How Carol Kane Crafted Pelia's Accent For Star Trek: Strange New Worlds
At the end of the first season of "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds," the U.S.S. Enterprise had lost its chief engineer, Lieutenant Hemmer (Bruce Horak), to a Gorn egg that had been implanted inside his body. At the beginning of the second season, audiences were introduced to a new character named Pelia (Carol Kane) an engineer who had no intention of serving on board the ship. After a merry misadventure, Pelia decided she liked the Enterprise and its crew and signed onto a senior role on the ship. Pelia was unlike many of the more rule-oriented characters on "Strange New World," rarely abiding by protocol, hoarding strange art artifacts in her room, and generally ignoring orders. She was a wonderful addition to the show, and a worthy successor to the already-great Hemmer.
Pelia is a Lanthanite, a humanoid species that lives literally thousands of years. It's their longevity, perhaps, that informs Pelia's devil-may-care attitude as well as her tendency to be a packrat. When you live for millennia, one would indeed accumulate a lot of keepsakes. She's also long-lived enough to outlive the statute of limitations on some crimes, meaning she can no longer be prosecuted for pilfering several of her better-known artworks.
Pelia also speaks with a unique, peculiar patois, nailed immediately by the linguist Uhura (Celia Rose Gooding). The Lanthanite accent doesn't quite resemble anything on Earth, and Kane admitted that she merely invented her accent for the role. Kane said in an interview with Wil Wheaton on an episode of the show "The Ready Room" that she was grateful to have been given the creative leeway to play Pelia with a unique voice, as she felt the character should reflect a certain confidence that comes with many centuries of life.
The ease of wisdom
When asked what she wanted to most bring to her character, Kane replied:
"A comfort, an ease with her wisdom, her knowledge, and her power, you know? A comfort. A comfort with that. And a voice was born out of that, too. That's a different voice. And that was really wonderful to do and have them accept that I would do that, because they could have said to me, 'No, no, we don't want that. We want just your regular voice.' But they took the leap with me and I'm grateful for that."
It certainly makes the character unique. In a separate interview with Variety, noted that she wanted her character to sound a little implacable so that no one could quite nail where she had come from. Her origins, through her voice, would remain somewhat mysterious.
Of course, having an unknown origin is also one of the central jokes of Simka Dahblitz-Gravas, the character Kane played on the 1978 sitcom "Taxi." Simka was said to come from the same country as Latka (Andy Kaufman), and his home country was deliberately never specified. It was perhaps somewhere in Eastern Europe, but when he spoke his native language, it was clearly not any kind of Earth language. /Film's own Danielle Ryan once posited the theory that Pelia — because she is so long-lived, and because she, too, possesses an accent of indeterminate origin — is in fact the exact same person as Simka. Nothing in "Strange New Worlds" has yet contradicted this.
It certainly makes "Taxi" more interesting, pondering that two of its regular characters are, in fact, centuries-old Lanthanites hiding out among humans. It would also explain why they refer to their home merely as "the old country," and why their language sounds so odd.