sam

Fun! A little chewy, but went a lot smoother than yesterday’s. I thought the longer clues/answers were great, but some of the shorter fill seemed a little too straightforward. Maybe these could be clued a bit less directly to make this feel more Saturday-y? Thanks for the puzzle!

I enjoyed the loop de loop element - very clever construction. Too bad that there seems to have been some technical difficulty in rendering it for the mobile screen. I raise my eyebrows at a few of the clues/answers: in particular, "TCBY" for "cultured dessert option" at 27A is a business I've never heard of, maybe simply because of regional specificity or coincidence, and the lack of an indication that it was an initialism threw me for a loop (ha). Is it because it's the name of the business that the initialism isn't clued? In either case, it felt like a bit of a stretch. Also, "THREEPIO" at 36D, while not too hard to get from the clue, is as others have pointed out both an abbreviated and non-standard spelling of the character's name which stood out to me as a little "messy." I felt in the end that the execution of the looping gimmick was prioritized over the elegance of some clues/answers. A notable exception was SETTLE/METTLE which several others have mentioned - this got me as well and struck me as very clever. Overall I enjoyed the puzzle and thank the constructor.