LANE CHANGES

This puzzle germinated during late nights spent dreaming under a mosquito net — I was in western Tanzania for work and it was recommended we stay in the compound at night, so I spent a lot of time with sci-fi e-books and blank grids and anti-malarial pills. Maybe also poetry — the Frost poem was definitely the seed, and earlier iterations of this puzzle focused equally on the "less traveled" and the "diverged" lines.

Initially I was looking for movies, songs, and literature pairs that had the word ROAD in them "diverging." (Here's a long boring explanation of that old, dream-fueled idea: imagine ROAD TO RIO across, then an additional OAD diagonally down from the R, then it picks up three rows down and finishes across with HOUSE, for the movie ROADHOUSE. The idea was to play on "less traveled" as less popular — ROADHOUSE as grossing less or having smaller audience numbers than ROAD TO RIO, or something). Anyway, that morphed into the idea you see now, with a nice steer from Joel on putting a black square after the "diverged" answer, since it should function as if it were its own entry.

Diagonal words always make filling tougher, and I'm happy with some of the pizzazz in the puzzle, but would've spent more time trying to avoid the glue, especially in the lower left. Hopefully the theme offers a fun aha moment, and hopefully you're as tickled by the descent of THE ROAD TO HELL as I am. Sad to see an Ed KOCH clue become Koch Industries, given the hellscape toward which companies like theirs have steered us.

Thanks to Will, Joel, Sam and all those who looked at early versions of this!

Natan takes us on some ROADs NOT TAKEN, starting phrases with synonyms for "street," then veering off diagonally to form some other phrase (or word). My favorite by far was THE ROAD NOT TAKEN splitting to form THE ROAD TO HELL — dropping diagonally down was especially apt for this one. Too bad HIGHWAY TO HEAVEN wasn't another one, rising up!

I found it a little odd that some synonyms for "street" were hidden or disguised, some not. ROAD was overt, as was PATH. DRIVE misdirected from its "street" meaning, as did DRAG. And WAY as part of WAYNES WORLD felt like an outlier. With just five themers, I would have preferred more consistency.

It's hard to work with splitting themers, those pesky diagonals causing so much trouble in filling. I can understand why Natan decided to keep it to five pairs, with one pair having a very short themer (PATHOS). But overall, it felt thin to me. Tough to execute on this type of theme — six or seven pairs would have felt much meatier, but that gets so much more difficult to do.

Natan did a fantastic job of working in bonus fill — check out all the GOD HELP US, ATTACK ADS, MEDIA BIAS, BELOW ZERO, I AM LEGEND, THE BEE GEES, SEAN PENN, (oh) NO YOU DIDN'T, BELLAGIO (this huge fan of "Ocean's 11" filled it in without a single crossing letter!). So much goodness! Almost felt like a juicily-packed themeless grid. Everywhere I went, there was some other fat entry that satisfied.

There was some ELKE, SLO, ATP, DEP, etc., but it didn't get to be enough to bother me. To have five pairs of themers, with diagonal entries, plus that huge amount of strong bonus fill, and keep your crossword glue to below average for a Sunday? That's great craftsmanship.

The theme didn't totally work for me, feeling a bit inconsistent and thin, but that central ROAD pairing was dynamite. Along with all the snazz in the fill, I wasn't quite on the highway to heaven, but certainly not on the road to hell.