#5: The Predator

You know, I'm feeling pretty good right now. For one thing, I made a David Foster Wallace joke on an Animorphs blog and the universe didn't collapse in on itself. (Is there a Celebrity Animorph where DFW morphs into a lobster? Because there should be. Make it so, Internet.) For another thing, this is the book where Marco finally finds his motivation to fight the Yeerks and quits bitching at everyone for wanting to save the world.

In fact, he starts this book off playing Spider-Man, morphing gorilla to save a guy from being mugged in an alley. Unsurprisingly, the others are way nicer to him about this than he is when one of them uses their powers for something stupid.

The main plot of this book is introduced early: Ax wants to go home, so the plan is to send out a distress signal to a Yeerk spaceship, then hijack the spaceship. Nothing can possibly go wrong with this plan. To do this, they'll need to go to Radio Shack (???) for parts. They go to the mall, where Ax freaks out about his newfound sense of taste, and causes general chaos. They escape by running into a nearby supermarket, morphing lobsters, and hiding out in the lobster tank. Unfortunately, all three are purchased and taken to some woman's house, where they demorph just in time to not be boiled alive.

Ax builds the distress beacon from the parts they bought, but will need a Z-space transponder. Since they've already seen Chapman's setup that he uses to communicate with Visser Three, they figure they can sneak back into his basement and steal the transponder. Luckily, Chapman's next-door neighbors recently moved away. So the Animorphs gather in their backyard to morph ants. Not that they couldn't have done it in Chapman's own backyard; they spent half of book two running around there, chasing cats and shrews, and they weren't noticed at all. Hell, Ax rampaged half-Andalite through a crowded mall and Jake and Marco turned from lobster to human right in front of some random lady who could've been a Controller, and nothing happened. They're taking some huge risks in this book, even compared to past books. Here's a random thought: if Animorphs took place today, there might be a subplot in which a Google Earth satellite catches one or several of them mid-morph, and they could wind up on one of those top-ten lists of weird Google Earth images.

Anyway, they morph ant, sneak into Chapman's basement, get the transponder, carry it out as ants, and everything's going pretty well - give or take some freaking out over the ants' lack of individuality - until an enemy colony of ants starts attacking them. They demorph underground, exploding out of the soil of Chapman's backyard. They get away with the transponder and some new nightmare fuel.

Marco tells Jake that this is his last mission, like he does practically every mission. But he really means it this time! Because that Sunday, it'll be two years to the day since his mother went out sailing alone in the choppy seas, and there was a storm, and the boat crashed, and her body was mysteriously never found. And that has no relevance to this story at all except that Marco doesn't want to put his dad through that again.

So that Saturday, they fly to the bottom of a rock quarry in the middle of the woods to get Large's mom's necklace back call down a Yeerk spaceship. They're all in their battle morphs (except Ax, who's in his own Andalite form), ready to attack the at least one Hork-Bajir and Taxxon each that they know are inside. Unfortunately, guess who else is there? Yup: Visser Three. The Yeerks may be pretty stupid, but they (sometimes) know a trap when they see one, and now a hundred Hork-Bajir-Controllers are herding the kids into the Blade ship.

Visser Three takes them to the mother ship (ha!) to parade them in front of his boss, Visser One. Visser One, who has a human host. And you will never guess who that host is! The Vissers can tell that something about Visser One is completely freaking the gorilla out, but Jake talks Marco down from doing anything rash. None of the other Animorphs have seen Marco's mom before. Marco makes Jake promise not to tell them anything. Meanwhile, the Vissers snipe at each other. V1 calls V3 "criminally incompetent," which, yeah, finally someone says it. Then she leaves, and Visser Three almost kinda sorta figures out that they're not all Andalites, then just kind of shrugs and has them transferred to a holding cell without any windows or cameras in it because criminal incompetence.

They're about to morph ants to try and escape when several of Visser One's Hork-Bajir appear and calmly explain how to get to the escape pod which has been programmed to bring them back home. Visser One's helping them escape to sabotage Visser Three's political ambitions. Yeerk in-fighting saves the day! They fight their way through a bunch of V3's Hork-Bajir, and demorph in the escape pod, which conveniently enough also has no windows or cameras in it.

That Sunday, Marco and his dad visit his mom's gravestone. His dad apologizes for the way he fell apart, and promises to be a better father. He's talking to his old boss about going back to his engineering job. They laugh, they cry, Marco silently vows to find his mother and bring her back. It's a pretty tearjerking scene.

Commentary:
We get a fuller picture of Yeerk politics in this book. We find out how many Vissers there are, and learn a little about the hierarchy, and find out that each Visser has his/her own army with his/her own colors. We see the mother ship, hear our first reference to the Council of Thirteen, and even get a glimpse of political maneuvering. And of course, we find out that Visser One's host is Marco's mom - a huge revelation. These new details about the Yeerks are so tantalizing, and the big reveal is so intense, that it's unfortunate that all of this comes in way towards the end of the book. Too much of the book is spent on Ax's hijinks and not enough on the mother ship. Also, the cover says there's an Animorphs decal inside, but I never got an Animorphs decal. Grumble, grumble.

Come back next week for my review of Animorphs #6: The Capture!