Nick Locarno

Name:	Nicholas Locarno
Gender:	Male
Species:	Human
Actor:	Robert Duncan McNeill

Cadet First Class Nicholas Locarno was the leader of Starfleet Academy's Nova Squadron in 2368.

Shortly before commencement, on stardate 45703, the Nova Squadron flight team was involved in an accidental collision trying to do a Kolvoord Starburst for the graduation ceremony on the Academy Flight Range near the moons of Saturn. Cadet Joshua Albert was killed in the crash, while the other members of the team were able to activate their emergency transporters to escape their doomed ships.

He tried to get the other members to cover up the fact that they did a prohibited manuever. However Wesley Crusher admitted it publicly after Captain Jean-Luc Picard confronted him about the matter. Locarno took the full responsibility for the accident and was expelled from the Academy. (TNG: "The First Duty")

Background

Locarno was the inspiration for Star Trek: Voyager's Tom Paris. When the writers were trying to cast for the part, they couldn't find anyone that seemed to match Robert Duncan McNeill's persona, so they eventually just asked him to read for the role, and he got the part. Reasons for not simply bringing back the Locarno character have varied. It may have been because they would have had to pay royalties to the writers of "The First Duty" every episode, though in interviews, the producers of Voyager have said they felt Locarno's actions in that episode made him irredeemable, or at least less interested in redemption than Paris was.

A photo of McNeill as Locarno was later used as a photo of young Tom Paris on Admiral Owen Paris' desk in the episode "Pathfinder".

It has been speculated that Nicholas Locarno is a twin of Tom Paris, separated from his original family at birth. ^{(citation needed • edit)}

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