Big female role on HBO's Westworld / SUN 11-25-18 / 1994 tripartite treaty / Nail polish brand with colors Teal Cows Come Home Berry Fairy Fun / Procedural spinoff starring LL Cool J / Los Angeles neighborhood next to Beverly Grove / European stratovolcano

Constructor: Joooooooooooon Pahk

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium to Medium (10:10)

THEME: "Silent Finales" — actually "Silent Final 'E's": familiar phrases where one word in the phrase has a silent "E" added, creating wacky phrases clued wackily:

Theme answers:

• "A STAR IS BORNE"
• "BYE, ALL RIGHTS!"
• SEMI-PROSE
• RUNNING LAPSE
• UNCALLED FORE
• EITHER ORE
• SAVED BY THE BELLE
• COPSE AND ROBBERS
• CASTE LOTS

Word of the Day: LETHEAN (88A: Inducing forgetfulness) —

(chiefly poetic, Greek mythology) Of or relating to the river Lethe, one of the four rivers of Hades. Those who drank from it experienced complete forgetfulness. (wiktionary)

• • •

This is about as basic a theme concept as you can get. Super duper minimalist. It's a simple add-a-letter, with the one restriction being that the letter must always be silent. "Silent finales" isn't really a phrase, *but* you get a title word that is both literally accurate (the silent letter is added to the end, or finale, of its word) and punny (FINALES => final 'e's). Clever. In a puzzle like this, everything depends on how funny you can make the answers and clues, and I thought this one did alright on that front. Clue on "A STAR IS BORNE" was a bit (very) contrived, but most of the rest were pretty funny. I think I liked "BYE, ALL RIGHTS!" the best—though that was also one of the very hardest for me to grok. The whole middle part of that answer was a bleeping mess. I mark up my grids after I've finished and printed them out, and there is so much orange ink around the center of "BYE, ALL RIGHTS!" The problem: I dropped SWEAR TO down at 11D: Make official? (SWEAR IN), and then crossed it with ANNOY at 47A: Torment (AGONY). You wouldn't think there'd be a clue that could work for both ANNOY and AGONY but You Would Be Wrong Ha Ha Ha, ugh. [Spike] for LACE was also very hard, as was the vague [Human Rights Campaign inits.] for LGBT (turns out Human Rights Campaign is very much LGBT-specific, but you wouldn't know that from their Very General Name). And holy moly did I have trouble with 33A: Rey, to Luke, in "The Last Jedi" (PROTEGÉE). Lots of words and phrases came to mind, none of them correct. Cool new clue on ELSIE, though (15D: Big female role on HBO's "Westworld"). Much, much better than the usual ELSIE clue.

[Shannon Woodward plays ELSIE Hughes on "Westworld"]

I teach Dante every year and yet even I was like "... uh, what's the adjectival form of Lethe??? LETHEIC? LETHISH? LETHE-AL?" Never seen LETHEAN, ever. More trouble: [Small bother] for GNAT! I mean, accurate, but yikes. A NIT is a "small bother." A GNAT is a dang insect! And a BRIG is a ship (??) as well as a *part of a ship that functions as a jail*! (the only meaning of BRIG I know)? Again I say 'dang!' And also again I say I have no idea how I finished this in just 10:10. Other super-tough part was everything in and around SHELF (107A: Area near the shore). This is what happens when you try to get cute with the "let's repeat a clue we used elsewhere in the grid" shtick—you get a clue that doesn't reeeeally fit, but that's defensible, and ends up resulting in massive difficulty for the solver. Not a fan. So many possible clues for SHELF out there. Pfft. Anyhoo, had real trouble with 4 of the 5 crosses on SHELF: SAFEST, PILL, HARE, and SCAB (that last one because I misspelled SHARI as SHERI (119A: Actress Belafonte)).


Pretty cool / unusual that there were nearly an equal number of Across and Down themers—usually they're exclusively one direction, or else there maybe just an extra pair running counter to the majority, but here: 5 Across, 4 Down. Nifty.


Four things:

• 50A: Capital of Albania (TIRANE) — really really thought it was TIRANA. Thank you, Brian ENO, for saving my bacon there.
• 80A: Coined money (SPECIE) — not sure how I knew this, but I (mostly) did. It is a silly word.
• 75A: "Casey at the Bat" poet Ernst (THAYER) — I must've known this at some point, but darned if I could remember it today. To me, THAYER will always just be a street in Ann Arbor that a former girlfriend of mine used to live on.
• 68D: Shirking work, maybe, for short (MIA) — this one little answer really wreaked havoc with my flow in the center of the grid. This is a highly modern and colloquial use of this term, which I think of primarily in military contexts. In fact, I wanted it to be four letter so I could write in AWOL. MIA never occurred to me: that "M" was the last thing I wrote in, which is super-weird, as I almost never finish in the middle of the grid.

It's my birthday tomorrow so I will be off, but Laura Librarian (i.e. Laura Braunstein) will be here filling in. Ooh, and I get Tuesday off too (last Tuesday of every month is a Clare Tuesday, just as first Monday of every month is an Annabel Monday!). So see you Wednesday, then!

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]