What is it to be Harry Kimmed in a Star Trek series?

Star Trek has a nasty habit of underutilizing characters, which has been dubbed as being Harry Kimmed

When Star Trek first launched, the series focused mainly on two characters; James T. Kirk and Spock. The rest of the crew got stuff to do from time to time but Trek knew where its bread was buttered.

Over the course of the films, however, most of the characters got to expand their backstory. Most. This ended up becoming a theme within the franchise where there was always a character that wasn’t given as much to do as the rest of the cast.

This idea of a character getting buried under more popular characters finally received its name with the launch of Star Trek: Voyager, with Harry Kim, played by Garrett Wang. The character was widely popular, so popular it kept him from being canned after season three. Yet, the character never really grew.

He was an ensign for seven years and was largely just given storylines that played into this idea. If Deep Space Nine had “O’Brien must suffer”, Voyager had “Sad Sack Kim” storylines.

This idea of being Harry Kimmed came up again during this past weekend’s 56-Year Mission Las Vegas convention. Wang hosted a panel that included the Enterprise cast. During the course of the discussion, Anthony Mongomery, who played Travis Mayweather on Enterprise, brought up how disappointed he was that he was Harry Kimmed.

"If I have to be honest, I didn’t like the fact that I didn’t have much to do.…We hope that they don’t ‘Harry Kim’ you.” At the time, he didn’t realize that the expression was a verb."

The idea of being “Harry Kimmed” has largely been fixed with the newer series but only time will tell if Nu Trek can permanently leave the concept behind That said, what are the three criteria of a character being “Harry Kimmed”?

To be clear, this is just our list, and you don’t need to fit all three criteria. Just one.

3 things that define being “Harry Kimmed”

1. You aren’t given much personal growth as a character

Throughout the seven years on Voyager Harry Kim never had a real romantic interest, nor did he sustain some sort of series-altering issue that would define him. Usually just existing on the bridge and not contributing is another version of this. No promotions, no re-assignments, nothing.

2. Your character needlessly suffers

If the character is there mostly to suffer in storylines, that’s another Kim-Flag. In Voyager, Kim was the reason the Voyager created bio-weapons to combat Species 8472 after one of them clawed him during an encounter. Kim is also the only remaining member of the original Voyager, or the only member of the original Voyager to die in the episode Deathlock. He was also tortured by a psycho clown in the episode Thaw. Kid dealt with nightmare fuel all series long.

While O’Brien has the phrase, Kim has the experience.

3. Your character doesn’t have many interpersonal relationships

If your character only has one, or fewer, major interpersonal relationships, you’ve been Harry Kimmed.