship advice. In Paris' opinion, Kim always fell in love with the wrong women. (VOY: "Prime Factors", "Revulsion", "The Disease", "Ashes to Ashes")
Tuvok[]
Kim playing kal-toh with Tuvok
Aboard Voyager, Kim was often seen enjoying a game of kal-toh with Tuvok, although he was unable to defeat the Vulcan officer during the seven years of Voyager's return trip to the Alpha Quadrant. (VOY: "Endgame")
Romances[]
Libby and Harry (2371)
Kim had a girlfriend named Libby, whom he met, by accident, at a Ktarian music festival, where he was sitting in her seat. After the incident, it took Kim three weeks to work up the courage to ask her on a date. After Voyager became stranded in the Delta Quadrant, in 2371, Kim held on to his love for Libby and often woke up in the middle of the night calling her name, hoping for a response. (VOY: "Non Sequitur")
Kim and Ballard
Despite his continued affection for Libby, Kim had many failed relationship attempts while aboard Voyager. He confessed to a long-held infatuation with Academy classmate Lyndsay Ballard, who died during a shuttle mission and was then revived by an alien race known as the Kobali. (VOY: "Ashes to Ashes") Kim's other failed infatuations include crewmate Megan Delaney, (VOY: "Time and Again") a holographic character named Marayna, (VOY: "Alter Ego") and an alien terrorist named Irina. (VOY: "Drive")
In 2374, Kim became infatuated with Seven of Nine shortly after she was released from the Borg Collective. Seven, however, did not return the affection due to her incomplete understanding of Human culture. When she confronted Kim regarding his feelings for her, she attempted to initiate an intimate encounter with him, forcing an awkward Kim to defuse the situation. The result of their encounter, however, did set the foundation for developing a friendship. (VOY: "Revulsion")
Harry kissing Derran Tal in 2375
In 2375, Kim became involved in a forbidden affair with a Varro engineer named Derran Tal. Harry fell deeply in love with Derran, in part because of a special bond created between the two called olan'vora, which he contracted following intimate relations with the Varro. (VOY: "The Disease")
Holograms []
Harry Kim has been holographically duplicated on a number of occasions.
- Recreations of crew members from Voyager and the Jupiter Station Holoprogramming Center were seen by The Doctor during a holographic malfunction in 2371. This simulation, or daydream, included Harry. (VOY: "Projections")
- The entire crew of Voyager was recreated by Tuvok for his Insurrection Alpha program. (VOY: "Worst Case Scenario")
- The Doctor took holographic images of the entire crew of Voyager in 2375 during their annual physicals. (VOY: "Latent Image")
- Lt. Barclay's recreated most of the crew of USS Voyager at the Communications Research Center on Earth for the Pathfinder Project in 2376. (VOY: "Pathfinder")
- In 2378, Seven recreated the crew of Voyager to perfect her social skills, including Kim. (VOY: "Human Error")
- The Doctor's holonovel Photons Be Free was set aboard the USS Vortex and crewed by characters based on the crew of USS Voyager, albeit the names were changed to protect the innocent. The character of Kymble was based on Harry Kim. (VOY: "Author, Author")
- The Kyrian Museum of Heritage in the 31st century used the program The Voyager Encounter to detail their encounter with the Warship Voyager, as an aid to a history lesson. In this simulation 'Lieutenant Kim' was portrayed as a brutal interrogator who would beat prisoners in an attempt to extract information. (VOY: "Living Witness")
Appendices[]
Appearances[]
Harry Kim appears in 166 of the 168 episodes of Star Trek: Voyager. Thus, only the two episodes he does not appear in are listed here for brevity.
- VOY: All episodes except for:
Background information[]
Harry Kim was played by actor Garrett Wang throughout the run of Star Trek: Voyager. Taylor Chong portrayed the infant Harry Kim in the second season episode "The Thaw" and actor Kenny Yee portrayed Harry Kim as a child in the flashback scene in the third season episode "Favorite Son".
According to the VOY Season 2 DVD trivia text version of "The 37's", an early production name for Harry Kim was Jay Osaka.
In the original, 1994 Writer's Bible for Star Trek: Voyager, the following biography was given for the character: [3](X)
- Kim, the Ops / Communication officer, is a Human of Asian descent, and had the happiest day of his life when he reported to duty aboard Voyager. He knew his parents were proud – though he was a bit embarrassed by their hugs and kisses as they said good-bye – and that meant a lot to him. As the only child of a couple which had tried for years to conceive, he was their great pride, their golden child. He grew up with love, warmth, and support, and an assumption that he would excel at whatever he chose. More than anything, he wanted to fulfill that expectation, to repay his parents for their undying devotion to him. And he had always done that, through his shining academic career and his graduation with honors from the Academy.
- After Voyager was swept to the far reaches of the galaxy, when he realized he would never see his parents again and they would believe him dead, his greatest regret was for the pain they would feel.
- But if Harry was raised with love and care, he was also raised in a somewhat sheltered way. He had no worries, no cares, and whatever minor annoyances life might have brought were deflected from him by his parents. So Harry has some growing up to do. Having never experienced adversity, he has fewer of the tools for coping than some of the others. Though he tries to keep such thoughts from surfacing, he's scared. He's over his head in this mission; he thought he'd be gone a month and then go home to share his adventures with his folks. But what has happened is unthinkable, and often he has the sensation that it's just a bad dream, that he will wake up in his bedroom at home, to the sound of his mother singing in the garden and his father hammering copper plate for sculptures.
- He goes about his duties with diligence – it's comforting, somehow, to have a job to do – but more than anyone else, Harry is suffering.
- The others know this, and in their varying ways, try to give the young man a helping hand. Their methods range from Chakotay's stern insistence on duty to Janeway's comforting maternal presence, but among the crew there is no one who doesn't like Harry Kim.
In the script for "Caretaker", Harry Kim was described as "a young Starfleet Ensign in his early twenties. Looks fresh scrubbed and right out of the Academy."
According to numerous interviews with Garrett Wang, over the course of Voyager's run Wang actively petitioned both the writing staff and Rick Berman to promote the character of Harry Kim to lieutenant, thus mirroring similar promotions of Tom Paris and Tuvok. Wang's views were also shared by a large number of fans who felt it was unrealistic and even silly to show Harry Kim as an ensign after several years of experience in the Delta Quadrant. According to Wang, in response to his protests, he was repeatedly told "Someone has to be the ensign." and thus his character was never promoted.
Regarding his character's ethnic background, Wang explained on his podcast The Delta Flyers that he believed, with the last name Kim, that his character was Korean-American. Wang also remembered a conversation with Brannon Braga during the development of Star Trek: Enterprise where Braga suggested Kim was Chinese-American.[4]
According to Wang, Eric Steinberg was a runner up for the role of Harry. [5]
Apocrypha[]
According to the video game Star Trek: Starship Creator, Harry's father is named Han Myong Kim and his mother is named Shin Ok Kim.
In the Voyager relaunch book series, Kim gets back together with Libby and is promoted to full lieutenant (like many of his crewmates, Kim is promoted two steps in rank, to make up for the time spent in the Delta Quadrant where he could not normally receive promotions). Kim then serves under Captain Chakotay aboard Voyager as chief of security.
In the novel Pathways, it is stated that a George Mathers was Kim's roommate at the Academy, not James MacAllister. Mathers developed a serious crush on Kim, only to be severely disappointed to the point of moving out when he found out that Kim was heterosexual. However, it is possible that MacAllister simply became Kim's roommate after Mathers moved out.
According to the Star Trek Online tie-in novel The Needs of the Many, Harry Kim became the chief of security of Starbase 11 in 2400. Kim appears in the second expansion, Delta Rising (voiced once more by Garrett Wang) as captain of the USS Rhode Island and Starfleet envoy to the Kobali, a race under siege by the Vaadwaur. In the mission "Dust to Dust", it is revealed that the Kobali had found the body of the original Harry Kim from the episode "Deadlock" and had reanimated him as a Kobali named Keten. Kim and the Rhode Island also fight alongside now-Admiral Tuvok and Captain Tom Paris in the war against the Iconians. In the "Kings and Queens" storyline, Kim now commands the USS Inouye fighting against the incursion of the mirror universe Borg Kingdom. In the episode "Scorpion's Abyss", Kim joins Captain Ezri Dax in a mission to seal a dimensional vortex used by the Borg Kingdom to invade fluidic space, and discovers that the Borg King is his own mirror universe counterpart.
According to The Autobiography of Kathryn Janeway, Kim eventually married Libby after his return to the Alpha Quadrant and he gets promoted to captain rapidly.
In an alternate timeline featured in the Star Trek: Myriad Universes novella A Gutted World, Voyager was never stranded in the Delta Quadrant. Kim served as operations officer until the ship was destroyed by the Cardassians in the Dorvan sector in 2373.
External links[]
- Harry Kim (Star Trek) at Wikipedia
- Harry Kim at Memory Beta, the wiki for licensed Star Trek works
- Harry Kim at the Star Trek Online Wiki
- Keten at the Star Trek Online Wiki