Cave dweller of Greek myth / WED 4-17-24 / Food products wholesaler / Old Testament queendom / Pro wrestler Luger / Eschew the pews, say

Constructor: Joseph Gangi

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 CYCLOPS (60A: 20-Across, by another name)
• WANDERED (?) (65A: Took the long way home, say)

Word of the Day: THE CYCLOPS (60A) —

The Cyclops is a 1957 American science fiction horror film written, produced and directed by Bert I. Gordon, starring James Craig, Lon Chaney Jr. and Gloria Talbott.

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 of Mexico.

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 physical MATH 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.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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