It was supposed to be Katy O’Brian’s big break. After spending eight years toiling away in bit parts on TV, she had landed a key role in the second season of The Mandalorian. Then, she was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease.

“I was exhausted all the time, and one or two lines and I couldn’t remember them, and I just felt really unwell and weird,” O’Brian tells Inverse. “That season just was like a blur, and I thought, ‘OK, I’m just going to go deliver these one or two lines.’”

But with just those one or two lines as a lowly employee in the First Order, O’Brian’s Elia Kane became a breakout character of Season 2 as fans speculated that this background actor with a surprising amount of screen time might be a resistance spy hiding among the enemy.

Four years after she first made an appearance as Elia Kane, it certainly feels like O’Brian’s star is about to go supersonic. In March, she had her first leading part in a feature film with the sensually surreal crime thriller Love Lies Bleeding, which has her tapping into her bodybuilding roots to play the ’roided-up love interest to Kristen Stewart. She most recently appears in the ensemble for Twisters, as one of the wild storm-chasing crew of YouTube star Tyler Owens (Glen Powell). And next, she’s set to join the cast of the upcoming Mission: Impossible movie, a gig that could launch her into the stratosphere (and which made it very hard to schedule this interview).

Nearly 30 years ago, in 1995, the USS Voyager’s chief medical officer was slain, so a backup was brought online in the form of a sentient AI hologram, formally known as the EMH — emergency medical hologram. But because the ship was stranded on the far end of the galaxy in the very first episode of Star Trek: Voyager, the EMH, later just known as “the Doctor,” became the full-time physician for the crew, despite being an AI that merely projected a physical body.

Played with epic sass by the legendary Robert Picardo, the Doctor wasn’t Star Trek’s first regular AI character. In fact, he wasn’t even Star Trek’s first self-aware hologram. The Voyager writers were inspired by the self-aware holographic version of the Sherlock Holmes villain Professor Moriarty (Daniel Davis) who had previously appeared in The Next Generation. “I think they sort of got the idea from developing his character,” Picardo tells Inverse. And now, almost three decades later, many wonder which kind of AI are we going to end up with — Moriarty or the Doctor?

As he makes his triumphant return to Star Trek, once again playing the Doctor in Star Trek: Prodigy, we caught up with Robert Picardo to get his take on coming back to Starfleet after all these years, and what real-world changes his famous character actually inspired.