There's a whole lot in Michael David's puzzle thematically: ten TRADITIONAL ANNIVERSARY GIFTS, plus the three-word revealer. ONE LOVE paralleling DIAMOND is nice, and the way some of the answers loosely float around and in one case correspond to their clue numbers is kind of neat. The grid and the fill are fine.
So why is Rex unexcited, and why do I share his lack of excitement? One possibility is that there's not a nice subsurface meaning today there was on Monday and Tuesday.
THE END IS NEAR! revealer on Monday is a vivid phrase that I feel like I've seen in five New Yorker cartoons over my lifetime, and the prosaic NEAR phrases above are a pleasant debunking of the apocalyptic revealer, just as NYer cartoon captions are.
The hidden fish on Tuesday along with the array of devices used to catch them evoke a pleasant sense that fish are indeed elusive creatures, gliding and hiding in the vast watery surfaces just as PERCH, BASS, etc. do in their long across answers.
Today, on the other hand, I don't sense something below the surface of the theme that bubbles up pleasantly. Instead, for all but the most conscientious, benevolent, and generous married man, the theme evokes a less than pleasant underlying sense of husbandly duties unfulfilled.
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