Megamorphs #1: The Andalite's Gift

Let's be honest with ourselves here. Animorphs is a children's pulp series about teen superheroes. It's campy, it's unrealistic, its pages are littered with sound effects and dialogue like, " 'Arrrrgggghhh!' I yelled in frustration." The only reason I'm still talking about it a decade later is because many of the books rose above that.

This is not one of those books. This book is exactly what you think it is. It is not deep. It does not contain quandries about the ethics of war, or depictions of kids traumatized by horrors that kids should never know. This book contains a pool party, a dust monster from Saturn, and Easy Amnesia. This is actually the first Animorphs book that bored me so much I stopped reading in the middle and grudgingly came back to it a few days later, purely out of a sense of obligation to my three or so readers. I probably devoured it as a kid, but I had lower standards then.

The Megamorphs books (there were four of them by the end of the series) were supposed to be special adventures, longer than the normal Animorphs books and with multiple narrators. The other three feature time travel and alternate timelines and stuff, so that's another way in which they bust out of the usual format. This one, though, doesn't have any of that. I'm not totally sure why this particular story needed the expanded length and multiple perspectives. Of course, I'm not totally sure why this particular story needed to be told at all.

Basically, here's how it goes down: Rachel signed up for a weekend gymnastics camp before she got superpowers. She's going to go, but then calls and cancels at the last minute because Earth needs her help, but the others talk her into having at least the semblance of a normal life for two days. So her family and friends still think she's going, but the camp isn't expecting her. Just before leaving, she morphs bald eagle to fly to Tobias's meadow and say goodbye, but she flies a little too close to some baby blue jays. The flock gets angry and attacks her, and while trying to escape she hits her head against a tree and is knocked unconscious. When she comes to, she's half-human and freaking out because she has the kind of TV amnesia where you remember everything except who you are and your own life history, and also your ability to form new memories is not impacted in the least. She manages to calm herself down enough to demorph, figuring she's some kind of freak.

I have a lot of problems with this, starting with amnesia being an overused cliche that virtually never works like that. The thing is, if for some reason you really want to do Easy Amnesia, this is a universe where mind-controlling aliens exist. You could come up with some sci-fi explanation for how Rachel loses her memories of who she is without resorting to the eye-rolling "I hit my head really hard." Also, since injuries suffered in morph don't apply once you're de-morphed, why would the bald eagle's head trauma apply to Rachel's human brain? Especially if her perfectly intact human brain was controlling the bald eagle from Z-space? I mean, if Jake can use all his human brainpower while in the form of a flea, I don't see why Rachel's human brainpower would not be able to control a brain-damaged eagle. Now, if a spaceship had smashed into her body while it was passing through Z-space, I could see that being a serious problem. And that would be way more interesting and scary than being chased into a tree by a flock of friggin' blue jays. How lame is that? Seriously? She was a bald eagle.

So while this is happening, Marco crashes a pool party he wasn't invited to, dragging Ax along by promising him he'll do something to help Ax with his new flea problem. They're both mice, and while initially Marco just wants to eavesdrop on the girl throwing the party, he can't resist going a little further. He thought-speaks his own name into her head, and, thinking someone else mentioned Marco, she goes off on a rant about how immature and obnoxious he is. He proves her wrong by running over her toes and chasing her around the pool. Oh, Marco. Jake and Cassie, who were invited, immediately know what's up and try to contain the chaos/save their friends from being stomped on. Marco and Ax manage to race inside the house and down to the basement, where they demorph.

This is where things weird. A giant swirling dust storm with insane numbers of mouths and razor-sharp teeth appears out of nowhere, rips the house apart, almost kills everyone, and then disappears. It reappears in the forest as Rachel is morphing human and starts chasing after her. She runs to a highway where the monster destroys a Ben & Jerry's truck and then disappears again. The others see news footage of it, and Cassie immediately recognizes Rachel.

Rachel leaves the scene, wanders through the forest, and eventually stumbles upon a crazy old lady living in a shack. This woman is rambling about Yeerks. She seems to imply that the Yeerk that once controlled her died. I really wish we knew more about her - who she was before, how her Yeerk died, what happened. Maybe she ate maple-ginger oatmeal. (If you haven't read all the books yet... you'll see.) Anyway, the woman becomes convinced that Rachel is a Controller, locks her in the cold cellar beneath the shack, and lights the entire place on fire. But something inside Rachel knows to morph grizzly bear.

Meanwhile, Jake, Marco, Tobias, and Ax grab a shirt Rachel left at Cassie's one time, go to the place where the truck was destroyed, and use it to track her scent as wolves. Of course, as soon as they start morphing, the dust monster appears and starts attacking them. They run away, leading the monster on a chase through the woods, then suddenly turns around and makes a beeline for the burning shack. It attacks Rachel, and Rachel tries to fight back, but the monster shreds both her front paws. Ax shows up to save her, but realizes he can't do anything to stop it. Hoping to at least follow it and find out where it lives, he starts to morph hawk. As soon as he does, the monster forgets about Rachel and goes after him. Instead of killing Ax, however, the monster wraps him up in a sort of cocoon and whisks him away.

Incidentally, Megamorphs #1 is the first time Ax narrates. He mentions for the first time that he is honor-bound to kill his brother's murderer, Visser Three. So conveniently (or not), the monster takes him right to the Blade Ship where the Yeerks lock him up in a metal box that can be made opaque or translucent on demand. Visser Three, in typical Bond villain fashion, explains exactly what's going on. The monster is a creature from Saturn which the Yeerks trained to detect the energy released during morphing, capture whoever released the energy, and take it back to the Blade Ship. Visser Three calls it the "Veleek," Yeerk for "pet." Didn't occur to me that Yeerks had the concept of pets. Did they have pets on their homeworld? How would that work?

Anyway, Ax has a potential opportunity to kill Visser Three, but doesn't. Even though he probably wouldn't be able to kill him, and would almost certainly die in the process, Ax beats himself up over failing his duty to his brother. This is one of three worthwhile things in this book. Also, because Ax is an Andalite, Visser Three haughtily dismisses forever the possibility - suggested by some of his underlings - that maybe the "Andalite terrorists" are human. Because it's not like he knows about an Andalite that survived in the Dome that crashed into the ocean and was rescued by a bunch of morph-capable beings whose true forms he never saw. Oh wait, yes he does, because he was there. Criminal incompetence.

Meanwhile, Cassie's at the mall. Why? "Jake had asked me to look in all the other places she might have gone. He'd said I would know best where she hung out." That's right: while the boys are turning into wolves and running from dust monsters and saving Rachel's life, Cassie's sent to the mall. She wanders around thinking about all the reasons this bothers her - Jake being "a little" sexist (a little?), her getting special treatment, her shameful relief at being in a safe place - when she sees Chapman. She morphs fly to spy on him and overhears a conversation between him and two other Controllers basically repeating the exact same information Visser Three told Ax, but with less detail. So that's kind of repetitive. Cassie tells everybody what's up at the barn and they figure they can tire the Veleek out by spreading out and constantly morphing, thereby making him chase them everywhere. They don't know for sure that it even can be tired out, but the very least, they'll distract it from Rachel.

By the way, Rachel survived the attack. Instead of becoming the bear version of the Handless Maiden, she morphs back to human. She still can't remember who she is, but she's at least figured out that she can morph. She follows a stream to a suburban housing development and finds an empty house to fall asleep in. Unfortunately, the neighbors saw her breaking in and called the cops. So she does what any of us would do: she morphs into an elephant and breaks the door frame rushing the cops. Of course, this morphing attracts the Veleek, which rips the house apart.

Back at Cassie's farm, the other Animorphs can see it headed that way, so they steal Cassie's dad's pickup truck. That poor guy. All he ever wanted to do was heal injured animals, and now his cell phone's been used to make a suspicious phone call to a Controller and his pickup truck's been stolen and totalled. You think running a wildlife hospital is a really lucrative career choice? You really think he's got the money for a brand-new pickup truck? He's probably still paying off his student loans from veterinary school.

Anyway, Marco "drives" the pickup truck. I put "drive" in quotation marks because, well, Marco cannot drive. This is the second worthwhile thing about this book, because the way he careens around the neighborhood with Jake and Cassie screaming in the backseat is actually really, really funny. Especially when he hits seven garbage cans (while driving on the sidewalk) and Jake yells, "Do you hate trash cans? Is that your problem? Do you just HATE TRASH CANS?!!" Miraculously, they make it to the housing development alive to find the Veleek trying, and failing, to lift Rachel in her elephant morph. Cassie jumps out to go to Rachel while Jake morphs tiger in the truck and Marco burns rubber, trying to lure the Veleek away.

They lead the Veleek onto a highway, then Marco takes the truck off-road, hoping it'll slow the Veleek down. Jake jumps off the truck and leads the Veleek on a merry chase through the woods, getting more and more exhausted while the Veleek doesn't slow down for a second. Just as it's about to grab Jake, though, it disintegrates and races somewhere else - see, Marco's just started morphing gorilla. And continues to drive. He crashes the truck right into Elephant!Rachel - which restores her memory, because of course it does. Bug fighters have shown up, shooting Dracon beams everywhere, and now he's led the Veleek right to Rachel and Cassie. Cassie bravely runs away and the Veleek picks up Marco and carries him to the Blade Ship.

Oh, and somehow the Yeerks are all watching this on some kind of holographic TV set, so Ax can know what's going on, but for some reason they never catch the kids morphing straight from human to animal. At this point, I've lost track of how many times they reveal their secret right in front of a bunch of Yeerks. They make Ax's box opaque, and he notices a flea on himself. (Aha! That was some good setup.) He acquires and morphs the flea, and by the time Visser Three orders his box made translucent again so Ax can see his friend's been captured, he can't see anything in there. The Controllers open the box, of course, and Ax jumps onto the nearest Controller, whom Visser Three immediately kills for being so damn stupid. To his credit, V3 recognizes that Ax could have morphed something small, so he demands that "bio-scanners" be brought in. (First mention! Although in later books it's referred to as a bio-filter, still, they're pretty obviously the same thing.)

Ax hatches a plan: he's on Visser Three, and he starts to demorph, causing the Veleek to attack V3. The Yeerks spray the Veleek with water while Marco opens the hatch to the ship. Apparently, the Veleek is actually a hive of extremely small insect-like creatures that all work together as one. Ax hops off V3 and onto Marco, and Marco jumps out of the ship, which is flying two miles above the Earth. Good plan! Marco just barely manages to demorph and remorph as an osprey seconds before hitting the pavement.

The next day, everybody meets up in the woods, no morphing allowed. Cassie's guilt-stricken over letting the Veleek take Marco when she could have morphed and drawn him to her. So she comes up with a plan and insists on doing it herself. And it involves a psychic whale! They go to the ocean, morph dolphin to attract the Veleek, and swim out to the nearest whale. As they suspected, the Veleek stays the hell away from the water, though he hovers above. With the others holding her just above the water so she doesn't drown, Cassie demorphs, acquires the whale, then immediately morphs cockroach and gets onto Tobias's back. He flies her as high as he can take her, then drops her onto the Veleek. She demorphs, then morphs whale in mid-air, as she's falling. (There's a lot of that in this book.) The Veleek wraps itself around her, but her whale form is far too heavy for it. They fall into the ocean, killing (?) the Veleek. Having achieved victory, Cassie sings a whale song of hope which she knows somehow despite having been a whale for about ten seconds.

Commentary:
Between the the unrealistic amnesia, the silly dust monster, and the return of Jesus Whale, this book is kind of cringe-worthy. There are some funny parts, and Cassie's heroics at the end are genuinely awesome. Actually, her character development from selfish fear to selfless courage, and the way she uses her natural morphing talent to save the day, is the third worthwhile thing in the book. It belongs in a better story, with a less ridiculous villain. Ideally, it should go in a Cassie book, where she doesn't have to share narration with five other people so her arc has more time to play out naturally. I'd also prefer that it not involve psychic whales. Overall, this one is eminently skippable.

Come back next Monday for my review of Animorphs #8: The Alien! Liun-uh. Nuh.

#7: The Stranger

The Stranger is all about choices, and it's not particularly subtle about that theme. So far, the Animorphs haven't done a whole lot of angsting about what the right thing to do is. Cassie expressed ethical concerns with morphing in book four, but she was alone in that and largely settled the issue by the end of the book. This is the first time the group as a whole is faced with a major dilemma and has to make a choice as a group. Oddly enough, the cover quote for this one is "This time there may be no way out..." which could not possibly be more wrong because the entire book is about them being handed "ways out" on silver platters and debating whether or not to take them.

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 -"

"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?"

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.

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."

"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."

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:

I saw Cassie, with her bone-breaking jaws sunk into the throat of a Hork-Bajir.

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.

Jesus fucking Christ.

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!

#6: The Capture

With the fifth book, we've completed a full cycle of Animorph narration. The original five members have all gotten a chance to show things from their perspective; we've established the setting, the characters and their motivations, and the war. Books six through ten expand the universe with new allies, insights, and complications. Already in The Capture, you see the kids start to get more cautious: Jake tries out a cockroach morph in his bedroom before using it on a mission - and even that level of carefulness isn't enough. He gets chewed out by the group for doing it alone. Clearly, they've learned from past experiences. They've all come terrifyingly close to death the past three books in a row - and in the last book, they were flat-out captured by Visser Three. If they're going to be even halfway successful at fighting this war, amateur hour needs to end yesterday.

So they get together in Marco's sweet new apartment (now that his dad is back at work, they got to move to a nicer place - and also his dad works late a lot, leaving Marco free to have all his friends and a hawk and an alien over) to morph cockroach and learn how to tell what someone's saying based on vibrations in the floor. They'll need this skill because Jake has figured out from spying on his Controller brother that the Yeerks have taken over a hospital, which they're presumably using to infest patients. Jake's still dealing with the fact that his brother is a Controller, and that he may have to face him in battle. Or that if the Animorphs succeed in shutting down the Yeerk hospital, Visser Three might kill Tom along with the Yeerk in his head. He's been having dreams where he hunts Tom as a tiger, but as soon as he catches him, Tom becomes the tiger and Jake the prey. So that's totally not metaphorical at all.

They use their new roach morphs to spy on a meeting of The Sharing. Visser Three shows up (of course) in human morph (maybe he learned something from Visser One in the last book) and announces that the governor of their state will be checking into their front hospital for minor surgery - and will check out a Controller. As if that wasn't terrifying enough, Rachel points out that their governor is planning to run for president next year. I like to imagine that Rachel knows so much about current events because her dad is a local news anchor, and she and her sisters watch his show every night. He probably gives them a little signal, like Carol Burnett tugging her earlobe.

Anyway, the Yeerks see the roaches and Visser Three figures out that they could be Andalites, so there's a massive rush to kill them. Jake is sprayed with bug spray and almost dies, but Tobias picks him up and flies him to a rooftop so he can demorph. I am getting guilty flashbacks to every house centipede I ever killed with Raid. I'm not sure how I could have done that after reading this chapter.

Even though Jake almost died from bug spray, the kids figure out when the governor's going to be there and morph flies to sneak into the hospital. That's another part of their growing up: even though they still think bugs are gross, even though insect morphs have almost killed them multiple times, they're far more willing to morph them because they know you can't beat a bug for spy work. Hence, two new bug morphs in one book. They get into the hospital and find a room where the Yeerks have turned a Jacuzzi into a mini-Yeerk pool. Jake decides to turn up the heat, boiling alive the hundred or so Yeerks that are in there. Cassie stands back and says nothing about this, because they still don't really think of Yeerks as people. But it's still kind of disturbing.

While Jake is committing mass murder, two Controller doctors walk in on them. A battle ensues, and before you know it, Jake is plunged, unconscious, into the boiling Yeerk pool. He wakes up with a massive headache. The others eventually cover his face (seriously, how have they not been found out yet?) and Marco carries him out in his massive gorilla arms (aww). But what they don't know is that Jake has been infested. And not just by any Yeerk - by Tom's former Yeerk, Temrash 114. Tom's been given to a lower-ranking Yeerk and Temrash has been promoted. He'd been intended for the governor.

After spending five books hearing about Yeerks, this is the first time we get to experience first-hand what it's like to be a Controller. And it is every bit as disturbing as you think. Luckily, Ax realizes what's happened basically as soon as he sees Jake. They decide to tie him up for three days in an old shack in the woods. If he's a Controller, the Yeerk will die of Kandrona starvation. If not, Jake will understand the need for carefulness. The fact that this all happens so quickly is fortunate for the Animorphs, but unfortunate for the story: it would have been nice to have at least a few chapters of tension, where maybe Jake's Yeerk starts to lead them all into a trap, and the reader worries that all the Animorphs will soon be infested. Of course, the only reason the plan works is because none of the other Yeerks know that Jake's been taken - or that Temrash isn't dead in the Jacuzzi with all the others. Really, this is the ideal scenario in which to get infested - insofar as there is such a thing.

Ax acquires Jake's DNA and the others coach him in Jakeology so he can pose as him for the three days. Which is incredibly risky - even if Ax manages to mimic Jake perfectly, he'll have to morph back to Andalite form every two hours. In the same house as a Controller. Will he sleep as an Andalite, risking discovery if some accident happens in the middle of the night? Or will he set an alarm every two hours throughout the night to demorph and morph back, which seems like a recipe for exhaustion and sleep deprivation? It would have been interesting to see these events from Ax's perspective: he pretty much just arrived on Earth and is still getting used to food and speaking with his mouth. Now suddenly he has to perfectly imitate a human. That's got to be an interesting learning experience. Unfortunately, all we get of this is a couple of throwaway jokes in the very last chapter about Ax-as-Jake eating everything and playing with words. So clearly he's not very good at pretending to be Jake, but Tom's new Yeerk doesn't seem to question it.

Anyway, as soon as Ax touches Jake to acquire him, Temrash freaks out and calls him "Andalite filth." That's all the confirmation the others need. But Temrash continues to try to convince the Animorphs that Jake isn't a Controller, focusing on Cassie because of her feelings for Jake. He also taunts Jake, replaying his embarrassing fantasies and making fun of them. Of course, because this is a children's book, the fantasy is of baskeball stardom instead of sex with Cassie, which is what Jake would probably be thinking about virtually nonstop if he was a real thirteen-year-old boy. Then he shows Jake Tom's memories and feelings. He reveals a broken teenage boy, sobbing inside his mind, begging the Yeerk to leave his little brother alone.

Several times Temrash tries to use Jake's morphing power to escape, but the Animorphs use what they've learned from past missions to thwart him. He morphs wolf, Cassie rides on his back as a flea like Jake did Rachel in book two, and then they lead him into the territory of the rival wolf pack from book three. He morphs ant, he runs into an ant colony that tears him apart, a la book five. Meanwhile, the knowledge that his friends are behind him fills Jake with hope, and he takes every opportunity to distract and annoy Temrash.

Temrash's arrogance gradually subsides; as he starves, he grows more confused. He gets weaker and weaker and starts thrashing in pain. Jake starts seeing flashes of Temrash's memories, involuntarily shared. He sees the Yeerk homeworld through the eyes of a Gedd, the Yeerks' first host and Temrash's too. He sees how Tom got infested. And then, just as Temrash dies, he sees something else:

A creature. Or a machine. Some combination of both. It had no arms. It sat still, as if unable to move, on a throne that was miles high.

Its head was a single eye. The eye turned slowly... left... right...

I trembled. I prayed it would not look my way.

And then it saw me.

The eye, the bloodred eye, looked straight at me.

It saw me.

It SAW me!

This is our first tantalizing glimpse of a major villain who won't be properly introduced for another twenty books. But his appearance here sets up a new character to appear in the very next book, although readers won't find out that they have anything to do with each other, again, for another twenty books. For now, feel free to shit your pants.

The dead Yeerk falls out of Jake's ear and shrivels away, and he is free. The Yeerks close the hospital down. And Jake calls Tom, disguising his voice by half-morphing wolf, to tell him not to give up. He uses Cassie's dad's cellphone for this, which would probably put Cassie's dad in an enormous amount of danger if Tom ever dialed *69. (Which he doesn't, for some reason.) I don't think K.A. understood how cell phones worked; just because they're wireless doesn't mean they're untraceable. They could at least call him from a payphone in the middle of the night. Oh well. Even if he'd covered his tracks better, it was still kind of a dumb thing to do. They're getting better at this, but they're still kids.

Commentary:
It's early on in the series, so the Yeerks are still pretty one-dimensional. Temrash doesn't have any of the depth or complexity we'll see from certain Yeerks we'll meet later on. Still, it's wonderfully creepy to have a firsthand look at what it's like to be a Controller. You really feel what it's like to be a prisoner in your own body, watching helplessly as you are used as a tool to destroy your friends. It's a real shame that Jake doesn't get infested until halfway through this book. That's the most interesting part, but instead of jumping right in we get a filler scene of Jake playing basketball with two friends who have never been seen before and will never be seen again, and an entirely pointless chapter where Rachel helps him shop for a birthday gift for his mom. Not only do these scenes not advance the plot, they don't even provide character development - which Jake could still sorely use. Those are pages that could have been put to much better use showing Temrash manipulating the other Animorphs, or slowly coming to terms with his mortality, or digging into Jake's thoughts and memories to reveal more character depth.

Even so, this book is an improvement over past books. The repetitive rhythm of the first four books - plan, scope out the location, get hurt, run home, re-plan, go back to the same location, get hurt, run home, re-plan again, come back again, kind of succeed this time - doesn't show up in the fifth and sixth books. There are different locations, different morphs, different strategies to liven things up. And even though Jake got infested, they managed to shut down that Controller factory of a hospital: a concrete victory in the war, only the second they've ever had and certainly the more significant of the two. (The other one was destroying the water transport ship in book three.)

This victory will embolden them - maybe a little too much - in Animorphs #7: The Stranger. (Next week on 'Political Animorphs'! Check your local listings!)

#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!

#4: The Message

So this is a pretty major book. The first book established the setting and characters, the second book explored the personal toll the invasion takes on regular people, and the third book gave us more insight into the experience of morphing, by way of showing us the consequences of staying too long in a morph. The Message is where the overarching plot of the series really starts taking off. See, there's one last member of the Animorphs team that hasn't been introduced yet. In this book, we meet him.

This is Cassie's first time narrating. Oddly enough, given that Cassie is the biggest animal lover of the group, her first book does not open with the Captain Planet antics that the last two did. Instead, we open on her standing alone in her barn - the Wildlife Rehabilitation Center - morphing a squirrel. Some predator has been sneaking in at night and eating the birds. Cassie thinks she might be able to crack the case by morphing a tiny prey animal, because, hell, Rachel made it out of her little shrew adventure alive, so why not? Oh, you kids and your suicidal plans.

Naturally, she loses control of the squirrel's strong fear instincts and almost gets killed twice - once by a fox (the culprit!) and once by Tobias, who has no idea the squirrel he's hunting is actually Cassie. Clearly, he's made a lot of progress since the last book in terms of living like a hawk. Cassie, however, recognizes that he's still a little sensitive about it. One of my favorite things about Cassie's narration is how much she tells us about the other characters' emotional states. She's so deeply empathetic, so keyed into everyone else's feelings, that Cassie's books often contain more insight into the other Animorphs than their own books. If she wasn't so clearly on her way to becoming a veterinarian like her parents (at least before she was dragged into an intergalactic war), she'd make a hell of a psychologist.

Anyway, Tobias apologizes and she says, "It's okay, my friend." Jake also called Tobias "my friend" in the last book and it made me wince. I guess they're trying to make him feel welcome, but it just makes them sound like John McCain. Cassie reveals to Tobias that she's been having weird dreams about the sea, and Tobias tells her he's been having the same dream: "a voice, calling out to you from beneath the water." Hmmm...

The next day after school, the Animorphs meet up in Rachel's room and Cassie and Tobias tell everybody about this strange, shared dream. Nobody else has had it. But Jake has a videotape: on the news last night, there was a segment about a piece of metal that washed up on the beach. There are strange symbols engraved in the metal - symbols that Jake recognizes from when he stepped into the Andalite's ship to retrieve the blue box. Upon seeing this, both Cassie and Tobias pass out and have even more vivid visions. It becomes clear that some Andalite, deep down in the ocean, is calling for help. Remembering Elfangor's kindness, the group unanimously agrees that they need to help this Andalite. Even Marco's down for it, even though he starts complaining once they actually get on the mission. Oh, Marco. As Cassie points out, "Marco is never happy unless he's complaining about something. Just like Rachel is never happy unless she has something to fight against. And Tobias is never happy, period. He thinks if he's ever happy, someone will come along and take his happiness away." See what I mean about the insight?

So that night, they walk along the beach in their regular human forms, scoping it out. But neither Cassie nor Tobias feels the pull any stronger, or gets any more visions. But of course, The Sharing is there, scoping it out too. The two male Animorphs who've narrated so far compared The Sharing to Boy Scouts; here, Cassie compares it to Girl Scouts. That's a nice little touch, although you don't really see any ranks or merit badges or focus on the outdoors in The Sharing. It's generally struck me as more akin to a Christian youth group. I can totally see a van full of Sharing kids blasting Jars of Clay as they drive down to North Carolina to rebuild houses after Hurricane Bertha.

But instead of rebuilding people's houses, they start shooting at the Animorphs. With, like, guns and shit. Because no one but Andalites takes long walks on the beach in the evening. Can you imagine if they'd actually shot one of the Animorphs? It would be such a massive scandal, this supposedly squeaky-clean organization murdering some random teenager. Unless they shot Cassie or Marco, in which case the country would just shrug and be like, "Whatever. They must've been doing something wrong." But if they shot Rachel? Holy shit, it'd be bigger than O.J. (Why yes, I am enjoying making these '90s references. Why ever do you ask?)

Anyway, the Animorphs run, hide behind some dunes, and morph fish to hide in the water. One problem: the only fish they've acquired is a freshwater fish. They manage to survive in the sea water just long enough for the Yeerks to notice their human footprints leading to the water and conclude that they're a bunch of kids going swimming. Tom's Yeerk points out that, hey, maybe these aren't Andalite bandits. Innis 226 (Chapman's Yeerk) laughs and tells him he's not going to be the fool who tells Visser Three he's wrong. Thank God for Visser Three's incompetence. The Yeerks fan out to search the whole beach, and the Animorphs escape with their lives, having learned and accomplished absolutely nothing. Another mission well done!

A few days later, Jake rides his bike to Cassie's house while she's doing chores in the barn. Cassie is always doing chores in the barn. I'm halfway convinced at this point that Cassie's parents had her just because they couldn't find an intern. Jake helps Cassie shovel manure and tells her that everyone's waiting on her to decide what to do. Cassie is shocked and very uncomfortable at the idea of having to make a decision that might get everyone killed.

"I know this is crazy," I said, "but the ocean scares me a little. I understand the land. I understand soil and things that grow out of it." I laughed. "I guess I'm just an old farm girl. You know this farm has been in my family since the Civil War?"

Jake winked. "Do I know that? Puh-leeze. I had Thanksgiving with your family last year, you may remember. Your great-grandmother gave me the complete history."

"Going all the way back to when dinosaurs ruled the earth," I said. "Grammy does tend to go on about our history, doesn't she?"

Okay, firstly, I want Cassie's great-grandmother, who I imagine to be tiny and wizened and adorable, to tell me the epic history of her family. Secondly, Jake spent Thanksgiving with Cassie's family? Holy cow. They went from awkward middle school mutual crush to practically picking out china patterns in the span of, like, thirty pages. For an author who spent almost a decade writing some very true-to-life teen romance novels, K.A. sure seems to have a hard time progressing the romances in Animorphs smoothly and consistently. Jake and Cassie, and Rachel and Tobias, pinball between "secretly like-like each other" and "seem to have been dating for a year or more," sometimes hitting both in a single book. And who lets their 12-year-old son have Thanksgiving with his girlfriend's family anyway?

But enough with the kissy stuff and on to more pressing matters: namely, the kids need to get to the bottom of the ocean. They head to The Gardens and the dolphin trainer leaves the kids alone with their dolphins, thanks to Cassie's mad connections. These dolphins are named Joey, Ross, Monica, Chandler, Phoebe, and Rachel. Oh, the '90s, I love you so. Come back to me, my precious. Let me lie in your tender, beflanneled arms. Anyway, Cassie is hesitant to morph the dolphins because they're so intelligent. As opposed to elephants or gorillas, who are clearly dumbasses.

"It will be strange morphing something so intelligent," Rachel said.

"Yes," I agreed. Strange, and... wrong, somehow. I felt a twisting in my stomach. "How is doing this any different than what the Yeerks do?"

Rachel looked surprised. "Yeerks take over humans," she said. "Besides, they don't morph, they infest. We don't take over the actual animal, we just copy his DNA pattern, create a totally new animal, and then -"

"And then control the new animal," I said.

"It's not the same," Rachel insisted. But she looked troubled.

This brings up an interesting question, namely:

Fucking Morphing, How Does it Work?
Cassie's right, in one respect: the animals they morph into wouldn't exist without them. In a sense, they are creating these new animals, with their own instincts, and the Animorphs use their superior cognition to dominate them. How exactly this all works, given that when you have the mind of, say, a tick, you shouldn't be any more intelligent than a tick, is not really explored in-depth. Z-space is the usual catchall answer to anything involving weird science. When you morph something small, where does your extra mass go? Z-space! When you morph something big, where does that extra mass come from? Z-space! How can you preserve human consciousness when your morph doesn't have the brainpower to support it? Z-space! How do spaceships get from distant worlds to Earth? Z-space! It's pure white nothingness and doesn't actually make a whole lot of sense, but then neither does anything else, really. Not that that stops us from trying to come up with elaborate scientific explanations.

Moving on. Let's assume that morphing involves creating a new copy of a currently living animal, using a mix of the morpher's mass and whatever mass can be dragged in from Z-space, and that the morpher's consciousness is psychically controlling the creature from Z-space, where it is being stored. (Whether or not this implies the existence of a soul I will leave for the readers to decide.) This is going to be controversial among the hordes of Cassie-haters, but she actually does have a point. They are not humans who look like animals; they replicate every part of the animal, including its brain. Then they take these animals into battle. We've seen that the animals they morph have instincts that they must overcome. If said animal has theory of mind (i.e., sentience), it knows that horrible things are happening and that it is in danger. It will not want to go into battle. The morpher's consciousness has to force the animal to comply. No, they're not controlling currently-existing animals as the Yeerks do. But is it really any better to create a brand-new animal that will exist for less than two hours, and in that all-too-brief existence experience extraordinary fear and pain? So unlike a lot of other Animorphs re-read bloggers, I don't think this is just Cassie overthinking things. Morphing is very similar to cloning, and this is the same ethical dilemma we face there, but now there are issues of consent and violence piled on top of it.

But Cassie is willing to put those issues aside for now, in order to save the Andalite. They acquire the dolphins (I like to think that Rachel acquired Rachel), and the next day they meet at a secluded place by a river leading into the sea. Rachel's bought Tobias a little digital watch and strapped it to his leg so he can serve as timekeeper, which is ridiculously adorable. So they morph dolphins and swim out to the sea, and are having the time of their lives because the dolphin brains just want to play and frolic and rape everything.

Playtime ends, though, when their echolocation senses a shiver of sharks (I'm not even kidding, that is an actual accepted term for a group of sharks) attacking a great one. I mean, whale. For some reason, the phrase "great one" pops into their heads, and they are deeply distressed by the idea of a great one being attacked. So distressed that they attack the sharks. They win, but not before one of the sharks bites off Marco's tail. He starts to morph back, to heal himself, but they're still deep underwater, so if he can't make it to the surface, he'll drown. Thankfully, the whale they saved lifts him up to the surface.

Then the whale communicates telepathically with Cassie. And this is where the book loses me. Because you know what? I'm fine with Andalite or Leeran telepathy because they're aliens. I'm fine with the Animorphs having telepathy in morph because they're using Andalite technology. But telepathy in whales? Don't you think if they were able to communicate telepathically, whalers would have to endure a nonstop psychic barrage of "OH GOD PLEASE DON'T KILL ME" to the point where whaling would effectively end as soon as it began? Whales are very intelligent and probably wise and, yeah, a little bit mystical-seeming. But telepathic? No. Just... just no.

And then there's the whole "great ones" thing. Dolphins are intelligent, and they do have their own complex language and cultures. I totally buy that they would call whales "great ones" and have a deep respect for them. I don't buy that these particular dolphins, who were effectively just born less than two hours ago, are aware of those words and that cultural respect. The morphs are basically infants in the bodies of full-grown animals. Nobody taught them about great ones and why they should be respected. Admittedly, that nitpick kind of pales in comparison with telepathic whales. And this will not even be the weirdest thing that happens in a Cassie book, so hold onto your hats, folks.

Anyway, Jesus Whale tells Cassie his life story (literally) and then tells her where to find the Andalite. Marco demorphs, and remorphs, and they swim back to shore to regroup and come back to find the Andalite some other time because it's not like it's urgent or anything. This whole "formulate a plan, go scope out the area, come home, formulate another plan, go back for more scoping, come home, formulate a new plan, then finally do something" thing the Animorphs do in every book is perfectly good spy/guerrilla strategy. But it makes for some really repetitive storytelling.

Back on land, Cassie visits Marco at his unbelievably depressing apartment complex to apologize for almost killing him. He tells her it's not her fault, then lets her in on two different stories he read in the newspaper: "One is about this guy who is going to be looking for some supposedly lost treasure ship off the coast. The other was this story about some big marine biologist guy who has a ship and is going to be doing some underwater exploration off our coast." Man, these kids are real news junkies. So these guys are obviously Controllers, which raises the stakes for the Animorphs to save the Andalite before the Yeerks can get to him.

The kids devise an insanely complicated plan where they morph seagulls, hide out on a container ship that's headed in the right direction, demorph, and when they get close to where Jesus Whale told Cassie the Andalite was, jump over the side and morph dolphin. Miraculously, they're in the ocean before anything goes massively wrong. The Yeerks are already there, hovering above in helicopters, but luckily they don't see the kids in spandex jumping into the ocean.

They swim very far down and find a huge glass dome that surrounds what looks like an alien park. There's an entrance, with a little hallway and an inner door leading to the dome proper, and they race inside before their lungs explode. They demorph there. But as soon as they open the inner door, the Andalite knocks them all unconscious with his tail blade.

Nice to meet you too, Ax!

Cassie wakes up to find him holding a Dracon beam in her face. Lots of people wanting to shoot Cassie lately. She explains that they're humans, that they came to help, that Prince Elfangor gave them the power to morph. The Andalite reveals that Elfangor was his brother, and that he was in the Dome part of the Dome ship when it fell apart because he was too young for battle. He's been living in the Dome, under the ocean, for weeks, sending out calls to his cousins and receiving no response. He introduces himself as Aximili-Esgarrouth-Isthill, and Marco cleverly shortens it to Ax. He asks, if they fight the Yeerks, who is their prince? Everybody looks at Jake, and despite his denials, Ax bows before him. This will be the first of many, many Prince Jake jokes.

So Ax gives them the grand tour of the Dome, telling them all about the alien plantlife. Rachel whispers to Cassie, "He's cute!" and winks. Rachel, you freak.

[We take our home with us into space. It angers the Yeerks,] he added grimly.

"Why do they care what you take into space?" Marco asked.

[It is a part of everything they hate and would destroy if they could. The Yeerks would take our world and make it as barren as their own. As they will to your planet unless they are stopped.]

I grabbed Ax's arm. "What... what are you saying? What do you mean about making the planet barren?"

He turned his big eyes on me. [The usual Yeerk pattern. Once a planet is under their control, they alter it to suit their own desires. They will leave enough plant and animal species to keep the host bodies fed - humans in the case of Earth - and the rest they eliminate.]

Cassie is horrified by this, because it's not like there's already a species on Earth driving a mass extinction of creatures they don't rely on to stay fed. She asks how long it will take for the Andalites to come save them. Ax gives it one or two years.

"Two years!" Jake looked stricken. I went to his side and slipped my arm through his. "Five kids against an enemy that has destroyed half the galaxy? Five of us?"

Ax gave that smile, the one he did with his eyes. [Six, my Prince,] he said.

Aww. Okay, I forgive you for knocking me unconscious and shoving a Dracon beam in my face. Anyway, with the Yeerks coming, it's time to blow this popsicle stand. Luckily, Ax already acquired a shark who swam fairly close by one day. So the Yeerks are setting off explosions and they've got Taxxons who apparently can swim really fast, and Visser Three's Blade ship is there of course, and the Animorphs swim away as fast as they can, but the Taxxons catch up with them.

They beat the crap out of the Taxxons (who are surprisingly easy to kill - "like hitting a soggy paper bag with a sledgehammer"), but just when they think they're safe enough to swim to the nearest island and demorph, we meet yet another one of Visser Three's horrifying monster morphs. This one is a Madrut, an enormous sea creature from one of the Andalite moons. Visser Three chases them until they're too exhausted to swim anymore. So even though they know it will probably be their death, they turn to face him and fight.

[Jake?] I said. [I wanted to tell you...]

[Yes. Me, too, Cassie] he said.

Ugh. Really, K.A.? Two books in a row with this sappy shit? Anyway, they're all going to die but then it's JESUS WHALE TO THE RESCUE! And he brought four of his closest whale friends! The other whales kick the crap out of Visser Three, while Jesus Whale lets the kids demorph and take a nap on his back. Then he carries them back home. And Jake and Cassie have this conversation while sitting on the whale's back:

Jake smiled his slow smile. "It's fun being a dolphin, though, isn't it? I know you were worried about it. You know, thinking maybe it wasn't right and all."

I shook my head slowly. "I'm still not sure it's right. But I guess we don't have much of a choice. The Yeerks started this fight, not us. And after what Ax said... I guess it's not just about one species, human beings. It's about all the animals. It's about all of Earth."

Jake nodded. "I think if you could ask the dolphins, they would say it's all right to use them. Since what you're trying to do is save them."

"Nah, they would just think it was all a big game. They would never understand."

We both laughed. Even if they could talk, the dolphins would never really understand what we were so upset about. We knew that better than anyone.

"I guess that's true," Jake said. "But we do understand." He met my gaze. "We do understand what's at stake. And we'll do whatever we have to do to win."

I knew what he was trying to tell me. We'd used the dolphins to save them. We'd used other animals to save them, too. And that made it okay.

So that's the heartwarming moral of this story: the ends justify the means. Remember this scene as the series continues. Specifically, remember what Jake says. Because holy hell, they are going to some seriously dark places and it is at least in part that attitude that'll take them there.

The kids get back to the secluded spot by the river. They decide to hide Ax on Cassie's farm, since it's huge and full of wide-open meadows where he can graze and dark woods where he can hide. But first, they must get him there without suspicion. So Ax acquires all of their DNA (except Tobias's, of course), then morphs into a combination of the four of them - a clever trick I really wish came up more often in the series. A few nights later, Cassie sneaks into The Gardens' dolphin tank, morphs dolphin, and plays with them. And that's the book: kinda weird, kinda mystical, generally pretty good, but I could really do without the psychic whales.

Commentary:
In my review of #2: The Visitor, I talked briefly about Cassie and Rachel's relationships with traditional gender roles and how that reflected upon/impacted their friendship. Drawing on my own experience as someone who doesn't really "get" makeup or fashion and, as a result, floundered socially when I entered middle school, I suggested that Rachel had changed herself to fit in better while Cassie stayed true to herself. Of course, I was drawing on my experience as a white girl.

About a week ago, a blogger on Tumblr made a post discussing Cassie's race and how that related to her sartorial style and her friendship with Rachel. (There's also a separate follow-up here.) White women are presumed to be at least capable of achieving mainstream beauty standards, if not outright obligated to be beautiful. If you aren't beautiful as a white woman, it's because you're just not trying hard enough. This cultural obligation that I described Rachel as falling prey to - and Cassie as rejecting - doesn't really apply to black girls. Black girls more often get the message that they are, by virtue of their race, incapable of being beautiful. For a white girl, the idea that she doesn't have to be beautiful is revolutionary. For a black girl, the idea that she can be beautiful is revolutionary. And that changes so much about the reasoning behind Cassie's sartorial choices, and her relationship dynamic with Rachel.

You know what really kills me? I read The Bluest Eye, I saw For Colored Girls, and I watched Good Hair, and I still needed all this pointed out to me specifically in the context of Animorphs before I made the connection. That may be due to my own special blend of obliviousness and forgetfulness, but I think it also says something about white privilege. The sad fact of the matter is that white people just don't have to think about this kind of thing too much, so we mostly don't. Even when we make an honest effort to listen, it takes a lot to understand the full implications of what we're hearing. Especially because we've made a lot of assumptions about the way the world works based on our privileged experience. And of course, K.A. Applegate is also white, and that undoubtedly had a great deal to do with her blindness to the implications of the black character she was writing. As sensitive as she has tried to be with regards to race, she still misses some pretty key stuff.

Come back next Monday to consider the lobster when I review Animorphs #5: The Predator!

#0.5: The Rebranding

As you may have noticed, I've renamed the blog from Idiot Teenagers with a Death Wish to Political Animorphs. I kind of jumped into blogging with the original name because I had no better ideas. Unfortunately, a few posts in, I'm starting to see several problems with it: one, it's long and unwieldy. Two, it says nothing about this blog except that it's about Animorphs, which you probably already knew. Three, it's hard to remember unless you're already a hardcore Ani-fan.

So I've changed the name to Political Animorphs. I thought it was a reasonably clever play on words (political animals? Eh? Eh?) as well as being shorter, easier to remember, and stating upfront what's unique about this particular re-read blog: its commentary on sociopolitical issues in Animorphs. I might develop an actual reader base in the future (hard to believe, I know, but anything's possible!), so I thought it best to make this change now, while my only audience is the odd person who trickles in from Richard's Animorphs Forum.

To live up to the name, I'll probably spend more time talking about politics and less time recapping the books. (I realize my review of #1: The Invasion was waaaaaaay too long, and I've been trying to make each review shorter than the last. I've managed to cut my wordcount by about a thousand words with each new review, but it's still pretty hefty.) I'll also try to hold back on the spoilers, to make this a more welcoming place for new fans of the books.

If you're reading, thanks for sticking with me! I'll have my review of #4: The Message up on Monday, as promised.

#3: The Encounter

My name is Tobias. A freak of nature. One of a kind.

And so we come at last to Tobias, most beloved of Animorphs, who sadly gets only half as much narration time as the others because for some reason Scholastic thought kids wouldn't be interested in reading about an abused orphan whose superpower simultaneously frees him from his tragic home life and isolates him from other people. Yeah, there's nothing gripping or relatable about that at all. Let's hear more about Jake's failed middle school basketball career.

Anyway, this is Tobias's first book and immediately, just in the first line, you see the dualism in his character. He sees himself simultaneously as a "freak of nature" and as "one of a kind." Or maybe he starts to see himself as a "freak of nature," and quickly switches to a more positive self-image to keep himself from sliding into despair. He's going to do that a lot in this book, and it will work... for a little while.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. We begin the way the last book began, the way too many of these books begin, with Captain Planet-style escapades. Unlike last book's drunken rednecks, though, this one actually connects to the main plot. A used car salesman named Dealin' Dan Hawke has a red-tailed hawk in a cage, and he's using her to "hawk" his merchandise. (See what I did there?) He's filming a commercial with this hawk, which for some reason is airing live. So Tobias has this harebrained sceme to free the hawk in the middle of this live-airing commercial, and Rachel joins in because she's Rachel. So Tobias swoops in and picks the lock on her cage with his beak and sets her free while Rachel distracts everyone by elephant-stomping a whole lot full of used cars. They free the hawk and run away, and Marco yells at them for being stupid. And this time he's completely justified; it was idiotic. They could have easily snuck into wherever Dealin' Dan was keeping the hawk in the middle of the night and opened a window and no one would have thought anything of it. But instead they make this huge scene with an elephant that appears out of nowhere and then mysteriously disappears and a red-tailed hawk who knows how to pick locks, and seriously, even if the ad wasn't apparently the first commercial to air live in television history, there is no way that wouldn't make the national news. This is like a thousand times stupider than what Rachel did in the last book, and there's literally no reason they had to take such enormous risks. Jesus, how have you people not been caught yet?

Anyway, before Marco chews them out, Tobias sees a mysterious ripple in the sky. He decides to go back the next evening, around the same time, to see if it happens again. Not only does it reappear, but a flock of geese unknowingly fly right into the rippling nothingness, killing themselves in the process. This convinces Tobias that what he's seeing is an enormous Yeerk ship, cloaked so perfectly that it's made itself invisible to the human - and, apparently, goose - eye. And it looks to be headed into the mountains.

He tells the others about it at Cassie's barn the next day. And then this happens:

"Look, these aren't people we know," Marco argued. "They aren't my friends. Or my family." He shot a guilty look at Jake. "And we did everything we could for Tom. So why should I get killed for strangers? We can't stay lucky forever. Don't you people understand that? Sooner or later, we'll slip up. Sooner or later we'll be standing around here crying because Jake or Rachel or Cassie or Tobias is gone."

"You know something?" Rachel exploded. "I'm tired of trying to talk you into this, Marco. You want out? Fine, you're OUT!"

THANK YOU. This is why you're my favorite character. I am so sick of Marco's bullshit. Book five can't come fast enough.

Anyway, Marco accuses Rachel of being in it mainly for the thrill, which is fair, and calls the lady hawk a "stupid bird," which is not fair, and everyone's awkward and guilty for a minute until Tobias is like, [You know what? I'm going to the mountains to check this out tomorrow morning, and you guys can do whatever.] But they all agree to go with him, even Marco, who points out that it would be too conspicuous if they all skipped school on the same day, so they should go to the mountains in the afternoon. See, Marco, isn't it nice to contribute to the group instead of bringing everybody down?

The kids finally figure out that a red-tailed hawk, a bald eagle, a peregrine falcon, and two ospreys look kind of weird all flying together. I guess the scene with the geese was meant to explain why they can't acquire some Canada geese for flying, although in all situations where a giant invisible spaceship is not involved, that would actually be an excellent disguise. But wolves were recently reintroduced into the national forest near their town, and already two of them - a male and a female - are injured and in Cassie's barn. How convenient!

They decide to morph the wolves - all of them taking the female except Jake, because two males might fight for dominance. Now, a couple of people on Tumblr have pointed out that K.A. got wolves really wrong here. The conventional view of wolf packs for several decades had been that they organize themselves into a hierarchical structure, with the alpha male and female at the top and lower-ranked wolves occasionally challenging the alphas for dominance. However, wolf researchers came to that conclusion because they were studying wolf packs in captivity. That's sort of like studying prison gangs and extrapolating their behavior to the entire rest of humanity. But for a long time, scientists didn't have GPS trackers or video cameras that they could leave in the woods to observe wild wolves. Once that technology developed, they started observing wolves in their natural habitat - and found that a wolf pack is actually just a family. The "alpha" male and female are the mom and dad, and the other wolves are their children. When the children grow up, they move away to find mates and form their own packs. There's no more fighting for dominance in a wild wolf pack than there is in your average nuclear family. So when a bunch of wolves who don't know each other are thrown together randomly in captivity, they do their best to approximate a family. But no one can agree on who the "parents" should be. Hence, the fighting.

But at the time this book was written, the leading scientific consensus was that wolf packs were hierarchical. Information about how wild wolf packs operate didn't start coming out until years later - and it would be years after that before that information reached the general public. So you can't really blame K.A. for not including information that even leading wolf biologists did not know at the time. In any case, the kids' plan hinges less on how wolves actually act than on how the kids think wolves act. And a wolf pack consisting of multiple copies of the same two wolves is pretty freaking unnatural, so maybe their instincts would drive them to fight each other just out of sheer WTFness. Although it is kind of funny to consider that, given how much Marco bitches about having to morph a female wolf, he probably didn't even have to do that.

Wildlife biology tangent aside, they morph the wolves (hey, Cassie finally got her battle morph! And it only took her three books!) and they head off into the forest and Jake can't stop peeing everywhere, which is hilarious. And then they all start howling and Tobias is like, [WTF is wrong with you people?] At first, I just thought it was a funny scene, but now it strikes me as kind of a poignant comment on Tobias's distance from the group. They've got the wolf pack's cohesion, and he's just kinda... there. Outside the pack. As a bird, not even capable of understanding or sharing their howl.

So Tobias flies off to do some aerial reconnaissance and finds a bunch of park rangers with automatic weapons gathering around a lake. They drag some freaked-out campers away from their tent and a bunch of helicopters land and Hork-Bajir climb out of them. So, you know, just your average day in the woods. Tobias goes back to warn the others and swoops down once he spots the wolf pack. But they all growl and encircle him, ready to strike. Thinking his presence surprised them into letting the wolf instincts take over, Tobias starts to reassure them - until he realizes that there are five wolves in this pack, not four.

Tobias barely escapes with his life, then finds the real fake wolf pack and tells them what's up. They head to the lake and creep along the edge of the treeline, trying to act like real wolves who would generally avoid humans like the plague. And then the ship arrives, and sheds its cloaking, revealing itself to be massive. It lowers three big pipes into the lake, and starts sucking up the water like straws. The kids realize that the ship is basically a supply truck that gathers air and water from Earth to bring to the Yeerk mothership hovering in orbit. Delighted that they have found the Yeerks' weakness but mindful of how little time they have left in wolf morph, the kids turn around and start heading back.

That's when Tobias spots the hawk he and Rachel freed. I'm going to refer to her as GirlieHawke, since that's what she is, and that was the screen name of a friend I had in Animorphs fandom way back when the series was still being written. And maybe she'll see this blog and contact me and we can catch up, and this is the only way I can think to make that happen because I have no earthly idea what her real name is. Anyway, he sees GirlieHawke and has ~*feelings*~ that he belongs with her, which is incredibly weird for him because she's a hawk, like a real hawk hawk, and he still considers himself human. So he freaks out a little and spins around to fly back to the others, all the while reminding himself over and over again that he is a human, that his name is Tobias, that he has human friends and human interests. But deep down, he fears that that's a lie; that human Tobias is dead.

When he gets back to the kids, they have stumbled into the path of the real wolf pack, which just killed a rabbit and now think they're trying to steal it from them. Now, wolf senses are extremely acute. I don't think this could have happened. They'd have smelled that other pack from a mile away, or at least their scent-markings, and steered clear. They most certainly wouldn't have just bumped into them without any clue that other wolves were there. And that's something K.A. should have known in the '90s. Anyway, it's a really tense moment, and the two packs are about to get into a serious fight, so Tobias swoops down, clutches the rabbit in his talons, and flies away with it. The real pack's "alpha" chases after him and he loses a tail feather while the others run away.

Once he's free of the wolves, Tobias checks the time on one of the park ranger trucks. They have been in wolf morph for just over two hours. Tobias rushes back and yells at them to demorph ASAP. Cassie manages to, but the others are having trouble, getting stuck with parts of their bodies human and parts wolf, and they are freaking out. Cassie races around, reassuring them one by one and talking them through it, and they actually manage to demorph all the way.

I saw Marco roll his human eyes up and stare at me. His gaze locked on me. It was like he hated me. Or feared me. Both, maybe.

I didn't move. If Marco needed me to concentrate, that was fine.

But it sent a shiver of disgust through me. I suddenly saw myself as they all must see me: as something frightening. A freak. An accident. A sickening, pitiable creature.

...

Suddenly I desperately didn't want to be there. I felt an awful, gaping black hole open up all around me. I was sick. Sick with the feeling of being trapped.

Trapped.

Forever!

I looked at my talons. They would never be feet again.

I looked at my wing. It would never be an arm. It would never again end in a hand. I would never touch. I would never touch anything... anyone... again.

I dropped from the branch and opened my wings.

"Tobias!" Jake shouted after me.

But I couldn't stay. I flapped like a demon, no longer caring that I was tired. I had to fly. I had to get away.

"Tobias, no! Come back!" Rachel cried.

I caught a blessed breeze and soared up and away, my own silent, voiceless scream echoing in my head. 

God, this book. THIS. BOOK. I reel from the feels.

That night, Tobias goes to his "new home": Jake's attic. Jake has left the drawer of an old dresser open with a blanket in it for Tobias to sleep in, and he leaves leftovers up here for him to eat. Tobias chokes down a cold, cooked hamburger patty, but can't digest the side dishes of potatoes or green beans. It is the saddest tupperware dinner in the world, and we're talking tupperware dinners here. He tries to make himself comfortable in the dresser drawer, but for him, comfort is a branch to perch on. He appreciates what Jake's doing for him, but none of these human comforts apply to him anymore. He doesn't want to be a burden on Jake, but is unnerved by the idea of truly living as a hawk. The conflict between his human brain and hawk instincts is particularly acute at the moment, and he can't sleep, so he flies to Rachel's house.

Rachel lets him into her room through the window and he confides in her, which seems like an unusually mature way for a teenage boy to act around his crush. Rachel tries to make him feel better, showing him a picture of himself which she has somehow (Yearbook photo?), and tells him that when the Andalites come, they'll probably have a way to restore his humanity. Even though he can tell that she's lying, the talk makes him feel a little bit better.

Tobias spends the next day flying around, waiting for the others to get out of school. He talks himself up, telling himself that at least can fly and he doesn't have homework. That's pretty cool. The group is meeting at Jake's house while Tom goes to a meeting of The Sharing. So Tobias flies around the school and then basically stalks the kids as they head home, then randomly flies around for a while so he can show up late to the meeting and make them think he has more of a life than he really does.

Rachel wants to blow up the ship, but Marco suggests merely sabotaging the cloaking device as it flies over the city so that everyone can see there's an alien invasion going on. Everybody gets all excited until Marco changes his mind on his own plan, pointing out that the Yeerks wouldn't just roll over in an open battle with humanity. But Tobias suggests that they don't have enough power to attack Earth openly; why else would they invade secretly? Oh, I don't know, maybe because they've noticed that humanity has enough nuclear weapons to destroy themselves ten times over and has also exhibited a shocking willingness to sacrifice millions of valuable host bodies for no goddamn reason. It is not at all a reasonable assumption to make that they're only invading secretly because they're not powerful enough to invade openly, and it's a really stupid idea to trigger open warfare based only on this assumption. But none of the Animorphs sees that, so they're like, "Awesome idea! Let's do it!" Jake comes up with the idea to get inside the ship by morphing fish and getting sucked up into the water tank. Every single part of this plan is horrible.

So after the meeting, Rachel goes to the mall because her gymnastics class is doing an exhibition there. Marco threatens to come and watch her, but Rachel hates performing in front of crowds. Tobias flies off to scope out the lake area again and see if he can gather any useful information. He's actually feeling pretty good right now, feeling useful. He thinks about how he can get into outdoor concerts and amusement parks for free, how kids walking below him probably feel jealous of his flying ability. He feels so good, in fact, that he lets his hawk instincts take over, hunts and kills a rat, and starts to eat it.

Then he snaps. He goes wild with shame, not only for killing the rat, but that for enjoying it so much. He flies straight to the mall, fully willing to bash himself against the glass doors. Luckily, someone's walking in at the same moment, so he just zooms right into the mall. He shoots past Rachel, on the balance beam in the center of the mall. She cries, "Tobias!" and nobody in the giant crowd notices that this easily-identifiable girl just shouted the name of a boy who recently went missing at a hawk that's displaying unusual behavior. Whatever.

He knocks himself against a wall and falls into Rachel's arms. (I wonder why this scene wasn't mentioned in book #12? She's already got a public reputation for crazy, animal-related things happening to her.) He confesses to her that he killed, and says he's lost, and she reassures him then releases him in a way that makes it look like she's throwing him off her. But Tobias is not reassured. He flies straight up, toward the glass skylight. His human consciousness knows he will die; his hawk brain only sees sky. He consciously, willingly, gives himself over to his hawk instincts so he can kill himself by flying into the glass.

This was a children's book.

Luckily for him, Marco followed through on his threat and is on the upper level of the mall, and apparently brought a baseball and apparently has a really good throwing arm. Because a split second before Tobias hits the glass, Marco hurls the baseball into the window, shattering it and giving Tobias a way out. That sort of makes up for his previous assholishness.

For the next few days, Tobias gives himself over completely to his hawk instincts. He avoids his friends, sets up a nice territory in a tree-lined meadow, hunts during the day, tries desperately not to remember his human life during the night. But one day, he notices another predator running after its prey. It takes him a while, but he slowly begins to recognize that the "predator" is a Hork-Bajir and its "prey" is a human being. Tobias rakes the Hork-Bajir in the eyes with his claws and leads the human to safety, now remembering who he is and the responsibility he bears.

That night, he goes to Rachel's house to tell her what happened. She reassures him again that he is human, and this time it starts to sink in. He shares with her a new motivation for fighting the Yeerks, and for keeping himself together:

[See... there are human beings all over, trapped in bodies controlled by Yeerks. Trapped. Unable to escape. Rachel, I know how they feel. Maybe I can't escape. Maybe I am trapped forever. But if we can free some of those others, maybe... I don't know. Maybe that's what I need to do to stay human.]

Luckily, the mission was planned for Saturday, and Tobias apparently only spent Wednesday through Friday having a nervous breakdown, so the next day they morph wolves and head back to the lake.  Tobias is carrying a little pouch with fishing line and stuff, because the plan is apparently to catch a fish in human form. There has to be a better way to do this; if nothing else, two of them can turn into ospreys, which eat mostly fish and are awesome at grabbing fish out of the water. But they're new at this, so instead they demorph inside a little cave Tobias found them and then they spend the morning trying and failing to catch a fish. Cassie finally catches one, because she's the only one with points in Nature on her character sheet. They all acquire the trout and throw it back, and by now they've wasted so much time just trying to get the damn fish that the Yeerks are showing up in their helicopters and Jeeps and the kids have to dive back into the cave to hide.

This time, the Yeerks have come with two more Bug fighters than last time, and there's an extra ship: a Blade ship. That's right: Visser Three is there. Visser Three is always there. (To quote Greg from Opinionated Animorphs.) Tobias flies into the cave and Jake's like, "That's not the plan," and Tobias is all like, [FUCK THE PLAN. SHIT JUST GOT REAL.] Obviously, they can't just walk down to the water and morph fish like they'd intended to, because now the place is swarming with Yeerks, but nobody wants to give up on the brilliant idea of inciting open war between an advanced alien race and a bunch of hairless apes who can just barely get to their own moon. So Cassie decides that they should morph fish in the cave and Tobias will carry them one by one to the lake before they suffocate, on the assumption that none of the park rangers the Yeerks have infested know anything about hawk behavior. This plan just keeps getting better and better.

So they do that and none of them suffocate and the Yeerks don't appear to see anything unusual about a hawk making multiple trips to carry fish from a cave and dropping them in a lake. The kids get sucked up into the tank and see some kind of grate at the top. They decide to morph human, move up through the ship through the grate, then get into their battle morphs and fight whoever's on there. Brilliant! Meanwhile, they wait for the water level to get high enough for them to reach the grate.

The Yeerks have figured out, from Tobias's attack on the Hork-Bajir, that Andalites are probably in the forest in animal form. So they roam around incinerating basically every animal they see. They almost get Tobias, but he figures out the one place they can't shoot: right next to the ship. He flies straight there and lands on it, outing himself as an "Andalite bandit" but safe from the Yeerks' Dracon beams. Visser Three taunts him from the Blade ship 'cause that's what Visser Three does. Tobias doesn't respond. In the middle of all this, Rachel sends a thought-speech message up that they can't get the grate open. She basically begs him to destroy the ship so they won't be taken alive.

A children's book.

Unfortunately, the moment is kinda ruined by this bit of corniness:

[Rachel... I never told you...]

[You didn't have to, Tobias,] she said. [I knew. Good-bye.]

That's totally cliche and way too much for a couple of middle schoolers who pretty much just met. Their relationship was developing very realistically, and then that happens. Sigh.

So anyway, Visser Three sends a bunch of Taxxons with Dracon beams (how can they shoot when they don't have fingers? Whatever) onto the roof to get rid of Tobias without harming the ship. Tobias rakes a Taxxon's eyes, steals the Dracon beam with his talons, and starts shooting randomly into the ship's control room, destroying everything he can. The ship starts falling and crashes into a helicopter and a Bug fighter with the expected big explosions. Luckily, a hole's opened up in the side and the Animorphs are falling out along with all the water they collected. They morph birds as they fall, with just enough time to fly away before they hit the ground.

I just want to point out that this is the second time huge crowds of Yeerks have had the opportunity to see at least one human teenager morph. (The first one was when Rachel demorphed from elephant in the Yeerk pool back in the first book.) They are really not paying attention. Anyway, they all fly off safely, but the Yeerks are still shooting randomly at every animal they see, and they end up shooting GirlieHawke.

Last week, Thought-Speak posted their own review of this book, and Coleman suggested that it would have been better for Tobias's character development if GirlieHawke hadn't died. I agree with that assessment. Tobias should have been forced to make the choice as to whether to a human or a hawk, and killing off his potential "mate" took that choice away from him.

Anyway, the Yeerks burn all evidence that anything happened (damn kids and their fireworks) and the next day, Tobias goes to Rachel's house again. She seems to have started leaving the window open for him. There are gonna be a whole lot of bugs in her house. Anyway, she offers to help him find GirlieHawke's body and bury it, but he waves her off.

Tobias flies off into the beautiful blue sky, having finally come to terms with his divided self. And then it ends gorgeously:

I am Tobias. A boy. A hawk. Some strange mix of the two.

You know now why I can't tell you my last name. Or where I live. But someday you may look up in the sky and see the silhouette of a large bird of prey. Some large bird with a rending beak and sharp, tearing talons. Some bird with vast wings outstretched to ride the thermals.

Be happy for me, and for all who fly free.

Commentary:
I love Tobias so freaking much, you guys. He was my second fictional crush (after Prince Eric from The Little Mermaid) and he has unquestionably shaped my taste in men. I am positive I am not alone in this; at least 90% of the female Ani-fans I spoke to back in the day were in love with Tobias. Looking back, I can see how he's kind of the ideal preteen girl crush. He's got a tragic past (he needs me!), he's brooding and depressed (my love can heal him!), he looks like Kurt Cobain (messy blond hair! Deep, sad eyes! Fashionably messy clothing, one assumes!), he's sensitive and thoughtful (not like those immature boys at school!), and he's star-crossed lovers with the girl we all kind of wish we were anyway. Best of all, preteen girls love sexually nonthreatening boys, and how much less threatening can you get than a boy who literally doesn't have a human body? Jonathan Taylor Thomas had nothing on Tobias.

Apart from Tobias's appeal to preteen girls (and gay boys) specifically, this series as a whole is incredibly effective as a metaphor for puberty. Your body is changing rapidly and unpredictably in ways that disgust and horrify you. You also have emotional moodswings (animal instincts) that you struggle to control. Everyone around you seems swept up in creepy conformity (The Sharing), and only you know the truth. Everything you do is incredibly important, every day filled with world-changing life-or-death situations, but you can't trust anyone with the details except a small group of your closest friends. Not to mention the threat of becoming a nothlit: weren't we all told by our teachers that whatever choices we made now (now being 6th grade) set us on the path we'd walk for the rest of our lives? If you fail this class, you'll fail the next class, and then you won't get into honors classes in high school, and you won't get into a good college, and then you'll just die homeless on the street. I had the strong impression that we were all clay statues rapidly drying, with a limited amount of time to reshape ourselves before we found ourselves stuck in our current form until death. (It came as an enormous relief to me when I realized, sometime in my early-to-mid-20s, that no one ever stops growing and changing.) No wonder I loved this series as a middle schooler. It's middle school with aliens.

As for this particular book, The Encounter is very, very strong. The best of the three I've re-read so far, and from what I recall, one of the best in the series. Every single plan in this book is horrible, but they're kids who just got thrown into fighting a war, so you kind of expect them to not know what the hell they're doing. There are just a few problems; for one thing, Tobias says in this book that his parents are dead, whereas in the first book Jake said his mother abandoned him just a few years back. Jake's story lines up with what we find out later in the series. This inconsistency might be due to the fact that K.A. didn't totally know where to take his character this early in the series, or it might be Tobias's unreliable narration. Maybe it's easier for him to tell people that his parents are dead than to admit that his own mother ditched him. Although mentioning the conceit that the Animorphs are writing all this down for an audience raises the question of how the hell Tobias even wrote this book. I've got a mental image of a hawk sitting in Starbucks typing with his talons on a MacBook. Maybe wearing a little hipster scarf. Go tell the hawk he can't stay unless he orders something, baristas. I dare you.

Tobias also says early on that no one's looking for him because Jake sent letters to his aunt and uncle telling them that he was with the other one. But I imagine problems would arise when he never enrolls in school in his aunt's neighborhood. If nothing else, wouldn't truancy officers investigate? I don't know enough about this sort of thing, but I kind of wish a search for Tobias had factored into the story, even a little. It wouldn't really threaten the Animorphs (would anyone seriously be looking for a red-tailed hawk?), it would be more realistic, and it would open up some interesting plot and theme possibilities.

But those are just minor nitpicks. A larger complaint I have is something that will pop up throughout the series, but seemed especially prominent in this book.

She didn't know that I had freed her. That kind of concept was beyond her thinking. And she felt no gratitude.

It wasn't like we were friends. Hawks don't know what "friend" means. And she certainly did not feel any gratitude toward me for saving her from captivity. Hawks don't have that sort of emotion, either. In fact, in her mind there may have been no connection between me and her freedom.

[I knew I was human when I realized how... how sad I was that she was killed. See, a hawk wouldn't care. If she had been my mate, I would have missed her, been disturbed. But sadness? That's a human emotion. I know it seems strange, but I guess only a human would really care that a bird had died.]

That's a whole lot of completely baseless assumptions about what hawks do and do not know or feel. Granted, the study of animal cognition and emotion has had something of a renaissance in the past decade. From René Descartes to about ten years ago, most people just assumed that non-human animals were mindless automatons with no emotion or capacity for critical thought. Which is rather silly, considering the fact that we humans are a type of animal, differing from other species in degree rather than kind. I have a hard time believing that an animal that hunts to survive does not understand cause and effect, or that an animal that has been observed engaging in social play lacks socially-oriented emotions like gratitude and grief. If nothing else, there's no particular reason to assume that it lacks these things, other than 500 years of unquestioned human exceptionalism.

Of course, much like the issue with the wolf pack, most of this scientific research happened long after this book was published, and there are still many people who maintain that animals are mindless automatons, and to think any differently is (gasp!) anthropomorphizing. I can't blame K.A. for not foretelling the next decade's advancements in biology, and Animorphs is generally fantastic about encouraging empathy with non-human creatures. It still irks me, though, and will likely continue to irk me as the word "sentience" pops up again and again and again.

Where do the Animorphs live?
This book provides some pretty major clues.
1. It establishes that they live on the edge of an enormous, mountainous national park.
2. It also establishes that wolves were recently reintroduced to said park. At the time this book was published, this had only happened in two places: Yellowstone National Park and Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Both of those reintroductions did indeed happen shortly before the book came out, and both those parks are indeed huge and mountainous. Unfortunately, they are nowhere near the ocean, or large cities, or animal theme parks.
3. Cassie says that there are no grizzly bears in the area, only black bears, which rules out Yellowstone National Park.

So it's the third book and we've already got mutually-exclusive clues as to where the story is set. I'll stop with this feature now, since there's no way to reconcile the clues we have. (That was quick.) Clearly, the Animorphs' hometown is basically Springfield. It would have gone a lot smoother without the hyper-specific details. Cassie's mom could have worked at just a plain old zoo, of which there are many, rather than a zoo/amusement park, of which there are very few. They could live near a national park, but not necessarily one of the two where wolves had recently been reintroduced.

If I ever write my series of Animorphs teleplays, I'm officially setting the story in Woodbridge, Virginia. The forest could be Prince William Forest Park in northern Virginia, and Cassie's mom could work at the National Zoo. Prince William's neither huge nor particularly mountainous, but it's big and wild enough for the Animorphs' purposes, and it just makes sense for the Yeerk invasion to be centered around Washington, D.C. This would remove wolf morphs from the equation, but whatever. I can write around that. If you're strongly opposed to this, feel free to yell at me in the comments.

Well, that's all for now. Come back next Monday to praise Jesus Whale's name when I review Animorphs #4: The Message!