page_title: Harry Kim (Star Trek)
section_title: Reception
hierarchical_section_title: Harry Kim (Star Trek) / Reception
caption_attribution_description: English: George Takei, John Cho and Garrett Wang at the Las Vegas Star Trek Convention 2011.
context_page_description: Ensign Harry S. L. Kim is a fictional character who appeared in each of the seven seasons of the American television series Star Trek: Voyager. Portrayed by Garrett Wang, he is the Operations Officer aboard the Starfleet starship USS Voyager. There was some difficulty in casting the part prior to the start of the series in 1995, with a reported lack of young Asian actors to choose from.
  The character first appeared in the pilot episode of the series, "Caretaker". The character continued to appear throughout the series in a main cast role, with his final appearance in the finale, "Endgame". In that episode, an alternative future version of the character is seen as a Starfleet Captain. He is typically shown as being naive, especially in romantic situations, but gifted. The character finds the ship's first possible route home, and in one alternative future, he manages to develop a transwarp drive which allows him and Chakotay to travel home in a matter of hours but kills the rest of the crew. The producers had considered whether or not to kill off Kim during the third season. Wang subsequently reprised the role of Harry Kim for the fan-made Star Trek: Renegades.
context_section_description: The mothering nature of Janeway on Kim has been described by reviewers, with the crew forming a type of family network which has Kim as a surrogate son. His separation from his nuclear family at a young age is described as cruel, and Janeway, Chakotay and Tuvok are highlighted as his de facto parents in the series. This motherly position was described by Michelle Erica Green in her review of the episode "The Disease" for TrekNation, who described certain scenes as Kim needing to request permission from "Mommy" in order to have a relationship with an alien. She felt that the disease itself caused the character to grow a "backbone" as he had rarely asserted himself previously to the Captain.
  Kim has been used to show the multiculturalism of Star Trek: Voyager. One scene was described in "Faces" by Elisabeth Anne Leonard which featured a sweeping shot around the command table of Janeway, Chakotay, Tuvok and Kim, showing a Caucasian race woman, a Native American, a man of Asian descent and a black Vulcan in a single shot. Kim's persistent optimism has been highlighted, with him being one of the few characters in the series who by the seventh series still believed that they would return home in their lifetime. Kim seemed to be frequently captured by alien species during the course of the series to the extent that it was described as one of the typical storylines seen in Voyager during an overview by The A.V. Club.
  The authors of the book Deep Space and Sacred Time: Star Trek in the American Mythos state that the episode "Deadlock," which featured the death of Kim, was one of several examples in the Star Trek franchise where the death of a major character is reversed by a parallel existence. Other examples included in The Next Generation with the return of Tasha Yar in "Yesterday's Enterprise" and the death of Miles O'Brien in the Deep Space Nine episode "Visionary". They felt that Kim also shared another similarity with "Yesterday's Enterprise" in that in the episode "Non Sequitur", he feels that reality has been changed – which was similar to the experience that Guinan felt in The Next Generation episode.
  Amongst Kim's relationships included the relationship with a character on the ship's holodeck in the episode "Alter Ego", but after building a rivalry for the character's affections with Tuvok, he becomes disinterested after finding out that the character was being played by a real person. This relationship was highlighted as an example of how Star Trek describes the ideal woman as an "objectified embodiment of male desire with no inner self to complicate the so-called relationship that a man may have with her".
  Juliette Harrisson for the website Den of Geek described "Timeless" as the best Harry Kim episode, and was the third best episode of Voyager overall. She said that "Wang’s bitter, emotionally scarred performance holds together an hour which also features some lovely imagery". Episodes centering on Kim were included in io9's list of the worst holodeck related episodes in Star Trek. These included "The Thaw", with the worst moment described as "the Harry Kim baby thing". Other episodes highlighted as bad included "Fair Haven" while it stated that it skipped the first season "Heroes and Demons". Wang later returned to Star Trek in fan-made productions and to the role of Harry Kim in Star Trek: Renegades, alongside Manu Intiraymi and Tim Russ from Voyager.
  In 2017, Screen Rant ranked the Harry the 11th most attractive person in the Star Trek universe. In 2018, CBR ranked Harry Kim the 24th best Starfleet character of Star Trek.
caption: Garrett Wang, with George Takei and John Cho, two other Star Trek actors of Asian descent
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