Inquisitor 1935: Your Move by Ploy

Your Move by Ploy

To solve each across clue, remove a letter from a word and rearrange its remaining letters; removed letters give a tag line missing its last word. Some words in clues have been affected like this last word, and must be corrected to enable solving. Four extra words in down clues can give a thematic phrase. The completed grid illustrates an encounter between two fictional characters (5 cells each). One of them is shown in two successive positions, but must be removed from both. His inevitable reappearance must be shown by changing three adjacent letters in a grid entry defining the process he’s undergone. At all times, all grid entries (ignoring spaces) are real words. The name of the work of fiction (9 letters) must be written below the grid.

Phew! I hesitate to use the word struggle but this was certainly no walk in the park.

I started by trying to solve some across clues and I got absolutely nowhere. Then (and I don’t know why it took me so long) I started on the down clues. The down clues were much more forgiving. I didn’t get them all by any means but it gave me quite a few crossers to allow me to take a punt at some of the acrosses. Having said that, I still found a lot of the wordplay to be tricky.

Eventually I had a full grid apart from the first letter of 20a. After consultations I settled on the answer below. I believe it to be correct but I still can’t fully justify it to myself.

Anyway, on to the rest of the puzzle. The extra letters generated by the across clues spell out WHERE NOTHING CAN POSSIBLY GO. A cursory internet search showed me that the final word must be WRONG. A further search for the whole phrase led me down a rabbit hole. It seems that in The Simpsons, there is an episode (series 6 episode 4) titled Itchy & Scratchy Land. In that episode, as they approach the park, the helicopter pilot says:

“We are now approaching our final destination, Itchy and Scratchy Land. The amusement park of the future where nothing can ‘possa-bly] go wrong. Uh, possibly go wrong. That’s the first thing that’s ever gone wrong.”

I don’t know a tremendous amount about The Simpsons but I am aware of Itchy & Scratchy so I thought that I needed to find them in the grid.

Well, I was wrong. For a start, although Itchy is 5 letters, Scratchy certainly isn’t. Then, when I looked at the synopsis on IMDb, I read this, “A family vacation to Itchy & Scratchy Land turns disastrous when the robots malfunction and turn on the tourists.” That made me think of a movie I’ve seen a few times, now what was it called? Aha! It’s Westworld. Another trip to IMDb revealed that our phrase was used as the tagline for that film. And you can hear it sp-sp-spoken in the trailer: https://www.imdb.com/video/vi2605037593/?playlistId=tt0070909. In cae you’ve never seen it I won’t spoil it but suffice to say, things do go horribly worng!

The misspelling of the last word explains why there are some misprints and I didn’t realise until writing this that they are all 5-letters long and have their second and third letters swapped. It’s quite late on Monday night so I’m not going to be able to weed them all out but I have managed to identify some of them bleow.

On to the end game, I stared at the grid for ages and all it did was stare back. I had to call in elmac, who’s no longer elmac since she became an O’Donoghue earlier this year. She managed to find two occurrences of ROBOT in the bottom left of the grid. After that I found REFIT at the top of the grid. So it seems we have to remove two ROBOTs and replace another one after a REFIT.

Finally, we have to write WESTWORLD (9 letters) below the grid.

In the table, I’ve presented the across clues twice to show the word that needs to be altered.

Finally, I never really got a handle on the four extra words in the down clues. I’ve tried to identify them but I’ve found five and they don’t make any sense to me. I’m sure that you’ll be able to help me out in with your comments.

A bit of a struggle but I got most of the way through. Many thanks to Ploy for the workout. Phew, again!

B