Spoiler warning: today, I will be giving away a few key answers—although I’ll stop short of giving you the final meta answer.
Key answers running along the top and bottom of the outside of the S…
…read, in order, as follows:
THE DESIGN IN THIS GRID HAS / THIRTEEN / SETS AND EACH / ONE IS SIX / MISSING A SEVENTH / AFTER FINDING WHAT ISN’T IN EACH SET / TAKE THE FIRST LETTER OF EACH MISSING LIST ITEM TO SPELL A TWO-WORD PHRASE ONE SIX LETTERS LONG ONE SEVEN LETTERS LONG THAT COULD DESCRIBE A CROSSWORD.
I had the idea for an “all sixes and sevens” theme lying around for a while. I thought I might use it in a suite of 6x6 and 7x7 puzzles, but I realized it’d fit better here, and “S” called for its use. Executing it, though, was not easy!
You can probably think of a few sets of items that are definitely just seven things, no more, no less. The characters in The Magnificent Seven, for example, or The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, or the seven episodes of the FX TV series The Old Man. Or The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.
Kidding, kidding. I did not use any of those. But I did use colors, continents, and every other set of seven I could think of.
One “set of seven” that I considered but couldn’t use was the seven basic plots. There’s a theory going around that every story can be reduced to one of seven formulas, as espoused in Christopher Booker’s book The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories. However, some claim the number is actually twenty, or thirty-six, or two.
For the same reason, I quickly decided against using the Justice League. They’re familiar to the general public, and in many of the comics and cartoons, the founding members are seven strong. In the live-action movie, though, they number six—and even when they’re seven, they’re not always quite the same seven. It’s true that if I listed GREEN LANTERN, FLASH, BATMAN, HAWKWOMAN, and WONDER WOMAN, you could probably tell that SUPERMAN was the missing jigsaw piece. But only an inarguable group of seven felt like it belonged in the metapuzzle.
I came up with thirteen groups I could use—fourteen, actually, and I forget which one of them I left out. I don’t think I could have come up with many more; my brain was creaking by the time I called off the search. And I wasn’t sure I’d be able to spell anything with the resulting groups of six and seven letters. The fact that I found a common phrase describing a crossword, which hasn’t been used as a meta answer before to the best of my knowledge, was insanely lucky. It felt like God Himself—the Word of the Cross—was guiding my crossword that day.
Reassuring, since more often, puzzlers end up feeling like the devil!