Recap / Animorphs: The Solution

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Narrator: Rachel

The Animorphs make a plan to deal with David.

Tropes

• Asshole Victim: We don't ever see Saddler awake or hear him talked about in any detail. In the previous book, Jake reflected that Cousin Saddler was kind of a jerk, who'd break things and blame Jake when their parents made them play together as little kids. Rachel thinks of him as obnoxious. They know they should feel sorry for him having been critically injured by a car but just aren't as attached as they are to other relatives.
• Bad Boss: One of the repercussions of Visser Three being such a General Ripper shows here. Two of the cops responding to the commotion in the mall at night are Controllers and know the wounded tiger must be one of the "Andalite bandits". Evidence that the "bandits" are fighting amongst themselves after Visser Three gave David that offer might be worth something, but the two cops know that Visser Three will be more angry that they didn't kill the tiger. Surrounded by non-Controller cops, the two don't see a way to get away with doing so. They decide he doesn't have to know. This is similar to how in Animorphs: The Message some Controllers suspected that the "bandits" were human, and knew not to tell the Visser as he was quite set on them being Andalites.
• Batman Gambit: Cassie comes up with the plan to trap David, manipulating his ego and his desire to humiliate Rachel in particular.
• Big Damn Heroes: Owl-Rachel is pursued by eagle-David and is caught and overpowered, but Tobias strikes David while he's distracted. As a Dirty Coward, David flees the moment he doesn't have the upper hand, not realizing that this is the Animorph he supposedly killed in the last book.
• Call-Back: In the previous book, a Hork-Bajir sees Ax and shouts "Andalite!" to which he arrogantly said <Yes, Andalite. What a pity for you, Yeerk.> In this book when recognized, David arrogantly tells them <Yes, David. Five little dolphins and one big orca. Let's see how that works out.>
• Cutting the Knot: After failing in their stealth attempt to sabotage the Yeerks' plan to possess several heads of state at a summit, the Animorphs try something less clever, morphing into elephants and rhinos and trashing the event space to get it canceled. They compare this to doing poorly at a game of chess and so just flipping the board.
• Dangerous Deserter: The Animorphs learn how difficult it actually is to keep track of, let alone fight someone with their powers once David goes rogue.
• Devious Dolphins: The Animorphs escape into the ocean after trashing the summit banquet, only to find David waiting for them in orca morph. Orcas are the largest dolphins.
• Didn't See That Coming: David didn't count on Tobias' survival, which allowed Tobias to free Jake, Marco, Cassie, and Ax from David's trap and set up their own trap for when Rachel gets back.
• Dismantled MacGuffin: Ax demonstrates that the morphing cube can be disassembled, which the Animorphs use to hide it from David. In reality, they faked this in order to make David think he was winning; what David thought was a piece of the cube was just a Lego brick they planted as part of the trap.
• Entertainingly Wrong: David dramatically underestimates the Animorphs at several turns.
• Fatal Flaw: Ego for David. His need to be the best, strongest, smartest, and coolest person in the room caused him to butt heads with Marco and Jake, and especially Rachel because she's a pretty girl who's gotten one up on him and scared him badly. When Cassie has the Animorphs stage a scene for him to eavesdrop in which everyone is out of options and says he's too smart to overcome, and scold Rachel, so therefore they have to give him the morphing cube that he's demanded, he doesn't even question it.
• I Have Your Wife:
  • Jake indicates to Rachel that she has to talk to David and prevent him from telling the Yeerks who the Animorphs are. What she comes up with is that one of them, her in particular, will kill his parents.
  • David turns this back on Rachel by speaking to her from somewhere inside her house and mentioning her sisters. When he kills and replaces Saddler, it's partially to get back at Saddler's cousins Rachel and Jake, the two Animorphs who've caused him the most trouble.
• I Lied: When Rachel and David are going to morph to rat to find the pieces of the morphing cube, David instead morphs to rattlesnake and forces the other Animorphs to morph to cockroach or he'll bite Rachel.
• Immune to Bullets: Downplayed. Rhino and elephant morphs can tank some small arms fire, certainly enough to let the Animorphs go on a rampage, but the heavy caliber weaponry that starts being brought out is a legitimate threat and they retreat. As they demorph in the sea, bullets that had been lodged in their bodies fall away.
• Jerkass Has a Point: While David is a selfish Smug Snake, he rightly points out that Rachel threatened to kill his parents if he revealed the Animorphs' secrets to Visser Three. Even Jake admits that it was going too far.
• Kill and Replace: David acquires Saddler (Jake and Rachel's cousin), who was terminally injured in an accident, then drops the real Saddler down an elevator shaft. He gloats that Saddler was already "toast", so in his mind it's Get Rid of the Body and Replace. K.A. Applegate has said on Reddit that David did not kill Saddler but it's hard to see how unless the idea was that you can't murder someone who's brain dead— Saddler was certainly still breathing and was actually being taken into surgery when David went after him.
• Let Us Never Speak of This Again: In a very dark example, Ax says this to Rachel after the two of them leave David trapped as a rat on a remote island.
• Life-or-Limb Decision: Rachel chews through her own rat tail to escape from David.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: Rachel, charging through a world leaders' villa as an elephant, comes across one who's drinking clear liquor and pantsless and does not panic, but glowers defiantly at her. A security team armed with automatic rifles (which she regards as actually threatening to an elephant) bursts in and he orders them not to shoot and gestures for her to leave, and when she does he laughs uproariously. She recognizes him but doesn't share his name with the reader. This may be then-president of Russia Boris Yeltsin.
• Mercy Kill: Rachel muses, seeing Saddler in the hospital, that she believes in mercy killing. She knows how grim his prognosis is and in the meantime her cousin is so helpless.
• Out-Gambitted: David's arrogance leads him to believe that he has the Animorphs scared enough that they'll give him the morphing cube to get him out of their hair. In reality, they let him think that. Cassie, revealing a manipulative side that's only ever been hinted at before, makes a plan that predicts every move he'd make afterward, complete with providing two different bottles he could put them in after ordering them to morph insects.
• Out-of-Character Alert: David pretending to be Saddler doesn't necessarily act like him and certainly doesn't know his family but Rachel knows that since no one would suspect someone of killing and replacing Saddler it would just be excused as disorientation thanks to his "miraculous recovery".
• Power Perversion Potential: David sneaks into Rachel's bathroom in morph to threaten her and her sisters and say "Enjoy your shower."
• Pragmatic Villainy: The Animorphs speculate on why David wants the morphing cube, and they realize that turning it over to Visser Three is unlikely, since he knows that trying could backfire. They are correct. David’s real plan is to use the morphing cube to assemble a gang of like-minded individuals.
• Rage Quit: With their sneakier or more subtle attempts to handle the world leaders conference having failed and alerted their enemy, Rachel refers to what the Animorphs do next as like "when you're in a chess game and you know you're going to lose so you grab the board and throw it across the room". They use big sturdy destructive elephant and rhino morphs to careen wildly through the outbuildings of the conference center where the dignitaries are staying, and then retreat - the chaos and the bewildering security breach cause the conference to be postponed and relocated.
• Reports of My Death Were Greatly Exaggerated: Tobias turns out to have survived David's murder attempt because David merely killed the first red-tailed hawk he saw. The Animorphs are able to use this to defeat him, as David didn't bother keeping an eye out for an Animorph he thought he'd killed already; at one point he even saw the entire group in dolphin morph from a distance and didn't bother to count and check if he was facing five or six.
• Rhino Rampage: Marco acquires a rhino of his own to help Jake trash the hotel where the summit was supposed to take place.
• Sealed Room in the Middle of Nowhere: The island they leave David on as a rat is functionally this, a rock a mile from shore.
• Shapeshifter Mode Lock: The Animorphs trick David into morphing into a rat, and walking into a wire cage too small for him to survive demorphing. Rachel and Ax then wait for two hours to make sure he can't demorph when they let him out.
• Smug Snake: When they're both human, David sneers to Rachel that she's no threat to him because she's a girl. This is untrue.
• Staging the Eavesdrop: Offscreen the Animorphs stage a conversation in the barn discussing a fake plan to disrupt the world leaders' conference which is very similar to what they tried in the last book, then hash out their real plan while in morph so David won't know. The plan itself goes off without a hitch but they leave the scene via the ocean and encounter David there as an orca. Later in the book, they gather in the barn again and say he has them beaten before discussing out loud what to do next. Tobias reports that a rattlesnake left the barn soon after they did, confirming that he took the bait and allowing them to get rid of him. Odd for it to not work the first time but go off great the second - possibly the torrential downpour made flying impossible, but still.
• Terminal Transformation: Openly exploited when David gets the Animorphs to morph cockroaches and then puts them in a bottle and gloats, thinking they can't demorph without crushing each other. Soon after that, they trap him in a cage just small enough to hold his rat morph but too small to demorph in, leaving him with no choice but to stay a rat until he's stuck that way.
• Tricking the Shapeshifter: The team defeats David by using an elaborate version of this ruse: they trick him into turning into a rat to enter a miniature labyrinth with Rachel (by pretending that the MacGuffin he tried to blackmail out of them is there). Rachel escapes the labyrinth, David stays locked inside until he enters Shapeshifter Mode Lock, since he wouldn't be able to demorph without being squished like a pancake.
  • And as part of that, they tricked him into thinking he tricked them into turning into cockroaches, which he then trapped in a bottle; Tobias, who David thought was dead, subsequently broke the bottle.
• Transformed Ever After: The team deals with David by tricking him into morphing a rat and trapping him in a cage, then waiting for him to suffer Shapeshifter Mode Lock since they can't bring themselves to kill him, later abandoning him on a remote island.
• Underestimating Intelligence: Having gotten the upper hand, David assumes the Animorphs are just stupid. He doesn't consider Cassie a threat at all, since she's been softspoken and kind to him; when he's in Marco morph in the cafeteria scene, while she's the one to tell him he can't trust Visser Three's offer he only threatens to turn in Jake and Rachel's parents. With her eye for people and ability to understand their emotions, Cassie's able to manipulate him extensively.
• Verbal Tic: David has a tendency to say the name of the person he's talking to several times in a single conversation, usually when he's trying to be threatening. At one point in this book he says Rachel's name six times in one page.
• Visionary Villain: On a small scale. David brags about his plan to create a team of morph-capable criminals, confident that he's "smart" enough to avoid repeating the Animorphs' "mistake" because he would only recruit people less intelligent than him.
• War Elephants: Cassie, Tobias, and Ax acquire an elephant to help Rachel and her own elephant morph trash the site of the summit banquet. Marco elects to morph rhino instead, joining Jake who has his own rhinocerous morph.
• What Measure Is a Non-Human?: David claims that he won't kill humans, but considers someone in morph to be fair game, because for the moment they are "just an animal". This "principle" isn't even true - he says it immediately after trying to kill a human Rachel, and even if you believe as KA Applegate does that Saddler being brain dead and dying means David didn't kill him, he still took a breathing body and turned it into a corpse.
• What the Hell, Hero?: Rachel threatens David's parents to keep him from selling the Animorphs out to the Yeerks. He brings this up all wounded outrage when attacking them as an orca, and none of them say he's lying or defend her. Rachel is sickened by the thought that one she'd go this far and two that the others expect it of her, and gives one of these herself to Jake. Why did he tell Ax "Get Rachel" at the end of the previous book? Why did he send her to talk to David in the cafeteria?