3. Pelia
Pelia beams into Season 2 as the Enterprise’s new chief engineer, and in one stroke Strange New Worlds gains a character who has literally lived through most of human history. As a Lanthanite who spent millennia on Earth before finally joining Starfleet, she can compare the Federation’s utopian ideals to centuries of far messier reality, and that perspective gives her throwaway lines more weight than most people’s monologues.
Pelia's chaotic, art‑hoarder energy and irreverent attitude toward rules could easily have made her pure comic relief, but the writing and Carol Kane’s performance thread the needle by showing her quiet, almost ruthless competence under the eccentricities. Whether she’s outwitting Spock’s fake “warp‑core emergency” or needling younger officers about their anxieties, Pelia feels like a character whose best stories are still in front of her, and that sense of untapped history is exactly what keeps her lodged in the upper half of this ranking.