Pelia continues to be among the best parts of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’ second season

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’ second season has been bolstered by Pelia.

Imagine you’re a Major Leagues Baseball team owner. You just won the World Series. You brought back every key player from the championship season, and you just found out you’re adding a star player that will somehow make you even better. You’d be pretty dang excited right? Well, that’s essentially what Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is going through with the addition of Carol Kane and her new character Pelia.

Pelia is a Lanthanite commander aboard the U.S.S. Enterprise, where she serves as the Chief Engineer. She’s ancient, having lived a long time, and may even be immortal, or close to it. She’s eccentric and whimsical, but she’s also a very useful character.

In “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow”, we see just a fraction of the possibilities that exist with Pelia, who as mentioned really doesn’t age past a certain point. She was found by the time-traveling duo of James Kirk and La’an Noonien Singh in the early 2020s, several hundred years before we’d meet her on Strange New Worlds.

La’an, believing her to be an engineer in this time, as in her own time, finds out she’s more or less a thief. Pelia has been getting her hands on artifacts, some that may not have been acquired legally, and is essentially a crazy cat lady with a huge collection of, to her, pointless things.

The excentricities that Kane was able to bring about in this minor moment in time elevated the episode, La’an with her character arc, and Pelia’s potential with the show. It also showed that she could be the center point of a lot of Star Trek shows to come out.

The potential of Pelia in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds and beyond is nearly limitless

Pelia being nearly immortal could really help bind the different series that Star Trek is doing. You can easily start having Kane pop up in Lower Decks, the new Starfleet Academy show, and whatever else you have in mind, because Pelia ages extremely slowly, and therefore can look the same in any show she pops up in as long as they’re within reasonable distances to one another on the timeline.

The only thing is that Kane is already into her 70s, and so if Paramount+ and the producers behind the shows want to use this idea, they’re going to have to jump in on it while she’s still active. Who knows when she’s going to hang the boots and retire if she ever does?

Doing this sooner, rather than later, would be a better idea.