New York Times, Monday, October 22, 2018

As originally submitted, this puzzle contained two stacked revealers intersecting the final N and E of SATURNINE: ROMAN GOD and PLANET. That arrangement necessitated a couple of cheater squares under PLANET and made the fill a bit rough in the lower-right corner. Therefore, I was asked to revise the puzzle to just use the single revealer PLANETS.

At the time, that seemed like a reasonable trade-off — sacrifice the second revealer to remove four cheater squares and get better fill. Looking at the puzzle as it goes to press, however, I realize that without the additional ROMAN GOD revealer, the theme feels a bit incomplete. Although the Earth isn't named after a Roman deity like the five planets alluded to in the puzzle, it is nevertheless a planet. I wish I had added EARTHEN or EARTHLY once the ROMAN GOD angle was lost. It would have even been symmetrically balanced by MARTIAN.

Perhaps this puzzle is better suited to the Ptolemaic system where the Earth isn't a planet, you say? Alas, that arrangement doesn't quite match what I've presented either. Under a geocentric model, the observable celestial bodies are arranged in concentric spheres around the Earth: Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, the fixed stars, and then the Primum Mobile (which accounts for the diurnal motion caused by the Earth's rotation).

Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto weren't included because they aren't visible to the naked eye and were only discovered after the invention of the telescope. By the way, Uranus is the only planet in our solar system (besides Earth) that isn't named after a Roman god. It's named after Uranus, the primordial Greek god of the sky.

I liked this theme so much that I'm breaking my Mondays-must-be-newb-friendly rule to give it the POW!

Adjectives, based on the PLANETS — presented in cosmic order (distance from the sun)! Talk about cosmic karma, the word symmetries working out so beautifully. You could hardly ask for more.

VENIAL was a tough word for this agnostic. I double-checked each crossing to make sure that V E N I A L spelled something legitimate. Triple-checked, even! But it's common in the Catholic Church, a "VENIAL sin" a lesser kind of sin.

Maybe like putting both CITGO and ESSO into a single crossword.

Zing!

The placement of PLANETS forced four big corners, and I like what Alex did with all that white space. HUMOR ME, ONEROUS, MIRANDA, MUD PIES, all for just the price of ORA? Not onerous at all; I'll gladly humor Alex!

Usually, I'm all for I'M ALL, as a slangy preface. It felt a little less elegant with ARE SO near it, though. Still, worth it to get the juicy IWO JIMA, PRIVATE, even MONOMER. I'll WORSHIP that!

*ducks the lightning bolts incoming for that less-than-VENIAL sin*

I wouldn't have paused for a moment in giving this one the POW!, if it had run on a Wed or even a Tuesday. But in the end, my constructor's brain was mighty tickled by how neat and orderly the theme played out.