The latest Star Trek series, Starfleet Academy, has given us a new captain. Holly Hunter plays Nahla Ake, captain of the USS Athena and chancellor of Starfleet Academy. (The ship doubles up as a building when in San Francisco.)

Ake is over 400 years old because she’s part-human, part-Lathanite. The Lathanites are an incredibly long-lived species.

You might remember Carol Kane in her role as Pelia, the Lathanite engineer in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. Pelia is thousands of years old.

Ake and Pelia share several key character traits.

They’re wise, resourceful, compassionate, intelligent, direct, and not afraid to challenge social conventions. In short, they are the people most of us would love to become someday.

They’re also great roles for two actresses who were born in the 1950s. It’s not so long ago that older women struggled to find acting parts that didn’t involve playing a main character’s mother or grandmother.

This had an impact on viewers because stories on screen are part of society’s messaging about what it means to be a certain kind of person. In the 1990s, English-language drama did little to counteract the idea that growing older meant invisibility for women. (At best, we could all hope to become Jessica Fletcher or Miss Marple.)

It’s good for everyone when older women are just as likely to be spaceship captains as they are to be the main character’s grandmother.

Being a Lathanite is pretty cool and gives both characters a certain perspective on life. But I do think it’s a pity that Ake and Pelia aren’t fully human. To be that amazing and a middle-aged earthling … now that would be something.