American television writer who co-wrote The Tholian Web with Chet Richards, her first sale, and went on to a long career writing for network drama series.
Judy Burns sold her first script to the original Star Trek while still a student, and afterwards built a long career as a television writer and story editor on American drama series of the 1970s and 1980s.
That first script was The Tholian Web, written with Chet Richards for the third season. The Enterprise finds the USS Defiant drifting between universes with her crew dead by their own hands, and Kirk is lost with the ship when it fades out. While the crystalline Tholians spin an energy web around the Enterprise, Spock and McCoy quarrel over the captain's last orders and the crew begins to succumb to the same madness.
The episode introduced the Tholians, and the Defiant's fate was picked up decades later in Enterprise's In a Mirror, Darkly.