The fourth season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds sees the return of Carol Kane as Pelia, the long-living Lanthanite overseeing the Enterprise’s engineering efforts. Pelia, like Kane herself, is an interesting character. Need proof? Take Kane’s answer at a press conference hosted by the Television Critics Association that I attended, where she explained where the inspiration for Pelia’s accent came from.
“You have to talk to somebody much higher up there than me because it just descended out of my mouth one day,” she said about Pelia’s unique way of talking. “I did ask [co-showrunners Akiva Goldsman and Henry Alonso Myers] if it was okay if I tried that accent, even though I really had no idea where it came from or what it meant, and they said, ‘Yeah, why the hell not? Just try it.’ So I did, and they liked it, so I kept with it. But where it came from, probably only Rebecca [Romijn] knows.”
(Romijn, who plays Una on the show, was in the press conference as well. She laughed at Kane’s answer but sadly didn’t elaborate on what her co-star said.)
Pelia came up later in the press conference as well, when Goldsman shared an episode they ended up not going with because they didn’t want to kill Kane’s character off. “We had an amazing death episode where your [Pelia’s] daughter came back,” he said. “It was a little bit like Sixth Sense… we built it so that it took the whole episode for the audience to realize no one else saw her, but you did, and she was your daughter.”
That episode, Goldsman added, was one of many ideas he and Myers have for the show. Sadly, we won’t see them all, but we will get 10 new episodes soon when season four of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds premieres on July 23, 2026, with new episodes appearing weekly on Thursdays until September 24, 2026.
