Enigmatic Variations No. 1072: Companions by Wiglaf

I found this puzzle quite challenging, partly due to a gap in my cultural references, which will be revealed – although I suspect many people who don’t have this gap may have got to the thematic entries, at least, straight from the title? Six thematic answers (undefined) need to be found, 20 extra letters identified to describe a related  ‘object’, which is then to be highlighted/shaded in the grid…

(My cultural ‘gap’ is that for various reasons – a combination of living abroad until the age of 10 and going to boarding school at 12 – a general lack of televisual availability in my formative years meant I must be one of the very few people of my ‘generation’ who never really got into Doctor Who – I don’t particularly remember watching it very keenly in the 70s or 80s – and I just never felt the urge to start watching it when it suddenly became popular again in the last 5-10 years…)

So, after a while ploughing and plodding my way through some generally tough clues, I came up with ‘SUSAN’ at 37A – and immediately thought ‘Famous Five’ – was there a Susan?! – and started looking for George and the others – and Timmy the dog, to make 6?

But then MARTHA and DONNA appeared, and ROSE – and I eventually had to resort to the power of wiki-oogling to find the connection between them: they are all names of various companions of the said Doctor over the years. Plus RIVER and ROMANA.

Next came the extra letters – which gradually spelled out ‘IT IS LARGER ON THE INSIDE’ – although that was 21, so IT IS got contracted to IT’S. Which even for a non-fan, was obviously a reference to the Tardis. With the grid not quite full yet, I then spent an inordinate amount of time looking for ‘TARDIS’ – there are a couple of places with T, A and R close together – maybe it was split with TAR <something meaning ‘larger’> DIS? When this proved fruitless, I saw POL in POLIS and thought maybe the letters POLICE – forming a ‘box’? But again, a dead herring and a wild goose chase.

Then, just as the submission deadline loomed, and I was about to file it as ‘not quite there’, I spotted the letters LARGER in a rectangle in the NE quadrant and guessed that these had to be shaded in blue to represent the Tardis:

Wow – quite hard work, for me at least, but I got there in the end! Generally quite tough clues, I thought – and some not too familiar words – VATIC, SNITS, IRADE, MOIETY – which, combined with that denouement, put this towards the harder end of the EV scale (again, for me). As I implied earlier, maybe the more die-hard Who-eys, or whatever they call themselves, might have got there quicker?

I liked the idea of the ‘Story of O’ being set as a musical, and involving squaddies!, in 2D. And I couldn’t parse 12D and 29D in the rightmost column at the time – they just fitted the crossing letters and definitions – until forced to revisit them for this blog.

I blogged Wiglaf’s debut EV1044 last November, and this has certainly matched the standards set there – keep them coming!