American screenwriter whose career began in 1930s Hollywood and who wrote The Conscience of the King, the Shakespeare-tinged first-season episode of the original Star Trek.
Barry Trivers wrote for Hollywood films from the early 1930s and moved into television in the 1950s, contributing to many drama and western series.
His only Star Trek script is The Conscience of the King. Kirk is told that Anton Karidian, the head of a travelling troupe of actors, is really Kodos the Executioner, the former governor of Tarsus IV who ordered half of that colony's population put to death. Kirk, one of the few surviving eyewitnesses, takes the players aboard the Enterprise as other witnesses are murdered, and learns too late that Karidian's daughter Lenore is the killer.
The episode supplied an important piece of Kirk's early history, later revisited in novels and in Strange New Worlds.