HELP!

Peter A. Collins is the chairman of the math department at Huron High School, in Ann Arbor, Mich., where he has been teaching for 39 years. He has been creating crosswords for The Times since 2006. This is his 108th. When he can, Peter likes to incorporate some of the black squares into his puzzle themes, as he ingeniously does here.

It was key to this puzzle's construction (in my opinion, anyway) that all the middle "O" words in the S-O-S phrases were different. I used OLD, ON, OUT, OUR, OIL and OF. I don't know that I had a lot of other substantive possibilities.

The most trouble in filling the grid arose in the EASTER WEEK area. It took a few tries to get to this version, and in spite of IES and RSTLNE, Will, Joel, and I thought it was the best of the bunch.

In my early crossword construction days, I was so proud of making an M W out of black squares, hinting at the M* W* theme. But not a lot of friends actually noticed it.

Initialisms have been mined for so many crosswords over the years, including S O S itself. I like that Pete tried to go above and beyond, using a grid pattern that looked like S O S — I'd give it a 7 out of 10 on the recognition scale. If the central O had been more closed-up, it would have been unmissable.

Tough to close up the O any more, though. Perhaps "filling it in" with grayed-out squares, and having those three-letter answers be OOO? [Winning tic-tac-toe line] and [Ghostly moan]?

Amazing that Pete got the visual to work. The S can't get any smaller without creating two-letter words, and you can't move them any closer to the edges of the grid. Fascinating that it appears to be a singular solution.

So hard to fill around the S O S. A lesser constructor might have added black squares jutting off the S's, in order to help break up the surrounding fill. I like that Pete avoided this, working in sparkly goodness like KANSAS STATE, RADICCHIO, EASTER WEEK, OKAY SURE, etc.

There is a glut of gluey short fill — ABT AGRO ASON EDD EEC ENE ETO just to start — but given the technical constraints, it's understandable. Filling a grid like this is as difficult as filling a low-word-count themeless.

I would have liked something less straightforward fpr the theme. It'd have been fun to brainstorm a more clever and fun angle — maybe playing on the Morse code for SOS — DOT DOT DOT / DASH DASH DASH / DOT DOT DOT?

It's a neat grid, and I do like the phrases SNAKE OIL SALESMAN and SAME OLD STORY. But I wish the theme had been as neat. A bit too much like his previous Sunday initialisms puzzle, too.