French skin-care and cosmetics giant / SUN 2-6-22 / Score of 8 in golf slang / Social media star Addison / The better of two sci-fi film franchises / Family name on TV's succession / The volcano Emi Koussi is its highest point / Skin-care brand with an accent over its last letter

And it took this long only because I didn't even bother to actually look at what 70-Across was before going up and getting REBEL ALLIANCE. As soon as I saw the revealer clue, with its apparently trolling question, I knew it was a Schrödinger. TREK fits. WARS fits. And sure enough, as soon as I tested the first Schrödinger letter (the "T" / "W"), both letters worked, and the whole puzzle was ... well, done, as far as any level of thematic interest was concerned. The rest of the puzzle is decorative, with "these just happen to be symmetrical" names / phrases populating the grid here and there. I think my favorite part of the grid was "It's a TRAP" (the "T" option in the TREK / WARS showdown), because it's a very famous line from ... "STAR WARS" (well, "Return of the Jedi," but close enough): 

I am also enjoying imagining that "STAR TREK" had a character named MRS. POCK. Beyond that, not a lot to love. I'm tired of the way franchises / sequels / children's fare dominates the box office, and I'm ... well, I'm not *tired* of Schrödinger puzzles, exactly; it's just that the bar is so high. Baiting nerds into a flame war ... doesn't seem like a worthy motivation for a Schrödinger. Also, this one was just far, far too easy to sniff out.

The skin-care answers today, yipes and yikes. I am waiting for my wife to solve the puzzle, because I don't think she'll know either of them, either, but we'll see. I can tell you that both are debuts, and it seems to me that if either were so sure-fire great, we'd've seen them by now. NARS in particular is just brutally ugly, as fill, as a word ... woof (36D: French skin-care and cosmetics giant). BIORÉ at least I've heard of (92A: Skin-care brand with an accent over its last letter). It rings a very faint bell, where NARS rings nothing. It sounds like a euphemism for where you kick a guy if you want to really hurt him. "Oof, right in the NARS!" Weird to go to the skin-care well twice like this, with both answers being absolutely new to the grid. Brands and movie franchises! And golf slang! (50A: Score of 8, in golf slang = SNOWMAN). Quite a day for "things I try not to think about." 

Not much in the way of difficulty today. Some names that meant nothing to me (a "social media star" (:/), a "Gossip Girl" actor), but the crosses were so easy I barely noticed them. I am doomed never to remember what MASERS are, but luckily crosses bailed me out there as well. I had TRUISM (?) before THEISM (59A: Capital-B Belief) and CORER before PARER (4D: Apple device), and I needed some crosses to get ANDERS (32A: Celsius of the Celsius scale), but otherwise I just flew through this. I would've said you SHIMMY up a pole, but that's apparently a famous mistake (72A: Climb (up) = SHINNY). Or perhaps no longer a mistake, but an accepted conflation. Here's University of Michigan English Professor Anne Curzan (with whom I went to grad school) explaining the curious history of the "shimmy" / "shinny" confusion. The other thing that baffled me was the LOCUS clue (31A: Points all around?). I think of LOCUS as one point, but it seems that in math it can mean all the points "satisfying a particular equation of the relation between coordinates"—so a parabola, for instance, can be a LOCUS. Pffft. Ok. Shrug. If I am still misunderstanding this clue, please don't bother to fill me in, as I no longer care. Good day.