“The Devil in the Dark” … We shot this particular episode, our twenty-sixth, during the first half of March 1967.

Problem: Star Trek did its shooting from May of one year to January of the next. Never in the early spring. “Devil in the Dark” was broadcast on March 9, 1967.

What’s remarkable: Shatner says that on the second day of shooting he had to take off because his father died. “My beloved father.” But he got the month wrong.

All right, maybe Chris Kreski gets the blame. He’s the “with” guy under Shatner’s name in the byline. Shatner talked into a microphone, Chris Kreski did a lot of typing and organizing, looked up some dates, and got the shooting month mixed up with the broadcast month. These books about Star Trek people are such murky soup.

But we experience this amazing simulated effect:  A man talks about his father’s death, “the tears and the anguish,” and he thinks the death happened months after it actually did.

Oh, that fucking Shatner.