While there weren’t any obvious theme answers, the title – “Backup Plan” – and the entry for 52A – MAKE A U TURN – were intended to tell you that you were to go back to the clues and read them all in reverse order… where four reversed clues would point to four different grid entries whose initial letters, read in grid order, would spell out the answer.
Pretty simple idea, but it turns out that this was much harder to execute than it might seem. Sure, there are pages and pages of palindromic words/phrases on the Interwebs, but I didn’t want to use any one-word clues that jumped right out as a familiar palindrome (think DESSERTS/STRESSED, DIAPER/REPAID, etc.), so that meant I had to either concatenate two or more words that, together, sounded like an innocuous clue, and still sounded like a normal clue when read backwards, OR make up my own phrases with non-palindromic words.
Anyway, I settled on:
18A: “Late edit,” which was ERRATA PAGE; but reversed, “Tide, et al,” pointed to DETERGENTS.
32A: “Stops guns,” which was UNARMS; but reversed, “Snug spots” pointed to NICHES.
51A: “Draw a lager,” which was TAP; but reversed, “Regal award” pointed to OBE.
So that was three, and in order, we have D-O-N_, and most people deduced that the answer must be DONE… but where the heck was that final E??
Here’s where backsolving helped some people. There were five E entries occurring after NICHES, but of those, the only viable ones were ENSIGN and ERRANT. And with that in mind, people went back through the clues yet again to see what they might not have picked up before, and there – the very first clue – was “General,” which at first glance, looks like it reverses to gibberish, but parsed differently, reads “Laren, e.g.” Who, what or where is Laren? I didn’t know either, so I reverted to Mr. G., and Wikipedia listed a “Ro Laren” as a Star Trek, the Next Generation character. So how does that help me?? Well, it helped a lot; turns out Ro Laren was an Ensign… sweet!
…or maybe not. A lot of people didn’t like that it was so arcane… and I don’t blame them. I wish I had worked on this for a few more days to come up with something more in the every day vernacular. But I didn’t, and there it is. Congrats to the 28 solvers, and to Cindy/KitchenDiva for being the first.
