Nothing yesterday, meaning 10'6, and today just a couple of hours. After numerous calculations and recalculations, lean toward the third season having 163 production days for a per-ep shooting time of 6.7 days. In other words, looks like Trek's third season reverted to the 7-day shoots of season one and the first part of season two. This would be the case even though Trek remained on very thin ice for season 3, ice that got thinner every week -- after all, the show was canceled. The books all say that Trek's budget was cut quite deeply in season three. But unless Trek had 26 days off that I haven't accounted for (days on top of the usual: Thanksgiving, etc.), then we've got the old 7-day schedule again.
Shatner says in one of his books that the series cut back to 5 days per ep, which sounds plausible to me, but see above. I should also note that Shatner tends to be unreliable. His Star Trek Memories gives the wrong month for when his father died.
I may have Sky Frontier, my series, cut back to 5 or stay at 6; either way, forget 7. The point of studying all this Star Trek lore isn't to replicate the history of the series; it's to judge what is plausible when it comes to making up stuff about an hour-long network s.f. drama back in the 1960s. The books all say that shooting time costs a lot of money; if the program has to save money, losing a day's shooting makes sense.
But could a 144-day shooting season (6 x 24, which is the number of eps) really start on May 21, 1968, and finish on Jan. 9, 1969. Think I've shown that it couldn't. Aw damn.
Left out "Whom Gods Destroy" from my third-season lists of episodes (one has when they were aired, other when they were shot). So a lot of redoing needed tomorrow plus the above mentioned mystery about the 7 days vs. 6. Fuck, and the first two seasons worked out so nicely.
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