Erik

@Rex Freedom from trying to maintain a streak is a gift in itself!

Let me add that this is in no way a bad puzzle, not trying to shame the creator, it's just not the right difficulty for the day. This would be a great Tuesday puzzle.

@MDB Recently invented? Yoink has been common among my tail-end Gen X crowd since the 90s.

@Ms. Billie M. Spaight Dictionaries allow both, with "mice" being much more common in actual usage. It's a matter of preference, and not an error just because your preference is different. See also the "gif" pronunciation debate.

@Deadline I've learned tons of stuff from looking up things in crosswords, it's good for you!

@Nancy It's a direct reference to a scene in the movie and an Easter egg for solvers in the know. It's not about being able to solve, it's about triggering those three extra neurons of recognition. Lighten up!

@Rosalind Mitchell I prefer my puzzles to have a single rebu

@Jim I was glad they rendered it for us so I didn't have to run a sharpie over my computer monitor!

@Paul Z. Hard to take a comment like this seriously when you don't point out a single reason why you didn't like it

@Grant PSST is obvious now that I see it, but a series of guesses led me down the wrong path. I've never heard of a THAI iced tea so CHAI seemed a good guess. SEE didn't occur to me right away and I stuck in EEE for filler, thinking perhaps it was some chess notation I wasn't aware of to denote the location of a bishop on the board. That left me with PESC across, which seemed perfectly cromulent as a fish word that would go with a poke bowl.

@LJADZ I think you mean a pretty Mehta puzzle

@Mean Old Lady I can't believe you'd STOOP to such a new low with this criticism

@Chet How about we change the cluing from plural: The Cajun chef yelled "The OKRA'S done frying!"

@Xword Junkie I don't recommend grating your OKRA(s), the slime will go everywhere

@jmooser A "mare" is a darker-appearing portion of the moon, but doesn't comprise a full side and isn't dark in the sense that no light is hitting it. "Dark side of the moon" is a common phrase that doesn't actually refer to a mare, so therefore MARE would not be a literally correct answer. FWIW, there's also no actual dark side of the moon, the pedantically correct phrase would be "far side of the moon." The far side of the moon from Earth's perspective is always dark to us, but because of lunar rotation no portion of the moon is always in darkness (except for lunar eclipses, mostly!). And of course sometimes the near side of the moon is also dark thanks to moon phases.

@JGinDC Typically replaced by Phillipa Soo these days, mostly known from her role in Hamilton

@Emerald This seems needlessly pedantic. Crosswordese does not follow strict rules of language. If you want the character to be an ñ in both directions, though would generally require two foreign language words to cross each other, which is a no-no in crossword construction (a word or name requiring specialized knowledge should be crossed with more general word or else the puzzle easily becomes unsolvable). If this has happened to you "every time it's here", you should be able to figure out what they're looking for. Otherwise you come across as purposefully not getting it just to complain.

@M I never fill in the vowels of that word on my first go-round because there are so many variations of it in crosswordese. Just K_B_B and move on!

@Ann "Alias" was a TV show from the early '00s starring Jennifer Garner as a CIA agent

@Pat It's been common slang for several years now, and commonly featured in crosswords from many publishers for it's vowel contributions.

@Andy K Well I finished it, longer than my average time, and liked the concept of the theme if not the total execution. The NW corner fill was especially tortured. I wish the editors had provided a bit more guidance and suggestion on fill and cluing on this one, and it could have been a lot more fun and elegant. Instead it was a bit of a slog, though I didn't hate it.

@Jane Wheelaghan ETAL, if written normally would be "et al.", short for "et alia" which is Latin for "and others". Often used when citing published papers with many authors, you might cite the lead author then note "et al." Common space filler for crosswords so good to keep note of.

@The X-Phile Wasabi peas might be a nice complement to a poke bowl but not much of a condiment

@Laura Xuereb I know Won from Korean movies and learned about both Rands and apartheid from Lethal Weapon II as a kid. Maybe you just need more screentime!

@dk Everything I know about the Foreign Service exam I learned from watching Spies Like Us as a kid

@Cherry You just have to remember that a burrito is a small donkey!

@john ezra I get what you mean re: 1999, too bad Prince wasn't there too. Though FWIW Ru Paul seems to be at peak cultural influence right now, Tori Amos has a new album coming out in the Spring, and yet another unnecessary Matrix movie will be out sometime in 2026. Maybe our puzzle creator knows something we don't... could the "Tupac is alive" conspiracy theorists be on to something?

@NYC Traveler I miss the days of Rae Dawn Chong

@Kyle Uncle Ben said it, but Spidey popularized it by putting it into action and making it his guiding ethos.

@BC RIP Milk Stout

@Bill Don't think of this entree as food. Consider the M-W definition: entrée noun 1a: the act or manner of entering : entrance b: freedom of entry or access

@Crevecoeur Do your best to remember Mr Epps, because he shows up in crosswords quite frequently

@stan I had to squint at it to figure out what the theme meant too, took a while. Spoiler alert coming... ... ... ... BREAKS IT All DOWN All the long down answers include IT and ALL, not next to each other. Yeah, it's not that exciting a reveal.

@CT "cray cray" dates back to when Gen Z were infants, so we probably have millennials to thank for that one.

@Nick When I was a kid I visited the Coca Cola museum in Atlanta. They had a big room where the wall was lined with soda fountains so you could try every global Fanta flavor, well over 100 choices, including "lychee nut" which stuck with me. Truly a global brand.

@CTav First definition at OED is "a lover of films or cinema." At M-W it's "a devotee of movies".