Relative difficulty: Medium? Medium-Challenging? Probably depends on your familiarity with the story...
THEME: ONE EYE (73A: Feature of 20-Across ... and, when sounded out, a feature of today's puzzle (clues and all!)) — the "theme" is POLYPHEMUS, a (not "the"!) cyclops in the ODYSSEY, whose "eye" Odysseus puts out. There is an awkward and gruesome representation of eye-gouging in the NW, where MAIM goes right through the puzzle's (and POLYPHEMUS's) only "I" ("eye"), which is the first word in the imagined (humorous?) exclamation, "I CAN'T SEE!" Oh, and there are no other "I"s in the grid (or in the clues, For Some Reason)
Theme answers:
POLYPHEMUS (20A: Cave dweller of Greek myth)
MAIM (7D: Hurt badly)
"I CAN'T SEE" (18A: Cry after a poke) (!?)
ODYSSEY (41A: Journey such as the one where 20-Across appears)
The theme of a monster created as a result of radioactivity was a common one in the 1950s // Test pilot Bruce Barton is missing and his girlfriend, Susan Winter, organizes a search party, which is sent out in the jungles ofMexico.
The team of scientist Russ Bradford, mining expert Martin "Marty" Melville, and pilot Lee Brand fly into unknown territory.
While searching the area, however, they uncover giant mutated Earth animals such as a mouse, an eagle, a mygale, a green iguana, a tegu and a boa.
More importantly, they encounter a mutated 25-ft tall, one-eyed human monster who became disfigured due to an exposure to radioactivity from massive radium deposits in the area. This is responsible for the unusual size of all the other giant inhabitants of the region. He kills Melville, but appears to recognize the girl.
When the cyclops tries to prevent the rest of the group from flying to safety, he is wounded and presumably dies.
• • •
Well, I really hope you're up on your Odyssey. I am—reread it earlier this year—and I still found this one harder than usual, perhaps because it was thought necessary to keep all "I"s out of the clues as well as the grid. When you tie your hand behind your back like that (or poke your own eye out, to use another metaphor), it's hard to do your job (in this case, write clues) effectively. I was wondering why the cluing felt off and kinda stodgy and sluggish. And then I got to the revealer and realized the "trick" they were playing, but the question is: what does that trick get you (except subpar cluing)? Like, why do it? Nobody has noticed as they're solving, I guarantee you, and no one is going to feel as if their solving experience was enhanced by having had "I"s removed from the clues. The grid, OK, whatever, that seems fitting, but the clues? You only lose, you do not gain, by taking your little maiming gambit into the clues. It's a terrible decision that (negatively) affects the basic solving experience. A feature that makes the puzzle worse and that no one will notice (until they're told). It's Baffling. But that's just the beginning of this puzzle's execution problems. POLYPHEMUS is *a* Cyclops. The ODYSSEY is rather explicit about this. He is one of many. He is *the* main Cyclops in the story, *the* only one that has a name (that I can recall), but he is in no sense THE CYCLOPS ("In Homer's Odyssey, [the Cyclopes] are an uncivilized group of shepherds, the brethren of Polyphemus encountered by Odysseus" (wikipedia)). So THE CYCLOPS, ugh, that answer was a clank and a half.
Also, are you doing an ODYSSEY puzzle or aren't you? The theme clues kept veering in and out of the ODYSSEY, explicitly invoking it here, pretending not to notice it there. "I CAN'T SEE" is absurdly clued. "A poke"?! "A poke"? "I CAN'T SEE!" is literally no one's cry after "A poke." I don't know if I'm more mad about "a" (be specific!) or "poke" (you "poke" someone to annoy them, or get their attention; a "poke" does not MAIM you). The whole thing is absurd without explicit reference to the ODYSSEY. Also, the puzzle seems to want to make a gruesome act of MAIMing comical? Whimsical? And then WANDERED is just down there on its own, no idea what it's doing, just wandering, with only the vaguest relation to the theme. "Should I just stand here? Like this? Guys! Is this the right spot? Why am I here again?" "We need you to provide symmetry for "I CAN'T SEE." "But I don't have anything to do with eyes or seeing? My thing's more ... wandering. Plus there's no symmetrical counterpart for MAIM. So can I just ... wander ...?" "No, do as you're told and stay put!" "Well fine but it's against my nature, I'm just saying." WANDERED, everybody!
Before I even got to the theme I sort of doubled over and heaved a sigh at how unpleasant it seemed like the fill was going to be. FLORAS? Oof. Over LEVELA and AGATES, crossing ALEPH, which is crossing PHAT? Lots more oof. The kind of oof that makes me stop and take a screenshot. Again, all before I got to the theme.
All the "I"s in the world, all the eyes of Argus, couldn't have saved some of this fill. It levels off, i.e. comes back to something like an acceptable norm, elsewhere in the grid, but overall, it's still underwhelming. Hardest parts for me were the proper nouns (don't really know SASHA, and definitely don't know non-Luthor LEX—had to run the alphabet for that "X" after [Takes a toll on] ended up not being TIRES). The one answer that just about broke me was STABLY. Even now, it doesn't quite look like a word. I keep mentally pronouncing it "STAB-LY," i.e. "in the manner of a stab." Maybe it's an oblique reference to the maiming up top? No, it's just the adverbial form of "stable." ABLY has never perpLEXed me, but STABLY, yikes, it just jams my synapses.
Notes:
7A: Mental ___ (MATH) — I have no idea what this is. Is there a physicalMATH that I missed in school? A calisthenic arithmetic, maybe?
70A: Wrap for a monarch? (COCOON) — this was one clue that came off very nicely. Lovely misdirection.
3D: Watermelon-shaped (OVAL) — isn't OVATE more appropriate? I think of OVAL as more of a two-dimensional "shape." Wikipedia says an OVAL is a "closed curve in a plane," and, again, I didn't take all the math classes in school (mental or otherwise), as we've established, but "in a plane," suggests 2-D to me. Watermelons, on the other hand, notoriously 3-D.
27D: Eschew the pews (ELOPE) — Told ya. They cannot lay off ELOPE. Can. Not. ELOPE and ARSON just trigger some irresistible punning / rhyming / whimsical wordplay urge (as I discussed at length this past Friday)
49D: Quest for some athletes (GOLD) — I had GOAL. On many levels, my answer works. Just not the level that counts (LEVEL A?)
56D: Food products wholesaler (SYSCO) — never quite sure of the spelling. There's also the CISCO Kid rattling around in my brain somewhere, not to mention "The Thong Song" guy (pretty sure he's a SISQO—yep, ooh, and with an accent over the "O," Ó la la!).
9D: Flotsam and jetsam (TRASH) — I had DROSS, which is less nautical than flotsam and jetsam, but at least as nautical as TRASH, and a hell of a lot more poetic.
THEME: MANBABY (39A: Certain immature adult ... with a hint to both halves of the answers to each starred clue) — men whose last names are baby animals:
Theme answers:
STEPHEN FRY (16A: *Actor who played Oscar Wilde in "Wilde" [fish])
RYAN GOSLING (10D: *Mouseketeer peer of Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake [gander])
SAMUEL COLT (62A: *Inventor who patented the first revolver [stallion])
CHARLES LAMB (24D: *English essayist who wrote "Lawyers, I suppose, were children once" [ram])
Word of the Day: BARBACOA (8D: Beef option at Chipotle) —
Barbacoa (Spanish:[baɾβaˈkoa] [...] is a form of cooking meat that originated in the Caribbean with the Taíno people, who called it by the Arawak word barbaca, from which the term "barbacoa" derives, and ultimately, the word 'barbecue". In contemporary Mexico, it generally refers to meats or whole sheep or whole goats slow-cooked over an open fire or, more traditionally, in a hole dug in the ground covered with agave (maguey) leaves, although the interpretation is loose, and in the present day (and in some cases) may refer to meat steamed until tender. This meat is known for its high fat content and strong flavor, often accompanied with onions and cilantro(coriander leaf). (wikipedia)
• • •
It's a weirdly gendered insult that I don't generally hear and certainly wouldn't use, but I guess it has enough currency to be a crossword theme, why not? It's the gender part that ends up being the one weak link in the theme, since all the animals are identified by specifically male terms ... except "fish." Fish is just "fish." No gendered term for baby fish, which makes this answer stick out more than it already did—FRY being a word I almost never hear except metaphorically, with the word "small" in front of it. If you'd asked me the word for a young [any of the non-fish animals in this grid], I would've known immediately, but FRY, uh, yes, that is a stage in fish development (between larva and fingerling, i.e. once the fish becomes capable of feeding itself, but before it's developed scales and working fins, per wikipedia) ... but, perhaps because they aren't generally visible unless you have a fish tank, and aren't particularly adorable, I would not have put them in the "baby" category. But fish are animals and FRY are young ones and STEPHEN FRY gets you an answer symmetrical to SAMUEL COLT, so there you go. Still, nothing "male" about it, so the MAN BABY theme you've taken pains to establish in all the other theme clues kind of falls apart there.
STEPHEN FRY made me laugh because I have no idea what "Wilde" is so, this being crosswords, I wrote in STEPHEN REA. This made me remember that Stephen REA appeared in a grid recently and a bunch of solvers got So Mad because the answer wasn't FRY. Let's see if I can find the puzzle where this happened ... here we go, April 4, 2024—the MARTINI puzzle. The clue was [Stephen of "V for Vendetta"], which both three-letter Stephens were in! So you can see why a solver might be mad. Me, I've been solving crosswords for over three decades (since the early '90s, when Stephen REA gained some fame because of his role in The Crying Game), so REA is just a reflex at this point. Unless you are *certain* about Stephen Fry, the three-letter acting Stephen is *always* REA—the name with the more crossword-friendly letters wins, that's the rule, thanks for playing! It's been that way since 1993—though you might occasionally see the term [Mens REA] (legal Latin for "intention of wrongdoing”) and if you're lucky, you might get a musical appearance from Chris REA. But today, OOXTEPLERNON, the God of Short Bad Fill (I mean, Crosswordese), betrayed me and failed to give me the REA I instinctively expected. He is a capricious god. A MAN BABY, some might say (some, but not me—I really don't want to make him angry) (solvers should make a point to honor him every October 30, for that was the one and only day upon which he showed his fearsome aspect to solverkind, way back in 2009) (the traditional offering is OREOs; you could try NILLA Wafers, but ... I wouldn't risk it).
I had BIG BABY before MANBABY, and thought that the BIGBABY / BIGBIRD crossing was some kind of ... thematic thing. But then BIG didn't work for the BABY answer so I changed it to MAN. I don't know if GOO over BABY is intentional (mens REA?), but it's a nice touch (GOO being half a baby sound). The only tough parts of this puzzle were the first names of COLT and, to a lesser extent, LAMB (having a Ph.D. in English means the 18th-century essay guy is a lot more familiar to me than the gun guy). Oh, and I had no idea about the N.F.L. coach, but crosses just blew right through him, no (real) problem.
[When you "finish" the puzzle but don't get the "Congratulations" message...]
Bullets:
10A: ___ czar, N.Y.C. government position whose job listing called for "a virulent vehemence for vermin" (RAT) — tl;dr for sure. Scanned the clue, saw "vermin," wrote in RAT, the end.
65D: Deserving of a fire emoji, as a party (LIT) — I had HOT
64D: Essie competitor (OPI) — nail polish
25A: Starting point for a record-setting swim in 2023's "Nyad" (CUBA) — so presumably ... the starting point for a record-setting swim ... in real life? The movie was non-fiction, right? Weird clue.
56A: Pepper and O'Leary of classic rock: Abbr. (SGTS.) — [literal record scratch sound in my brain] Wait, hold up. I nearly blew right past this because SGT. Pepper is a gimme but ... O'Leary!? Did you ... did you really just gratuitously throw a Billy Joel reference in there!? SGT. O'Leary? The one who's walking the beat? At night he becomes a bartender? Trading in his Chevy for a Cadillac (-ac -ac -ac -ac -ac)? Wow. He's in one verse of the song, not even the title or anything. That is some deep Billy Joel commitment. Not sure who to blame for this one but I'm gonna guess ... Joel.
53D: Word in the title of Broadway's longest-running show (OPERA) — ladies and gentlemen, my sincere reaction to this answer was "Wow, Three-Penny OPERA ran that long? Longer than Cats or Les Miz or Phant- ... oh."
A long time ago, I was solving this puzzle and got stuck at an unguessable (to me) crossing: N. C. WYETH crossing NATICK at the "N"—I knew WYETH but forgot his initials, and NATICK ... is a suburb of Boston that I had no hope of knowing. It was clued as someplace the Boston Marathon runs through (???). Anyway, NATICK— the more obscure name in that crossing—became shorthand for an unguessable cross, esp. where the cross involves two proper nouns, neither of which is exceedingly well known. NATICK took hold as crossword slang, and the term can now be both noun ("I had a NATICK in the SW corner...") or verb ("I got NATICKED by 50A / 34D!")