Kevin's Puzzles at Home Season 5: FINAL RESULTS!

FINAL SCORES

Here is a table of all of the participants and their scores (click to enlarge):

Participants are sorted by score (high to low), and then alphabetically (A to Z). The total number of points scored 8550. Thus, the final money pool for the Food Bank for Larimer County is $85.50. Four anonymous benefactors have agreed to match this donation, meaning that the Food Bank for Larimer County will actually receive $427.50. The total amount of money raised by Kevin's Puzzles at Home for various food banks now stands at $1,759.50.

Head below the break for the actual solutions! If you're looking for more easy-ish puzzles in this style, remember to visit the actual Kevin's website every single Monday, or come back to this site in January 2024 when I plan to launch Season 6! Seasons 6 and 7 are already written, putting me quite a bit ahead of the curve! Hope y'all enjoy them!

SEASON 5, EPISODE 1:
VEG OUT

The six vegetables, helpfully depicted in alphabetical order, are ARTICHOKE, CAULIFLOWER, CELERY, CORN, EGGPLANT, and ONION. Each has a unique length, and fits in one of the rows: 

One of the columns spells the final answer HUNGRY.

Author's note: One solver, a longtime furry, asked why a wolf would have vegetables in his kitchen in the first place. The correct answer is "so he can use them in a puzzle".

SEASON 5, EPISODE 2:
BASEBALL BAFFLER

When the baseballs and bats are interpreted as dots and dashes in Morse code, they spell RED SOX CITY, a clue for the final answer BOSTON.

Author's note: If you want to be successful at instructionless puzzles like this, a key piece of advice is to "learn to code". Even if you haven't memorized Morse code or many of the other common ciphers, merely recognizing them, particularly when they're disguised as baseballs and bats, will get you far.

SEASON 5, EPISODE 3:
MUSICAL ARRANGEMENT

When the letters in each column are properly arranged, eight musical instruments read across the rows:

The letters in the unclued shaded column spell another musical instrument, the final answer DULCIMER.

Author's note: In the earliest and roughest draft, CELLO started in column 4, creating a spot which could also theoretically spell ORGAN. Moving CELLO one column to the right seems to have eliminated such unintended difficulties.

SEASON 5, EPISODE 4:
THE NAME GAME

Each trio of famous individuals shares the same first name:
Burnett, Channing, Kane: Carol
Griffith, Samberg, Warhol: Andy
Dreyfuss, Gere, Nixon: Richard
Colbert, Hawking, King: Stephen
de la Hoya, de la Renta, Wilde: Oscar
Grace, Pelosi, Reagan: Nancy
Darwin, Dickens, Lindbergh: Charles
Rickman, Thicke, Turing: Alan
Baio, Bakula, Joplin: Scott
Hunt, Keller, Reddy: Helen
Attenborough, Bowie, Letterman: David
Murphy, Van Halen, Vedder: Eddie
McCartney, Rudd, Simon: Paul
Dinklage, Frampton, Jackson: Peter
The first letters of these first names spell CARSON CASH DEPP, a trio of surnames cluing the final answer JOHNNY.

Author's note: I don't know why, but finding trios of extremely famous people with the same first name was more difficult than I thought it would be.

SEASON 5, EPISODE 5:
THE CONCISE CINEMA CRITIC

The films which Kevin reviewed are:
GHOSTBUSTERS
HOOK
CASABLANCA
FROZEN
CADDYSHACK
CASINO
BAMBI
RATATOUILLE
JAWS
INCEPTION
ROCKY
TITANIC
HALLOWEEN
MEMENTO
SHREK
BEETLEJUICE
MATILDA
MADAGASCAR
Kevin gave each film an “X out of Y” score, in which the second number is the number of letters in the film’s title. Indexing into each title by the first number (for example, taking the 2nd letter in GHOSTBUSTERS) yields the clue phrase HONEY I BLANK THE KIDS. The word which completes this film title is the final answer SHRUNK.

Author's note: That final S prevents the answer from being BLEW UP.

SEASON 5, EPISODE 6:
NINE LETTERS, ALL ALONE

This is a standard Sudoku puzzle, but with letters instead of numbers. The unique solution is shown below:  

The main diagonal spells the final answer RATIONALE.

Author's note: This is the "We have X at home" version of Nine by Nine and Japanese Test.

SEASON 5, EPISODE 7:
CROSSWORD EXAMINATION

The clue answers are HASH, HEED, IOWA, SHIN, SWIM, DEFOE, HONDA, HEAVEN, REGGIE, ASHAMED, CHEETAH, DISTRACT, STRENGTH, and WOODCHIPPER, which fit into the crisscross grid in only one way:

When the letters are transferred to the correspondingly-numbered blanks, they spell the question “WHAT IS THE NAME OF THE RED ECHIDNA WHO APPEARS IN THE ‘SONIC THE HEDGEHOG’ VIDEO GAMES?” This clues the final answer KNUCKLES.

Author's note: In an early draft of this puzzle, the I in WOODCHIPPER corresponded to the I in IN, meaning that you could fill in the wrong preposition ON and get WOODCHOPPER instead (which refers to a person, not a machine). I switched some numbers around to prevent this.

SEASON 5, EPISODE 8:
“FIVE” GOT A PROBLEM

The unique solution to the Pentominous puzzle is shown below:

As hinted at by the shaded regions in the example and by “completely clueless” in the flavortext, the regions containing none of the initial clues spell the final answer WITTY.

Author's note: With only 11 early solves, this was one of the toughest KPAH puzzles in history, partly because the Pentominous puzzle can be intimidating for newbies, and partly because the hints to the answer extraction mechanism are very subtle. 6 solvers had their perfect score streaks killed by this puzzle! If you want more puzzles like this with artisanal themes, check out the e-book Plenty o' Pentominous 3 which I co-authored with Murat Can Tonta. Also, this is unrelated to the puzzle itself, but I like the idea that Kevin held in his pee for 7 weeks just to make a sophomoric joke in the illustration.

SEASON 5, EPISODE 9:
THE WORDS OF THE PROFITS

The flavortext mentions that Kevin’s wholesaler sells an A for a penny (1¢), an E for a nickel (5¢), a J for a dime (10¢), and a Y for a quarter (25¢). The solver can thus infer that the price for every letter is its position in the alphabet (A is 1¢, B is 2¢, C is 3¢, and so on). Calculating the total price of the letters in each answer, it can be seen that these amounts are indeed less than the $1 Kevin sells them for, and thus one can subtract to determine Kevin’s profit margin for each answer:
Crossword Examination: KNUCKLES=11¢+14¢+21¢+3¢+11¢+12¢+5¢+19¢=96¢ (4¢ [D] profit)
Baseball Baffler: BOSTON=2¢+15¢+19¢+20¢+15¢+14¢=85¢ (15¢ [O] profit)
Veg Out: HUNGRY=8¢+21¢+14¢+7¢+18¢+25¢=93¢ (7¢ [G] profit)
Nine Letters, All Alone: RATIONALE=18¢+1¢+20¢+9¢+15¢+14¢+1¢+12¢+5¢=95¢ (5¢ [E] profit)
“Five” Got a Problem: WITTY=23¢+9¢+20¢+20¢+25¢=97¢ (3¢ [C] profit)
Musical Arrangement: DULCIMER=4¢+21¢+12¢+3¢+9¢+13¢+5¢+18¢=85¢ (15¢ [O] profit)
The Concise Cinema Critic: SHRUNK=19¢+8¢+18¢+21¢+14¢+11¢=91¢ (9¢ [I] profit)
The Name Game: JOHNNY=10¢+15¢+8¢+14¢+14¢+25¢=86¢ (14¢ [N] profit)
Converting these profit margins back into letters yields what Kevin plans to buy with his newfound wealth, the final answer DOGECOIN.

Author's note: The concept for this meta was largely inspired by the concept of "dollar words", which I was introduced to decades ago via the seminal book Math for Smarty Pants by Marilyn Burns, though it might have predated that book. An earlier concept, titled "At a Loss for Words", would have involved words which total up to more than $1, but this flavor seemed to work better.