Everyone promptly gets freaked out over the arrival of Visser Three, and Tobias points out that their brilliant plan of just walking down to the lake to morph there isn’t going to work.  Really, guys?  That was your plan?  Openly walk down to the lake? 

Huh, I just realized we don’t really have a good description of the lake.  This book is usually good at describing things, but we have no idea of the size or vegetation cover.  If it’s big enough that they could have even considered just walking down, then we’re talking a lake lake, not what a city person would call a lake, and there’s no way the Yeerks are covering every inch of that.  If it’s more like a really large pond, then their plan was doomed even without V3 and then extra guards.

“We’ve always said, if there was just some way to show the world what was happening … well, this is the way.

…you have a way.  You can turn into a dog.  You have an alien brother you can pretty easily kidnap.  Proving it is not the problem and never has been.  In fact, you’ve never said this before.

I mean, I get the point that it would be good to expose them with something this big, but that doesn’t change the fact that they’ve never said ‘if only we could prove it’ before.

So they decide that they’ll morph out of the water and then have Tobias carry them to the lake.  Because, yeah, a bird putting a fish back isn’t suspicious…

Cassie goes first since it was her suggestion and Tobias gets her to the water just fine. Then he carries the others in as well, and despite mentioning that he almost ran into several people, none of those people seem to care that there’s a hawk trying to bait the lake with trout. 

Even if you don’t know that red-tails don’t eat fish, anyone should be able to tell that predators don’t put their prey back.  And a Yeerk currently residing in the brain of a Park Ranger should doubly-know that.  And, since they were shooting deer earlier just for the hell of it, this should all be triply suspicious.

Rachel is the last to go, but as she’s morphing a human and a Hork-Bajir show up and try to get into the cave to check it out.

“He gulferch you and eat your lulcath. Ha ha.”

So, I get the feeling that this was Michael Grant being really, really dirty in a kids book and covering it up with gibberish.  😉

They get caught, but it’s okay, because Tobias just flies really really fast and that means that I guess the fucking Park Ranger doesn’t think it’s suspicious.

I know it’s a Yeerk, but I also know that Yeerks can access the memories and knowledge of their hosts, and if they’re jumpy enough to shoot deer, they should be jumpy enough to double-check shit like this with the people who know the locality.

Tobias flies around and talks to the others, who all narrate for us as to what they’re doing.  They all get sucked up into the ship and wait for the tank to fill up so they can reach the top, while Tobias watches V3 punish the Hork-Bajir from earlier.  Then everyone stands around talking and presumably figures out that suspicious birds are suspicious. All the smaller aircraft take to the sky and start shooting everything with wings.

One of the helicopters finds Tobias, but he’s sitting on their big truck ship so they can’t shoot him.

Yeah.  This giant ship that can enter an exit a planet’s atmosphere and fly into space, it can’t withstand a single shot from a laser.  (Which, by the by, kills with heat not with blunt force.  Heat which is much, much milder than the heat of exiting an atmosphere.)  Apparently the Yeerks have developed some metal that can only withstand temps that are under a balmy 90 degrees or over a thousand.  Or maybe Yeerk lasers somehow turn light into blunt force, and their metal is just that delicate?  Which also doesn’t make any sense, because it’s not like space is actually a vacuum.  There’s little bits of junk all over the place.  I wonder if they lose ships every time they run into a space pebble?

My point is, they should have been able to just shoot Tobias and called it a day.

Instead V3 shows up and starts taunting and monologueing, like a good villain should. 

Then Rachel tells him that they’re trapped in the tank and can’t open it from the inside, because why would anyone think that you could open it from the inside to begin with?  I mean, when they were making this plan, did they really think there would be a door there with a handle on the inside? What would be the point?

Rachel asks him if there’s any way he can destroy the ship, because they don’t want to be taken alive and tortured by the Yeerks.  Which is a horrifying sentiment, and I’m all on board with both her saying it and Tobias freaking out about it.

she said.

FEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEELZ!

V3 sends some Taxxons out to get Tobias because…I don’t know, he doesn’t want to scratch the paint, I guess.  Tobias basically says “yeah, fuck all this shit” and crazy attacks them, then steals a gun.  He tries to head for the bridge so he can shoot through the window and bring it all down and…

Really?  These people are in the middle of a space war with the Andalites?  You’d think they’d learn some basic defensive design by now.  Stuff like “don’t make the hull of your fucking space ship weak enough that a hand-held weapon can penetrate it” and “you have computers, you don’t actually need a window to fly, put your bridge in the middle.”

But, no, the Yeerks are apparently the worst space ship designers ever, so Tobias totally shoots through the window and fries all the controls and that makes the building-sized ship burst into flames.

Okay, you authors are just trolling now, aren’t you?

The random explosions also tears a hole in the water tank and the other kids fall out.  So, now that’s three times in as many books that the Yeerks have seen the kids either fully-human or partially-human. 

The kids somehow manage to morph into birds before they hit the ground, despite the fact that they were only 700 feet up and they’ve said before that it takes several minutes to morph.  The kid!birds all hide in the woods, but Polly (she’s still around) gets scared and takes off, so the Yeerks fry her thinking it’s Tobias.

A couple days later, Tobias goes to see Rachel and they talk about Polly how sad it is that their totally random plot coupon died, even though she basically had no point in this book except symbolism.  I start to get annoyed all over again at the treatment of Polly in this book, but then…well…

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

All is forgiven.  GOOD NIGHT YOU GUYS, I’M OFF TO HAVE MORE TOBIAS FEELZ!