Try to hide the cell before it is shown, in UITableViewDelegate‘s tableView:willDisplayCell:forRowAtIndexPath: method. That’s the final method where you can manipulate the cell’s appearance. This however won’t remove the space the cell should take, so another thing you can try is to set cell row’s height to 0 using the tableView:heightForRowAtIndexPath: method of the same protocol.
Another method, which is most robust, is to devise a method for determining whether you need the date cell in the section and depending on the result, return the proper number of rows in the section, and return other section row cells taking the situation into account. And then reload tableView’s data on viewWillAppear.