It's amazing how they made a different character for purely narrative reasons alone, and the fact that the characters are legally distinct so that the writers of that episode don't get royalties for the entire run of Voyager is just a big wacky coincidence. Funny how that works out.

Every time you hear the name "Nick Locarno", it's because Admiral Paris' staff (so that he could claim plausible deniability) have used illegally obtained temporal technology (via Section 31) to "dub" that name over any mention of Tom Paris. Unfortunately, the device required so much power, it overloaded after one of the ST TNG transmissions, and could not be sustained for any of Tom's admissions (visual or verbal) in the Voyager transmissions (likely due to being outside of the signal radius). :-P /s

Ego the size of a planet on that kid. Must have impressed the Admiral.

Oh, you mean Nicholas Thomas Locarno-Paris?

I love this post.