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Seized Opportunities
Well, I already mentioned it in the Harry Kim review, but it bears mention here too: Paris' friendship with Kim worked. Whether it was for fun camaraderie in Survival Instinct or for dramatic camaraderie in Thirty Days or The Chute, it worked.
Paris as a soon-to-be father also worked. The writers used the well worn tropes about giving up pre-fatherhood activities without overusing them. I say that because their use highlighted his desire to leave his past behind - embracing fatherhood became a way of atoning for a troubled past.
Missed Opportunities
Paris as a womanizer - the modern Treks have backed off from Kirk's image as a man with a woman in every port at warp speed. Kirk's exploits were but a small part of the sexism of the original series, but they were a part nonetheless. It's not necessarily a bad thing that the writers of Voyager decided that Paris was not going to be a womanizer after all, but I think it may have been a decision made for the wrong reasons. His one fling, in Ex Post Facto, was admittedly over the top, but it became Piller's excuse to never give Paris a one-night-stand again. Why? Because it made him look bad.
I'm okay with the TNG characters being better than real life humans - that was the whole concept. That's part of what I love about TNG. Voyager was supposed to be different through, half the crew came from a terrorist ship. Paris was a former starfleet officer who broke the rules in some way. These people are going to make bad - or at least un-federationly - decisions some times. You have to let them, or the show won't make sense.
I mentioned a couple ideas for a subversion of the womanizer trope in the Kes evaluation, but I've got another one for Paris specifically: Captain Jack Harkness, of Doctor Who. Now, I've only seen him in his Doctor Who appearances, not his Torchwood ones, but he is spectacularly bisexual. Not in a cliched "gee, don't them gay folks act funny?" way, but in a "man, this guy just wants to have sex with a lot of attractive people, regardless of gender" way. Even if they wanted to be cowards and shy away from the bi/homosexuality element, Paris could have been an equal-opportunity sexer in terms of appearance. Big, little, scaly, liquid, gaseous, horned, whatever, as long as the entity was up for it. Just an idea - I'm sure a boardroom full of professional writers could have come up with something other than "oh, we let him do it that one time, but we didn't like it, so let's just never use him again."
Paris' relationship with Torres wasted lots of screen time on a couple of people who bitterly hate each other. This is again something that I've touched on in another character evaluation - but even unhappy couples sometimes have good days. Paris and Torres didn't have any. The whole thing felt like one big apology for Paris the womanizer of Ex Post Facto - "see, look, now he's only interested in one woman and he's gonna marry her!" which shifted into "drat, we don't know how to write for married people. Anyone have some old tapes of Married... with Children?"
Killing off everyone who didn't like Paris in Caretaker was a bad idea. It's funny, if you watch Caretaker, with the knowledge of who is going to live or die, one thing that stands out is that everyone who has something nasty to say about Paris dies when the ship is flung to the delta quadrant. Having all those people dead is not only annoyingly tidy, it limits the interesting character interactions you could use later. Of course, there's also some sort of feud between Paris and Chakotay that is also hinted at in that episode that we never see again, so even if they did keep someone else alive I'm sure we'd just never hear about it again too.
Those issues are all minor complaints really - there's one that overshadows all of them, and gives rise to a million other problems: Paris' past. I've got my Calvin and Hobbes tenth anniversary book here, with annotations from Bill Watterson. Underneath a strip wherein Calvin calls his dad at work and asks for a story, only to have his dad start dramatizing patent litigation jargon, he writes "I think it's funnier when things are specific, rather than generalized." I agree, even to the extent of replacing "funnier" with "more compelling," whether the goal is humor or drama. That's Paris' problem - his past is never really explored. I understand the value in leaving some things to the imagination - if we knew for sure if Hobbes were magical or imaginary, some bit of the fun would be gone. But without a foundation for Paris' guilt, how can we explore his redemption. They not only didn't tell us what he did, they didn't even give the overall genre of his crime.
There are a couple reasons out there as to why the writers simply didn't use Nick Locarno, who was the inspiration for Tom's character from The First Duty. The first, and most fan-accepted explanation, is that the producers would have had to pay the writers of this episode for every time they used the name Nick Locarno in Voyager. Though this explanation is consistent with the Trek model for guest writers, but of the people who got primary writing credit for The First Duty were Trek regulars or veterans. I have some difficulty imagining a situation in which the producers of Voyager really wanted to use Locarno but couldn't manage to cut some sort of deal with Moore or Shankar (whoever came up with the idea for the character).
The second explanation is the official party line: Locarno was an unredeemable character, and while they wanted someone similar, they needed him to be someone with whom the audience can identify. I disagree with that reasoning, but I do think it has the ring of truth based on the direction that the writers took with Chakotay (and the Maquis crew in general). Locarno was an interesting character; the thing that I love most about The First Duty is that, while the story took Picard's side, Locarno get to make some decent points. I think that it is hardly irredeemable that the character was dishonest only because he valued loyalty above all else. Loyalty is a good thing too! A more Locarno-y Paris could have been an interesting antihero, someone who would struggle with his desire for a second chance despite not truly believing that he was completely wrong to do what he did. However, the Maquis are the same: sure, they engaged in terrorist activities, but their actions were born from a love of their homes, and a belief that they should have some say in their self-determination. That doesn't sound irredeemable to me, but the writers abandoned their back-story as quickly as possible.
The Actor
As I've noted above, choosing Robert Duncan McNeill for this part brought a lot of baggage. The question for this section is: was it worth it? Well, it's somewhat tough to say - I think of McNeill as being bland and acting in a cardboard manner, but that's largely because his character was so uninteresting. He never had the opportunity to show much range, but one thing that kept the Doctor delightful is that he managed to show range, early on in the show, even when it wasn't necessarily there in the dialogue. Since so many of Paris' problems were caused by picking the same actor as the one who portrayed a similar-but-different character, and McNeill didn't do anything to fix it, I'm going to go with "no."
Final Thoughts
Whatever the reason was for making Tom Paris explicitly not Nick Locarno, it left a rift in his background that was never filled. Regardless as to the cause for the writer's reluctance to explore it, that reluctance led to Paris having very few episodes devoted to him - only two more than Kes, and he was on the show for four more seasons. He wasn't a character that had much that was interesting to do, and the things he did do did little to flesh out his identity. Eighth place is just about right for Paris.
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