On the micro level, Rachel is given a choice to move halfway across the country to be with her father. He's a TV news anchor, and he's gotten an exciting new job at a local station in some mystery city a thousand miles away. Rachel's dad is going to be lonely in this new city and really wants Rachel to come along. Even though she only sees her dad every other weekend since the divorce, they're very close. She once overheard him tell her mother that he used to want a son, but didn't anymore because Rachel was "tougher than any boy." More evidence for my former-tomboy theory! He tells her she could train professionally with gymnastics coach Carla Belnikoff, whose students have won Olympic medals. Rachel argues that she's too tall and not good enough to be an Olympic gymnast, but her dad insists. Given how many times she's talked about falling off the balance beam, and her loathing of gymnastics exhibitions established in book three, I think he may be letting his love for his daughter blind him just a wee bit. In any case, he has no idea that he's just offered Rachel a way out of the intergalactic war that's already beginning to traumatize her.
Speaking of, Tobias and Marco have been doing some spywork and discovered a new way into the Yeerk pool, and they want to go down there and kick some ass. Yeah, although Marco's generally the cautious one, for some bizarre reason he's been way more into the war than usual lately. And Tobias never stopped wanting to blow up the Yeerk pool. They didn't tell Jake they were doing this spying because he's still quite shaken up about his time as a Controller in the last book. Trouble is, the others (except for Ax) remember what it was like in the Yeerk pool way back in book one and don't particularly want to go back there - at least not without a plan. That's when Rachel starts asking Ax questions about this Kandrona they've heard so much about.
[The Kandrona is a miniature version of the Yeerks' home sun. It emits Kandrona rays, which concentrate in the Yeerk pools. It is what nourishes the Yeerks. That is why the Yeerks must swim in their natural state in the Yeerk pool every three days - they need Kandrona rays.... But the Kandrona may be many miles away from the Yeerk pool... The Kandrona rays may be beamed to the pool from almost anywhere. So, although I am in favor of attacking the Yeerk pool, we should not do it expecting to find the Kandrona there.]I'd be interested to know how they beam these Kandrona rays down into the pool from a Kandrona that could be miles away. I'm no physicist, but I'm not sure that's how beams of light work. In any case, they can do some serious damage to the Yeerks by finding and destroying this Kandrona, and their only lead is the Yeerk pool, so they decide to go back down there in roach morph to do some spying.
The night before they go, Rachel finds out about her dad and escapes her problems by going flying. She confides in Tobias, making him feel awful in the process because even the possibility of a normal teenage life is out of the question for him. Wracked with guilt and anxiety, she decides that if she's going back into the Yeerk pool, she'll need more compact firepower than her massive elephant morph, so she flies into The Gardens and acquires a grizzly bear. This will be her primary battle morph for the entire rest of the series.
The new entrance to the pool is, unsurprisingly since everything having to do with the Yeerks must ultimately be a metaphor for suburban conformity, in the mall: specifically, a fitting room in The Gap. The kids have this whole big elaborate plan: they pretend to randomly run into each other at the mall, converge on the fitting rooms, then everyone morphs roach except for Jake, who collects all their clothes in a duffel bag which he deposits in a coin locker. Then Jake comes back and morphs roach himself, leaving his own clothing behind. Which is probably a little suspicious, since Controllers are coming in and out of these fitting rooms all the time and I'm assuming at least one Controller works at the store. But it's the most they've done to cover their tracks so far.
They manage to get into the Yeerk pool and their cockroach senses smell food, so they go there. I'm not sure why. They're not overcome by the roaches' instincts, they're just like, "Yay, french fries!" I don't know why they think heading towards food will lead them to information about the Kandrona; you'd think they'd want to find some kind of main office or meeting room (or the Yeerk equivalents thereof) where they might overhear various head honchos talking tactics and Kandronas. Instead they find themselves in a sort of Controller cafeteria where an ever-hungry Taxxon assumes they're on the menu. They're about to be gobbled up, and then time freezes.
They demorph and wander into the main area of the Yeerk pool, where they see Tobias restored to human form. Then the being that froze time reveals itself: the Ellimist. He appears to them as a sort of glowing blue Gandalf, although it's pretty obvious he could look however the hell he wanted. This book describes multiple "Ellimists," an entire race of godlike beings, but later books will contradict that and establish that he is, in fact, the only one. He also has a certain connection with the evil red eye that Jake saw at the end of book six, but we don't know that yet. Anyway, the Ellimist tells them that they must decide the fate of the human race.
"We do not interfere in the private affairs of other beings," he said. "But when they are in danger of becoming extinct, we step in to save a few members. We love life. All life, but especially sentient life forms, like Homo sapiens. Your species. This is a very beautiful planet. A priceless work of art."Then the Ellimist takes them on a grand tour of everything that's beautiful about Earth. One thing that kind of annoys me about this series is how all the aliens gush over how awesome Earth is. Because apparently every other planet has much less diversity of life. Which doesn't make sense, because if you've got complex creatures, you pretty much have to have a wide diversity of lower-level life to sustain them. You can't have, like, three creatures on a planet and they're all super-complex. Anyway. The Ellimist tells them that the Yeerks will definitely take over Earth, no doubt about it, and offers to take the Animorphs, their families, and "a few others, chosen to get a good genetic sampling," to another planet where they can live in peace and repopulate the non-Controller human race. Now, you may ask yourself: if the Ellimist loves the rest of the planet so much, why is he offering to save only one species? This is not a plothole. This is the Ellimist being the Ellimist. But we'll find that out later.
Cassie wants to take him up on his offer, but she's the only one. They ultimately vote no, but while they're deciding, they notice a sort of dropshaft that Controllers can take to rapidly enter and exit the Yeerk pool. The Ellimist tells them that if they live, he will ask once more. Then they are returned to their roach bodies in the Taxxon's digestive tract, panic, and demorph inside him, bursting out in their human bodies in front of a cafeteria full of Controllers. Seriously, how have they not been caught yet? They run into the main area, Marco and Cassie make it up the dropshaft while Jake, Ax, and Rachel fight Controllers on the ground. Conveniently, all the Controllers are focused on Ax so they apparently don't notice the human teenagers morphing into a tiger and a grizzly bear. Rachel loses control of the grizzly and when she comes to, she's attacking Jake. She snaps back, and demorphs in the dropshaft, which leads them to a concrete platform at the base of a water tower behind their school.
Rachel wanders home and instantly falls asleep in her leotard. The next morning, her mother is concerned about her odd behavior as of late. She skips school and spends most of the afternoon in bald eagle morph, flying around to try to forget her problems. When she meets up with the others at Cassie's barn after school, they figure out something's going on with her. Acquiring a grizzly bear alone, without any backup; skipping school; spending all afternoon in morph... they're concerned. She responds to this concern by blowing up at them.
"It's like... what am I supposed to do?!" I yelled. "After what happened last night... after all that, I have to decide who I want to hurt - my mom or my dad? And you guys? And -"She's spent the past six books building a reputation as a fearless warrior because she's quick to anger and gets excited about fighting aliens, but at heart she's still just a kid, no more immune to fear than any of the rest of them. Marco, noticing that even Rachel is "losing it," changes his vote. "But I have some conditions first. There are some people going with me. But if the Ellimist can save those people along with me, then I have to say yes." Presumably, he's talking about his mother, who is his only reason for fighting. With Ax abstaining (since he feels this should be a human decision), Marco and Cassie voting yes, and Tobias and Jake voting no, Rachel is the deciding vote. Of course, the Ellimist shows up again to take them on another tour. But this time, the tour's a little different.
"Come on, Rachel," Marco said kindly. "Take it easy. Come on, you're Xena -"
"NO! No, I'm not some stupid TV character. I'm not some comic book, Marco. I'm scared, okay?! Just like all the rest of you. I'm scared of what almost happened to me last night. I'm scared just knowing that place exists down there. I'm scared about what happens to me. I just wanted to run away but I didn't think I could, so I was brave because that's the way I'm supposed to be. But now everyone's going, 'Oh, just come live with me and we'll go to ball games,' and 'Hey, forget moving to another state, we have a whole other planet for you.' And the more exits I see, the more scared I get, all right?"
He transports them to a blasted hellscape that they recognize as their town, in the future. Their school is destroyed and strewn with human skeletons. The mall has been turned into a Taxxon hive. All the buildings downtown have been torn down, except for the EGS Tower (which is a pretty specific landmark to mention if you're trying to hide where you live, but whatevs) which is topped with a glass dome for some strange reason.
Of course, Visser Three shows up. Except he's Visser One now. And along with him comes a beautiful twenty-something blonde woman - Rachel in the future. She knew they'd be there now, because she'd been there before. They taunt the Animorphs about how they made the right choice to keep fighting; the Yeerks won and turned all the kids into Controllers, except for Tobias, whom they cooked and ate with barbeque sauce. Children's book! But something's off: they refer to "six humans" and seem surprised to see Ax there. Present-Rachel figures out that something about the timeline is different. Furthermore, Visser Three/One can't kill the Animorphs, or his future won't happen - but they can kill him. They start to morph, but before they kill him, the Ellimist snaps them back into the woods behind Cassie's farm, back in their own time.
They change their answer to yes. But the Ellimist doesn't respond. Nothing happens, no one is transported to a different planet. The next day at school, Rachel and Cassie get into a debate about changing history and with their history teacher, Ms. Paloma, who mentions the butterfly effect and then briefly appears to be hypnotized. That night, Rachel puts everything together and calls a barn meeting in the middle of the night.
"He's in a trap," Cassie said. "The Ellimist is trapped. He wants to save Earth. But he can't interfere directly. Supposedly all he's allowed to do is offer to save a small number of us. But he knows that won't save Earth. It will save a few humans, yes, but when he showed us visions of Earth, he wasn't talking just about humans. He said Earth was a work of art. He wants to find a way to save it."They head to the EGS Tower immediately. There's a humorous scene where all of them in their battle morphs are squeezed into an elevator, complete with elevator music. But what follows is the most graphically violent fight scene in the series so far. It's seriously shocking. I know I'm quoting this book a lot, but I just can't help myself here:
"Without interfering directly," I agreed. "But what if we just happened to see another way? What if the Ellimist showed us the future, trying to convince us to let him take us away, and we just happened to see a way out?"
"What way out?" Jake demanded.
"The Kandrona. He let us see where the Kandrona is," I said. "That Yeerk pool downtown, that's the key. Why build a Yeerk pool downtown? Why level so many buildings to make room for it? Why leave the EGS Tower still standing? And why is there a glass dome on the top floors of the EGS? Ax is the one who said it - the Yeerk pool is the center of their lives. That Yeerk pool? I think it's a shrine. Almost a holy place to them. It's where they located the first Kandrona to be placed on planet Earth."
Jake snapped his fingers, "The EGS Tower!" "That's what's under that dome on the top floors. The Kandrona. That's what the Ellimist wanted us to see. Just the way he let us see the dropshaft we used to escape. He wasn't interfering... technically. The choice is still ours."
I saw Cassie, with her bone-breaking jaws sunk into the throat of a Hork-Bajir.Jesus fucking Christ.
I saw Ax, his tail like a deadly bullwhip, lashing, cutting, lashing again, till one of the Hork-Bajir stood screaming, holding his own severed arm.
I saw Jake and a Hork-Bajir locked in a deadly embrace as they rolled and slashed at each other with superhuman speed.
I saw Marco fighting with one arm as he held his own sliced stomach together with the other hand.
And everywhere, snarling, growling, raging, roaring noise. ...
I couldn't tell who was winning. I couldn't tell who was hurt. It all became one long cry, one long scream of rage. Hork-Bajir and Animorph.
Alien and animal.
We were flesh-and-blood creatures thrown into a meat grinder. Thirteen deadly animals locked in a combat to the death.
They win the battle, killing five of the Hork-Bajir guards and scaring off the other three, but are seriously injured. Rachel's left paw, for instance, is a bloody stump. Thankfully, demorphing heals (phyiscal) wounds. They demorph and find the Kandrona: a machine the size of a small car, in a bare room with the windows blocked by heavy curtains. The Kandrona doesn't appear to be emitting any rays, so I suppose it must be a Kandrona-generating machine hooked up somehow to a bunch of smaller ray-emitters located in the Yeerk pool itself, and that's how that all works. Rachel morphs elephant for the strength, and pushes it out the window, sixty stories to the street below.
The Ellimist comes back to inform them that a replacement Kandrona is already on its way, and will arrive in three weeks. And of course, there's still the Kandrona on the Yeerk mother ship. But Ax points out that three weeks without an Earth-based Kandrona is still a pretty big blow to the Yeerks, if not a game-changer. No matter how powerful the Ellimist is, he can't know every possible future. Every little thing changes the future; hope is not lost. The Animorphs stay on Earth and fight, and Rachel stays with her family as her father leaves for his new job.
Commentary:
I think this might be my favorite book so far. It feels like a real turning point for the series: it's darker, bloodier, and more thoughtful than any of the books that preceded it. Rachel gets some good character development, and we really see the emotional impact the war is having on the kids. Of course, we are also introduced to the borderline-omnipotent Ellimist and his generally-nice-but-also-completely-maddening ways. Another wonderful thing about this book is that Visser Three is nowhere in it. Seriously, this is the first Animorphs book where Visser Three doesn't show up and do his little Bond villain act. That automatically ups the seriousness by at least 50%.
As I mentioned before, this is also the first time they struggle with a major ethical issue: do they stay and fight a hopeless battle, or save whom they can? Notably, they make the "wrong" choice, but the Ellimist doesn't let them do that because that wasn't the answer he was looking for. But they don't make that choice out of cowardice: Cassie, the first one to decide they should leave, is influenced by her environmentalism. She sees them like the sick animals in her barn who bite the very people who are trying to save them. The rest eventually succumb to pragmatism: saving a few humans is better than saving none at all. It's a more mature decision-making process than one would expect of a kid superhero story. They only decide they can beat the odds when shown a Bad Future wherein Ax never joined up, and when they figure out that the Ellimist is helping them along. Even so, the ending is fairly ambiguous: they did only a little to harm the Yeerks, and have only a sliver of hope that they can actually save humanity in the end.
Something pretty disappointing is implied in this book: there's apparently only one Yeerk pool on the entire planet, and it's located in the Animorphs' hometown. This is why I want their hometown to be D.C. And considering how many times this book repeats the "butterfly flapping its wings in China" thing, I like to think the other Kandrona was planned for Beijing. I mean, if you're gonna take over the planet, take over the planet, not just one freaking town.
Come back next Monday for wacky summertime adventures when I review Megamorphs #1: The Andalite's Gift!
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