Recap / Animorphs: Back to Before

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Narrator: All six Animorphs

After a grueling battle, Jake privately wishes that he never walked through the construction site and met Elfangor. Unfortunately, Crayak was listening in...

Tropes:

• Aliens Love Human Food: When Aximili reaches land and starts morphing human, he's derailed from his mission for several days as he discovers the joy of taste. He never gets to try a cinnamon roll but really loves cookies, particularly Oreo-types. Only being told that he can't have any more makes him remember that he's got something important to do.
  “The cookies formed by two thin, round, black discs with a layer of adhesive white substance between them are the finest accomplishment of your species!”
• Ambiguous Situation:
  • Are the Animorphs truly reset to being the younger kids they'd been at the time, or are they their present selves put back into younger bodies and with their memories suppressed? Rachel's personality is a lot more aggressive in this book than it was in the early books - she's willing to shoot and kill human-Controllers, for example - but she's a little Out of Focus and little of her internal struggle is shown. Jake in book one yearned to impress Tom by joining the basketball team, sensing that Tom had withdrawn from him a little and wanting to change that, and felt down about not having made the cut; here, Tom approaches Jake to suggest going to the Sharing together and Jake doesn't consider getting closer to him with any interest, and even says he's "not a joiner". Unlike in his first appearances, Ax isn't desperately searching for a leader to tell him what to do but works independently with aplomb.
  • There are a few differences from the canon timeline that aren't due to the kids not becoming Animorphs. In The Message Ax used a "mirrorwave call" to try to get help. Three of the Animophs felt a little something, Cassie and Tobias got the full message, and unfortunately Visser Three got it too, which is why he showed up. Here Aximili has no technology to resort to and simply puts all his energy into crying out in thought-speech. Cassie still hears him, but there's no sign of the Visser noticing. Ax also said that he'd acquired his shark morph by stunning it, but that's not how Aximili acquires the "Blue Blade".
  • After going on the run with Jake and Rachel, Cassie calls her parents once to say she can't come home. They try to insist and say that the aliens are almost certainly friendly and this is a great opportunity for humanity. Cassie wonders whether her parents are just being naïve about the invading, body-snatching brain slugs, or if they've been taken and become Controllers.
• An Arm and a Leg:
  • Tiger Jake is hobbling on three legs at the start of the book, one of his paws having been severed in the fight.
  • Dracon beams that don't get a direct hit in can make limbs vanish, as Jake and Rachel prove when they get their hands on a pair.
• Batter Up!: Rachel arms herself with a baseball bat to save Jake and Marco from "Tom". She beats him into submission and gets one of his allies to drop his Dracon beam by smacking his arm.
• Beauty Is Never Tarnished: Rachel clobbers "Tom" four times before he collapses, leaving a stunned Jake to notice that she's not marred in the fight.
  Rachel was breathing hard. But her outfit, hair, and makeup had remained perfect.
• Befriending the Bullied: When Tobias is bullied in school with no Jake in sight, two Sharing members watch him get beaten up to the point where he fears he's genuinely hurt, and give him a card for the Sharing and walk away. Tobias starts to attend and is lovebombed, given positive attention and acceptance by people who act like they genuinely like him, and when his bullies try to stuff him into a locker, Sharing members threaten to kill the bullies and (again) walk away. Of course, the reader knows what's up, but poor Tobias, pressured into becoming a full member or going back to how things were before, chooses to commit.
• Beneath Notice: Tobias realizes why the Yeerks put so much effort into infesting kids when they also focus on more "important" people - police, politicians, the media etch. This is the 90s, and thirteen-year-olds and older teenagers roaming around unsupervised don't attract concern or suspicion. They can be used anywhere. We've seen in other books that Yeerks can take younger children - there's a five year old host in Animorphs: The Sickness - but those come with some greater physical drawbacks and get more attention.
• Big Damn Heroes: Jake and Marco are being marched out at gunpoint by "Tom", towards a waiting car, when Rachel comes to their rescue. Immediately after she called to tell them about the Andalite on TV, she picked up that bat and started running for Jake's house.
• Blatant Lies: The Drode claims that Crayak has compassionately offered a deal to Jake.
• Bully Brutality: Tobias has barbaric bullies who like to kidney-punch him for no particular reason. Early in the book they corner him in a bathroom and hit him until he's legitimately afraid he's been seriously hurt and doesn't have anyone who'd take him to the hospital.
• Bully Magnet: Tobias reflects that he just is one of these. The ones who'd been tormenting him with swirlies when Jake stepped in have left him alone ever since Jake told them to knock it off, but inside of a week he had new, more violent ones taking their place.
• Butterfly of Doom: The alternate timeline covers a period of forty-one days, which in the main series saw them rescuing Aximili and dubbing him "Ax" but not causing any serious damage to the Yeerks. However, it turns out that their distracting Visser Three and saving Ax made a huge difference in what the Yeerk Empire did, even over such a short period. Without the "Andalite bandits" the Visser determines that his orders about how to run the invasion of Earth are actually from his hated rival, and without the human kids to guide him Aximili publicly exposes the existence of Yeerks and so accelerates the turn from a "soft" invasion to an open one, which in the main series took almost three years.
• Cold Open: This book doesn't open with the usual "My name is...", which gets shunted to the second chapter. Instead, the Animorphs pick themselves up in the aftermath of a grisly battle and, exhausted, demorph and go home.
• Call a Human a "Meatbag": The infested Tom is last seen bloodied and cackling hysterically, calling out to Rachel that humans are nothing more than meat for the Yeerks.
• Call a Rabbit a "Smeerp": Aximili calls the shark he acquires a Blue Blade, with the reasoning that it's made entirely of triangular edges. He comes up with other names for the other animals he sees - Big Mouth, Runny Eyes, Swimming Bird - but doesn't describe them.
• Call-Back: A small one. When the Yeerks start rounding up people at the mall, the kids see people fleeing from the Gap. In Animorphs: The Stranger, the Animorphs found a Yeerk Pool entrance in the Gap's changing rooms. It seems Controllers are coming up from the Pool.
• The Chains of Commanding: Jake feels responsible for what he puts the other Animorphs through, as he always does. In the new timeline as they start to pick up on something being very suspicious about the Sharing, Cassie says that he's the leader and notes a helpless, hopeless look cross his face before he takes the role.
• Cosmic Retcon: When the Drode's plan fails, the Ellimist returns things back to normal, telling the Animorphs that only Cassie will vaguely remember this adventure.
• Darker and Edgier:
  • The book opens during the bloody aftermath of a battle, in which the Animorphs try to ignore a dying human begging for help. Jake has a whole chapter of despairing introspection about what fighting is doing to everyone, how they don't seem to be accomplishing anything, and there being no end in sight. The mundane horrors of Tobias's life give way to him being manipulated and used and made bitterly aware of it, then he's killed off without ceremony. Tom (the Yeerk in his head, but he's only ever called Tom) being more dangerous than he usually gets to be, then physically bludgeoned until he's a bleeding, raving heap on the porch. The Dwindling Party situation, where Marco, Rachel, and Cassie, all of them human, actually and unambiguously die. Aximili fighting on through worse injuries than we ever see him push past in canon. Jake half preferring this timeline despite the deaths of his friends because it would be an end and some kind of victory and not the relentless, painful certainty that the Animorphs are losing and will die one by one. There's a lot of darkness in Animorphs but it's unusually concentrated here. In the rest of the series, it won't get to a point like this, where hope and levity are quite small in comparison, until near the end.
  • Also, the premise of this book is the same as "Not My Problem", one of the episodes of the TV show - Jake gets a chance to rewrite history such that he and the others never met Elfangor, and some not-Animorphs become infested. The premise is the same (though apparently coincidentally so, as Applegate purportedly could only watch two episodes before abandoning the show entirely) but the execution and tone are very different. And while the Yeerks of "Not My Problem" are actually more dangerous and effective than elsewhere in the show, it's nothing like how they are here.
• Deuteragonist: This is more Jake's book than anyone else's, but Tobias and Aximili come close, with plotlines that only intersect with him and the other three Animorphs in a few places.
• Did Not Think This Through: Jake doesn't think about what not becoming the Animorphs means, but it's hard to blame him considering the kind of Questionable Consent involved.
• DIY Threat Detection: Marco, having read John le Carré books, warns Jake about this kind of thing when they search Tom's room, and they indeed find a hair wedged in the closet door. There's nothing in the closet, but they err on the side of it being deliberate and replace the hair as they close it again. Marco speculates that Tom set up these tells to see if anyone's suspicious of him but is too smart to leave a raygun unprotected in his room.
• Dropped a Bridge on Him:
  • Odret 177 is revealed to be a spy for Visser One, causing Visser Three to execute him and Tobias on the spot before they can properly react.
  • Visser Three himself is partially vaporized by the suddenly-alive-again Cassie.
• Dwindling Party: With a much more fragmentary awareness of their situation and no power to morph, the would-have-been Animorphs fall one by one. Tobias never makes it to their resistance because, sensing that he's tolerated by the other four but not welcomed, he joins the Sharing and is infested, then outright killed when Visser Three realizes that his Yeerk is a traitor. Marco is killed by a Bug Fighter as he, Rachel, and Jake run from Controllers. Rachel is cut down by a Hork-Bajir Controller as they run into the Blade ship. Cassie is vaporized by Dracon fire shortly afterward. Jake is wounded by Visser Three when he tries to interfere with his fight against Aximili, and it's clear that Aximili, already injured, was doing poorly in the tail fight between himself and the Visser.
• EMP: The Yeerks set one off over the city as they escalate to an open invasion. Lights come back on but anything with a computer chip stops working altogether, greatly hampering human communications. Aximili is a little contemptuous that humans don't "shield" their electronics from this sort of thing.
• Enemy Civil War: It turns out that the entire reason that Visser Three uses Visser One's playbook at all is because Visser One forged orders from the Council telling him to run a "soft" invasion. With no Animorphs to distract him, he discovers this and, knowing that the Council probably approves of Visser One's preference but haven't explicitly told him what to do, transitions to a more open, violent invasion.
• Equivalent Exchange: The Ellimist and Crayak were both allowed to meddle with time just once. The Ellimist's meddling happened on some far-off planet, while Crayak changes the timeline so that the Animorphs never come to be.
• Exhaustion-Induced Idiocy: Jake and his friends survive a very difficult battle, the kind that he has nightmares about which wake him up crying and shaking. He lies awake at night, exhausted and consumed with guilt and fear, wondering how long it will be before he and the others all die or lose it. These combine into a Moment of Weakness when he's given the offer to go back and make a different choice that sees them not becoming Animorphs and having to fight. He denies this offer twice, then takes it. It's a Wonderful Plot (except it's not wonderful at all) results - after all, the Alien Invasion is still happening in their town, but with fragmentary knowledge and no power, he and his friends fare much worse. At the end of the book when Jake is able to remember everything he's horrified with himself for giving in.
• Fake "Better" Alternate Timeline: From Jake's perspective the new timeline is better, at least for a month, as he goes about his normal life. Cassie's reasonably content but keeps having a sense of something wrong, Rachel prowls looking for some form of excitement she can only vaguely fill by shopping, Marco's doubtless preoccupied with his depressed father, Aximili languishes under the ocean, and Tobias's life really sucks. Once his memories are restored as the Drode Rage Quits, Jake half wants to stick to the new timeline because despite all the carnage and many of his friends dying, at least an end is in sight here.
• First-Person Dying Perspective: Rachel is killed mid-stride by a Hork-Bajir at the end of her final POV chapter, with the blow described as coming like a rush of air, then her body hits the ground and slowly rolls to a stop.
• The Friend Nobody Likes: Tobias is not really part of the Jake-Marco-Rachel-Cassie group at all and knows it. He walks home with them from the mall, as he did in The Invasion, tagging along because Jake recently saved him from some bullies. Cassie thinks Jake's just too nice to push him away and sees that he's trying to include Tobias in the conversation. But without encountering Elfangor, Tobias just doesn't feel he has anything in common with the other four and has the sense that Marco doesn't like him, so a week later he's stopped trying to hang around them.
• Go Mad from the Isolation: Aximili is shown talking to himself while still trapped in the Dome, and taking actions he doesn't remember doing a minute later. The text implies that some of the things he 'forgets' are actually elements of the altered timeline falling apart, but that just adds to his uneasiness.
• Gory Discretion Shot: Even from Rachel's POV, we don't get a description of the attack that kills her, only her body's reaction to it. It's implied that she loses her head.
• Grievous Harm with a Body: During the battle in the mall, Rachel uses a decapitated Hork-Bajir's horned head to kill another Hork-Bajir Controller.
• Half the Man He Used to Be: When Cassie shoots Visser Three with a Dracon beam, she disintegrates his upper body, leaving his lower body behind to to topple over.
• Heartbreak and Ice Cream: Without all the trauma and secrecy that keeps them in proximity in the true timeline, Cassie doesn't spend a lot of time with Jake and wonders if he actually doesn't like her. She opens her freezer and thinks "Hello, Ben. Hello, Jerry", then frets that maybe Jake's not interested in her because of her thighs and closes the freezer.
• Helpless Observer Protagonist: After he's infested by Odret, Tobias's few viewpoint chapters make him this. Odret says a few words to him and Tobias thinks back but they don't have a real dialogue. If nothing's happening - and Odret is the sort of Yeerk who, like the Chapmans, just sits and stares at nothing a lot of the time - he stews in regret and self-loathing.
• Higher-Tech Species: As ever, Andalite and Yeerk technology far surpasses human. After Aximili spreads word about what the Yeerks are on television, he's disgusted by humans hopefully saying it's really a Benevolent Alien Invasion because surely technologically advanced aliens must also be moral, and because when the Yeerks set off an EMP no human devices were shielded against it.
• Hugh Mann: Aximili is convinced that he's good at passing as a normal human. He doesn't get that being taken to an insane asylum is a fail state, and when talking about cookies he says they're the finest invention of "your species".
• Ignorance Is Bliss: After a terrible battle Jake lies awake stewing in guilt and fear and reflects on how it all began, meeting a dying alien who told he and his friends about the Yeerks covertly invading Earth and gave them the power to morph. While he's more focused on how the power has made their lives hell, he thinks of the knowledge too. In a Moment of Weakness he's offered a Cosmic Retcon, to lose the crushing weight of responsibility and the terror of the knowledge, and feeling in that moment that everything they're fighting for is futile and the only other way out is death, he grasps for it.
  There was the destructive worm of knowledge: You are not alone. You are not safe. Nothing is what it seems. No one is who they seem to be. The knowledge of betrayal and terror. The awareness of evil. And then, the power. The power made us responsible, see. Without the power the knowledge would have just been a worm of fear eating up our insides. Bad enough. But it was the power that turned fear into obligation, that laid the weight on our unready shoulders.
• I Just Shot Marvin in the Face: The human-Controller found dying in the first chapter, in addition to having a mangled skull, is badly cut by a Hork-Bajir blade. Jake identifies this as friendly fire.
• I'm Cold... So Cold...: A dying human-Controller in the first chapter keeps saying this. Jake tells the Yeerk to leave the man to at least die free, but the Yeerk can't get out thanks to a wound Jake inflicted on him earlier blocking his host's ears.
• Implied Death Threat: Neither example is at all subtle.
  • Tobias as a member of the Sharing is protected by a full member who picks up a twenty-pound weight and tells a bully "Let him go or I'll bury this weight in your head."
  • "Tom" says "Don’t make me mad, I have a very busy day ahead of me with all this. If you slow me down..." while aiming a Dracon beam at Jake and Marco. Of course, this is about a paragraph after he says that they can come with him or he can kill them.
• Insane Equals Violent: Subverted. When Aximili gets out of the ocean and somehow acquires a human morph, he has no one to try to manage him and get him out of trouble, so he ends up in an asylum. He remarks that the people he finds there are actually much less violent than humans on TV. Interestingly, considering how canon Ax dislikes the physically disabled, Aximili is pretty chill about the mentally ill.
• In Spite of a Nail: Even without the power to morph, Jake, Marco, Cassie, and Rachel join Ax in fighting back against the Yeerk invasion. They actually manage to kill Visser Three and then turn the stolen Blade Ship on the Pool Ship, which would significantly impact the war at the cost of millions of humans dying in the crossfire. However, it's up for interpretation whether this is a "true" What If? since Cassie is partially aware of the original timeline. Her suspicion of the Sharing gets Jake to be wary of it and of Tom; her sense that she, Rachel, Marco, and Jake are a team led by Jake makes them into a more cohesive group; her half-knowing Aximili's name makes him willing to work with them; and even though she's killed on the Blade Ship, by then the timeline has fragmented enough that she's a Reality Warper who returns to life and kills Visser Three.
• In the Back: Jake stops Rachel from shooting a fleeing Controller saying that they don't kill people who are willing to leave them alone. This Controller is talking into a cell phone as he runs, though, which probably contributes to the Bug fighter that shows up in a couple of minutes. A few scenes later when Hork-Bajir are preoccupied fighting Aximili, Rachel stabs one of them in the back with the horns of a severed Hork-Bajir head.
• "It" Is Dehumanizing: The Drode is "it". When he starts working with Aximili, Jake also refers to him as "it" at first.
• It's a Wonderful Plot: Crayak offers Jake the chance to go back to being a normal kid, and when Jake takes it Crayak makes it so the would-have-been Animorphs never cut through the abandoned construction site where Elfangor crash-landed. The book takes place during the same time period as the first handful of books, and in the normal timeline they don't materially accomplish a great deal during that period. However, they did have two huge effects. Without them to distract him, Visser Three determines that Visser One is falsifying orders from the Council of Thirteen telling him to continue a covert invasion. Aximili escapes the Dome ship on his own, doesn't have Jake encouraging him to maintain the Masquerade, and broadcasts an explanation of the Yeerk threat, at which point Visser Three takes this chance to go open, and Hork-Bajir-Controllers start rounding humans up.
• Jackass Genie: Through the Drode's prodding, Crayak manages to get Jake to wish for a world where he didn't become an Animorph, knowing full well that Jake doesn't actually want that wish granted.
• Kick the Dog: When Tobias joins the Sharing he has a "guide", Bill, who hangs out with him, gives him praise and attention, teaches him to shoot pool, and does his best to get Tobias to become a full member aka a Controller. Tobias yearns for this positive regard and agrees, even when "warned" that the individual has to give up something in return. Once he's infested Bill - or rather, the Yeerk controlling Bill - leans in and taunts him. Then Visser Three shoos him off because taunting the meat, giving it any regard at all, is a waste of time.
  "I know you can still hear me, Tobias. Now do you see what I meant? You have to give something up, human, to be a part of something larger."
• Lack of Empathy: Aximili, having much less to do with humans than canonical Ax, thinks about the situation from a colder, more tactical point of view and is torn considering taking a course of action that will see many more humans killed or enslaved but will lead to a more advantageous situation for the Andalites. He doesn't feel right about it, but he considers it seriously. There's also his line about the Hork-Bajir.
  The Hork-Bajir were excellent host bodies, but Andalite actions had severely reduced the number of surviving Hork-Bajir hosts.
• Lazy Alias: Visser Three is in attendance as several members of the Sharing become "full members" aka get infested. To any uninfested humans, Sharing members refer to the Visser as... "Mr. Visser". As it happens, "Visser" actually is a human surname, but it's terribly on the nose.
• Make Wrong What Once Went Right: Crayak prevents the Animorphs from forming, which causes the Yeerk invasion to go mostly unimpeded. Despite this, due to Cassie's vague memories of the true timeline, the would-have-been Animorphs manage to set things up such that although they die, humanity would eventually drive off the Yeerks.
• Meaningful Rename: Or rather lack of it. In other Megamorphs and main series books, the Andalite on the team has "Ax" at the start of chapters shown from his point of view. Ax is the nickname Marco gave him because it's shorter than his real name. Without that ever happening in this timeline, he goes by Aximili, which is why that's how he's generally referred to on this page. Aximili is less Intrigued by Humanity than his alternate universe counterpart, and not as goofy.
• Mistaken for Insane: Aximili in human morph, not having the Animorphs with him to act as Cloudcuckoolander's Minder, was quite rapidly taken to a facility for the mentally ill. He says that it took him a while to understand what the place was, but he stayed even afterwards, demorphing in the bathroom, because of a general subversion of Insane Equals Violent and because he was given cookies. When he's told he gets too excited about cookies and won't get any more, Aximili breaks out and returns to his mission.
• Mistook the Dominant Lifeform: Aximili was not sure what the dominant species of Earth, which he'd heard had just started spaceflight, actually was. His first instinct was "humans" but he wanted to make sure he wasn't being prejudiced towards creatures whose upper bodies were roughly similar to his own and investigated several other species too. One of these was cows, because they're numerous and have a different superficial similarity to his people (ie, four hooved legs).
• Moment of Weakness:
  • The Drode comes to Jake during one, when after a particularly terrible battle Jake lies in bed consumed with guilt and horror.
  • After he's infested Tobias bitterly thinks of joining the Sharing as this. They preyed on this weakness, offering him the care and attention he craved and then threatening to withdraw it.
• My Greatest Failure: At the end of the book the Animorphs have a few moments where they remember both their true timeline and what they did in this one. Jake takes a sledgehammer of guilt knowing that he'd weakened enough to take the Drode's offer and his friends had suffered tremendously.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero!:
  • Cassie's Amnesia Missed a Spot moments make her distrusting of the Sharing and inclined to treat herself, Jake, Rachel, and Marco as a group, causing Jake to investigate "Tom". Aximili, not sure if the Yeerks are making a serious move on Earth, walks into a news studio while it's broadcasting to see what happens. The Yeerks react by immediately sending several people to round up the studio staff. Aximili's next move is To Unmasque the World, broadcasting an explanation of the Yeerks and the threat they pose on all television channels. "Tom" walks in on Jake talking about exposing the Sharing as a Yeerk organization and tries to take them in, resulting in Marco dying and Jake, Rachel, and Cassie going on the run. The next day Yeerk ships encircle the mall and Hork-Bajir are sent to start rounding people up. Visser Three, who's had no "bandits" to distract him from learning that his hated rival is the one who told him to run a "soft invasion", would have moved to a direct Alien Invasion regardless but Aximili muses "My own actions may have caused them to rush."
• No Name Given: Tom's Yeerk is not identified. It's often assumed that he's Temrash, the Yeerk who infested him until The Capture, but he's only referred to as Tom. By Tom's last appearance Temrash may have moved on up to infest the Governor of California, something the Animorphs prevent in The Capture, and left Tom to another Yeerk.
• Not-So-Harmless Villain: At this point in the main series, Visser Three is generally a dangerous joke who primarily harms his own side; a couple of books ago he was trampled by a water buffalo which then knocked him out when he fought it; when he woke up Visser Three morphed a monster and flung acid at the buffalo but hit one of his own troops instead. Since Jake's very careful around "Tom" and the Animorphs deliberately avoid him to keep him from getting killed, and he's got to stay in character as Jake's brother, his threat is largely potential and he's quite oblivious. However, in the context of this new timeline they both have all the menace they enjoyed at the start of the series and more, as the heroes have much less knowledge and ability to act.
• Not Too Dead to Save the Day: Cassie's killed storming the Blade ship, but very quickly returns to grab a Dracon beam and shoot Visser Three Just in Time. With how much the timeline was breaking down by then, her sense of how things should be is strong enough to give her a hint of Reality Warper power, and she knows she's not dead.
• Out-of-Character Alert:
  • "Tom" freaks out on seeing an Andalite on the news, stuffs what Jake thinks is a handgun into his pocket, and tells Jake to cover his absence before taking their mom's car and speeding away. Jake finds this bizarre and out of character. Tom wouldn't be enraged and galvanized by the presence of aliens. He'd know that Jake couldn't realistically cover for stealing Mom's car when Dad would come home and see it missing. Jake also thinks only criminals, losers who think it'll make them important, and nuts have handguns. So Jake slips into the backseat and covertly rides with Tom to see what's up, destroying his blissful innocence and sense of well-being when he sees his brother and several cops shooting people at the news station.
  • The Yeerk who infests Tobias, Odret, knows of Visser Three's reputation but the Visser shows him "elaborate courtesy" and lets him see anything he wants to look at, not even hiding Aximili's broadcast. This makes Odret very uneasy. As it turns out, Visser Three is trying to determine if Odret is an emissary from the Council of Thirteen as he claims, or from Visser One.
• Out of Focus: While Rachel and Marco are present, they don't have a great deal to do in this book. There's only one chapter from Marco's point of view and it's fairly early. He reacts to seeing his "dead" mom by freaking out and running after her. She slips away when her Controllers chase him and Rachel off, and then that plotline ends. Nothing is shown of his normal life, though remembering the state his dad was in at the start of the series it probably wasn't great. He dies minutes after Aximili makes a broadcast about the Yeerks. Rachel has more to do and three POV chapters, but mostly she's there as an Action Girl and her inner life isn't shown much.
• Parental Neglect: This book shows Tobias's home life in ugly detail. The uncle he's staying with doesn't do laundry, barely provides food, and passes out drunk in his room, leaving Tobias to sleep on the smoke-stained couch, on a regular enough basis that Tobias finds it unremarkable. His aunt feeds him and lets him have a wider range of clothing but she keeps him out of school and makes him work constantly and stay on hand. Overall he prefers his uncle's for the greater freedom of his total apathy, but "prefer" is a strong word.
• Quality vs. Quantity: As this timeline is terminated Jake bitterly says that as bad as things went, at least they would have won. The Ellimist allows that this is so, but all of the Animorphs died and millions of humans before victory actually came. Even with Visser Three dead and both the Blade Ship and the Pool Ship destroyed, the Yeerks are the quality, with Hork-Bajir troops and far more advanced technology including EMPs. Humans would be the quantity, managing despite heavy casualties to not just get rolled over until "victory", which probably entailed the Andalites coming.
• Questionable Consent:
  • The Drode approaches Jake with a deal when he's at a very deep low point, ignores the two times that Jake tells him to leave him alone, and needles him with his worst fear until in a Moment of Weakness Jake says yes, all without bothering to outline what "not becoming the Animorphs" actually means.
  • Tobias almost becomes a voluntary Controller but it's quite different from how that process went in Visser. In that book, after being groomed into breaking down and longing to be part of something greater a prospective host was shown a Yeerk and told about what would happen, and accepted the Yeerk into his head. Tobias isn't told anything, just sat down at a table before a basin of liquid and strapped into something that keeps him still, having never heard one word about infestation that couldn't very easily be taken as metaphor for joining a community. Apparently to the Yeerks, ignorantly saying "Yes" to "Do you want to be a full member?" and not resisting when being infested for the first time counts as "voluntary".
• Rage Quit: The Drode starts freaking out when Cassie comes back to life and kills Visser Three, and then when Aximili is about use the Blade Ship to destroy the Pool Ship, he finally ends things all together.
• Revealing Continuity Lapse: Cassie senses something's wrong from the beginning, but can't put her finger on what. There are a lot of odd moments the others notice too. Visser One in the body of Marco's Death Faked for You mother, appears in the mall and has to have mooks chase off Marco and Rachel. While hiding and watching Controllers at work Jake's hands start to morph into tiger paws, just for a moment. Tobias, being made into a "full member" of the Sharing, suddenly remembers flashes of flying as a bird. It's Cassie who gets the most of it especially as the timeline becomes more and more unstable, to the point of coming Back from the Dead after she's killed. This turns out to be because Cassie is a space-time anomaly who will always try to revert things back to the original timeline.
• Rewarded as a Traitor Deserves: Visser Three manages to intimidate Odret 177 into spilling what Visser One ordered him to do. Odret says "I work for you, then?" in a voice Tobias calls pathetic, but the Visser just executes him with the reasoning that he's not going to wait for Odret to betray him too.
• Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory:
  • All of the kids have odd flashes of the original timeline, or of things they would know and be able to do in it. Sudden thoughts of flight are what causes Tobias to try and back out of becoming a Full Member at the last second.
  • Cassie gets more than that. She turns out to be a temporal anomaly that can sense how the timeline is supposed to be, allowing her to alert her friends into action before the action really starts. She can't remember exactly how things should be, but she has a better sense of it than the other kids and can guide this timeline back in that direction, at first subtly but increasingly to a Reality Warper extent at the end. As it turns out, the Ellimist hand-picked her for the Animorphs for this reason, as her remembering causes the modified timeline to destabilize. When things are set back to normal, everyone else will forget (and be happy to do so), but Cassie will remember, at least to some degree.
• Rock Beats Laser: The timeline is terminated before it reaches the end of the war with the Yeerks, but the Ellimist says that humanity would win in the end. Logically, with Visser Three dead and both the Blade Ship and the Pool Ship destroyed immediately after beginning open hostilities, the Yeerks would be leaderless, lacking their most powerful weaponry and best resources, and have only one source of Kandrona rays, plus facing people who have been warned all about them. Since they have to take at least some humans alive, they have to become vulnerable to human weapons. It would still evidently be a very hard-won victory for humanity.
• Rule of Three: When the Drode appears in Jake's room on a bad night and proposes a solution to the torment of being an Animorph, Jake tells him to go away twice, but as it throws his guilt and fear back at him, he can't bring himself to say no a third time.
• Skewed Priorities: Once he's told that he's banned from treat time and won't get any more cookies, Aximili decides he'd better get back to his primary mission. He'd let himself be distracted in part because he was uncertain about his next step, but he had at least learned about TV in the intervening time, giving him an idea.
• Shout-Out: Jake tells soon-to-be-a-Controller Tobias "Not your problem", which might be a reference to the TV series episode "Not My Problem", which has the same plot concept as this book but in which Tobias remains free while the others are infested. Then again, "Not your problem" is also a very common phrase.
• Small Role, Big Impact: Back in book seven, Animorphs: The Stranger, Marco voiced the concern that the Animorphs hadn't gotten much done. Their victories against the Yeerks were all small. Annoyances to the Empire, at worst. This book proves that the annoyance they caused was actually vital - without them, Visser Three isn't distracted, examines his orders to carry out a "soft invasion", and discovers that the orders are from Visser One rather than the Council, meaning that he can disregard them. And he does, shortly after Aximili, who when no one saved him rescued himself, tells humanity all about the Yeerk threat.
• Sore Loser: The Drode is NOT pleased that the new timeline sees the Yeerk invasion thwarted and reverts the timeline to normal.
• Spiteful Spit: Rachel clobbers Tom with a bat until he's curled up, bleeding from the nose and ear. He spits blood while taunting her and Jake and Marco.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: Normally, one of the few breaks the series gives the Animorphs is that they can easily, harmlessly render Human-Controllers unconscious with a Tap on the Head instead of having to kill them. Not so in the fight that happened directly before this book started, during which Jake stoved in a man's skull with his tiger paw. He's dying and his ears are blocked so his host can't die as himself, but wasn't killed instantly and pleads for help and some kind of warmth as the Animorphs, traumatized by yet another bad fight, try to ignore him and slip away. None of the Animorphs acts unusually about this so it might not be surprising to them, but it's unusual to the reader.
• Teens Are Monsters: When Rachel sees Marco's mother running, she impulsively gives chase. She can give some reasonable sounding excuses for it but knows that the split second decision was because she wanted to chase something, and reflects that that might be why Eva was running - many people would find it disturbing to be pursued by demented teenagers.
• The Unchosen One: It turns out that the Ellimist manipulated events into ensuring Ax, Marco, Tobias and Cassie became Animorphs, meaning that Jake and Rachel are this.
• There Are No Coincidences: This book confirms that at least four out of six Animorphs were handpicked by the Ellimist — Ax, Tobias, and Marco for their familial connections and Cassie for her status as a temporal anomaly. The Drode is upset and claims that the Ellimist violated the terms of the game with Crayak by doing this, but he insists he hasn't.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Sandwich: Rachel is buying some Taco Bell at the mall food court when the Yeerks start to corral people. She grabs her bag of burritos and runs to join the others, and then presumably dropped it at some point before they had to start fighting.
• Threatening Shark: The book reveals how Ax acquired the tiger shark morph that he had starting in book 4 of the normal timeline. He had a more difficult time than he expected trying to hold it still long enough to touch it. When actually in morph, he remarks that it's an animal with almost no intelligence, only the drive to move and kill.
• Time Crash: Thanks to Cassie's temporal anomaly, the main timeline starts leaking into the modified timeline, with Visser One suddenly being on Earth when she would have been elsewhere, Jake partially morphing to tiger when under stress, and as it really starts coming apart, previously deceased characters returning to life.
• Time Stands Still: When Jake and Aximili aim the Blade ship's weapons at the Pool ship the Drode finally has enough and appears on the bridge. Aximili fires at this strange new alien taunting him, but the Dracon fire freezes in the air rather than reaching the Drode.
• Took a Level in Badass: Compared to how they were in the first few books, Rachel and Aximili are both much more reactive and combat-capable, and Aximili (after quite a bit of uncertainty) proves himself to be extremely decisive and skilled.
• To Unmasque the World: After leaving the asylum Aximili tries to determine if the Yeerks are on Earth. When the answer is yes, he makes a recording of himself explaining the Yeerks and their threat in detail and hijacks television channels, broadcasting on all of them. In response the Yeerks stop the "soft invasion" and start openly using spaceships and Dracon beams, and within a few days are corralling people at the mall.
• Use Their Own Weapon Against Them:
  • Jake and Rachel manage to steal two Dracon beams from the Controllers sent to apprehend them. They're effective against individual Controllers, but even both fired at once can't take out a Bug Fighter. It does jerk "like a person who's been slapped" and moves out of sight, but it's back again almost immediately.
  • The final part of Aximili's plan is to hijack the Blade ship and fire on the Pool ship, which nearly comes to pass.
• What If?: Jake, Rachel, Tobias, Cassie, and Marco never meet Elfangor or gain their morphing powers. As a result, Tobias joins The Sharing and becomes a Controller and Aximili frees himself from the sunken Dome and alerts the humans to the aliens among them. It's not a true What If? since before long this timeline starts to be contaminated by the real one, as Visser One in her host appears on Earth and there are various other "glitches" and a lot of Wistful Amnesia and Amnesia Missed a Spot. This book is sometimes considered "proof" that if the invasion had been open the Yeerks would have been defeated far faster than in canon but since getting to that point requires moments like Cassie half-knowing Aximili's name and that he's a friend, it's not certain.
• With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility: In the second chapter Jake, tormented by yet another traumatic battle, thinks bitterly about being told of the Yeerks and that it had been bad enough to know, and much worse to be given just enough power that he feels compelled to fight despite feeling that it's a losing battle.
  The power made us responsible, see. Without the power the knowledge would have just been a worm of fear eating up our insides. Bad enough. But it was the power that turned fear into obligation, that laid the weight on our unready shoulders. We could become any animal we touched, the Andalite told us. Power enough to win? No. Power enough to fight? Ah, yes. Just enough, little Jake, here is just enough power to imprison you in a cage of duty. Couldn’t anything make it end? Was there no way out? Was I trapped, fighting, fighting till one by one my friends died or went nuts?
• Yank the Dog's Chain:
  • Tobias thrives in the non-full-members side of the Sharing, feeling accepted and supported for the first time in his life and suppressing his own caution and cynicism. Surely there are some people who are simply good. Of course, this is the Sharing and they're only doing this so they can infest him with a Yeerk. Tobias despairs in his next POV section, thinking that there was never an easy way out of his previous misery, but he could have endured until adulthood.
  • Jake is having tremendous difficulty in the main timeline at this point and keenly wishes that he was a normal kid. The Drode offers to let him go back and have neither the power nor the responsibility to save humanity, and despite knowing that he shouldn't, Jake thinks of one day having to lead Cassie to her death and says the word in a moment of weakness. As a result he has a month or so of a normal life, but the Yeerk invasion is still happening and horror and violence ebb back in, except without power or knowledge on his part. Jake has to watch his friends die around him. Then it's all reset back to the night of the Drode tempting him. Jake, having no memory of the other timeline, grasps for what the Drode offers again. The Drode, who does remember, suddenly snaps "Never mind!" and leaves. So, Jake was aware of having been offered a way out only for it to be snatched away, leaving him with the additional guilt of trying to take it.
• You Can't Go Home Again: "Tom" tries to herd Jake and Marco into a car to be infested after Aximili's transmission, and is attacked by Rachel with a bat. Marco is killed as the kids flee. Jake and Rachel can't go back, and Cassie joins them on the run because Tom knows her, too, so they spend a few days drifting through town, hiding in stores and libraries at night, until they end up in the mall just when it's swarmed by Hork-Bajir trying to capture as many humans as they can.
• Young and in Charge: Not in charge entirely but Bill points out Tom to Tobias and says he's an important senior member, then explains that the Sharing doesn't care if someone's young or old. Of course the reader knows that it's because a Yeerk with any level of authority can infest a host of any age, and the real Tom doesn't have any autonomy whatsoever.