D.C. Fontana — Dorothy Catherine Fontana — was Roddenberry’s secretary when she submitted her first story idea for the show. He encouraged her to develop it into a full script. The resulting episode, “Charlie X,” aired in September 1966 as one of the first season’s early episodes. Fontana’s ability to write character with emotional specificity and to develop the show’s regular characters in ways that felt true rather than merely functional quickly established her as one of the show’s essential contributors.
She became the show’s story editor — the person responsible for developing and shaping scripts from outside writers into production-ready episodes. The story editor’s role in television production is crucial and largely invisible: they are the people who make a show’s scripts consistent in character voice, who fix the structural problems that writers at a distance from production cannot see, and who ensure that each episode fits into the overall narrative architecture the show is building.
Fontana’s episode “Journey to Babel” — which introduced Spock’s parents and deepened the character’s backstory substantially — is widely regarded as one of the best episodes of the original series. Her work on *The Animated Series* (1973–1974) and later on *Star Trek: The Next Generation* (1987–1988) established her as a central figure in the franchise’s creative history.
Harlan Ellison wrote “The City on the Edge of Forever,” which aired in April 1967 and is frequently cited as the single best episode of the original series. The episode involves time travel, the death of a character who must be allowed to die to preserve the historical timeline, and a romance between Kirk and a woman played by Joan Collins. Ellison’s script went through multiple revisions and rewrites — his original version was substantially different from what was produced — and the relationship between Ellison and the production over the episode’s handling was contentious for decades.