After the meeting, Rachel heads off to the mall to have a gymnastics show.  Tobias stays behind, so Jake asks Tobias to spy on the lake until Saturday, when the rest of them don’t have school.

It’s kind of a shame, really. With my eyesight and the reaction time I have, I could probably be major competition in Doom.

Tobais’s hawk eyes make him see the computer screen better?  Or perhaps he’s just able to see…into the game?  And pick out pixilated blobs in the distance?

Tobias, what are you seeing in this that I’m not?

Since he can’t play video games, Tobias just flies around idly thinking about things he can and can’t do, then heads out to the mountains to do some spying.  He gets hungry along the way, and since he’s in super-chillax mode, he catches a rat and starts eating without thinking.

And it’s totally awesome, because it’s a live kill, exactly what his hawk body and instincts really want.

Too bad it makes his human brain flip the fuck out.

And really, I love everything about this scene.  I love the way he just goes in for the kill because it feels natural, I love how much he enjoys it, I love the sudden switch to ‘oh god what have I done,’ I love all of it.

In my panic, I forgot what I was. I tried to run away. But I no longer had legs and feet to run with. I had killing talons. Bloody talons.

Seriously, brilliant.  All of it.

In the middle off all this freaking out and identity crisis, Tobais decides to head down to the mall and find Rachel, because he’s just not thinking all that clearly, that’s why.

I was just going to end this right now. I would hit the glass at full speed and maybe that would awaken me from this nightmare.

You know, for kids!

So after Tobias tries to FUCKING COMMIT SUICIDE on the mall door (seriously, how did I not have more nightmares the first time I read this?) he makes it inside instead and starts flying around STILL TRYING TO RUN INTO SHIT.

Because KAA doesn’t ever want you to sleep again.

He runs into Rachel, then tries to crash into the glass ceiling, but Marco throws a baseball to break the glass so he just gets out of the mall instead and

and seriously, holy fucking balls, there’s not anything else I can say.

It doesn’t sound awesome when I summarize it because, come on, I’m so much better and snarky summaries than “this was awesome” summaries, but THIS WAS AWESOME.  I literally have nothing to complain about.  It was a perfect chapter.  It was just flat out supremely perfect and STUFFED CHOCK FULL OF TOBIAS FEELZ, YOU GUYS. 

After Tobias loses his mind, he runs away to go live in the woods and be hawk-y.  Because KAA wants to make sure that not only do you never sleep again, but you never feel comfortable again, she also throws in some mental anguish about how Tobias is trying desperately to lose himself over to being a hawk but his human brain keeps resurfacing at night to torment him with loneliness. 

Or possibly horniness, because a few days later he heads to up Polly’s territory to check her out again.

She would have to be very hungry to go for a raccoon, no matter how small. Raccoons are very tough, very violent creatures.

Very hungry, perhaps as if she’s bad at hunting because she’s a domesticated hawk who doesn’t normally do this and is used to having frozen mice fed to her by her owner.  Yeah, I’m not ever going to get off that, book.

So, Tobias settles in to begin…flirting? with Polly, but he’s distracted by seeing a Hork-Bajir chase some poor guy through the woods.  While watching this, Tobias slowly remembers things, like what a Hork-Bajir is and who Marco is and…

Wait…

He forgot?

What was that bit a few pages ago?

The human in my head would show me memories. Pictures of human life. Pictures of his friends.

Consistency is not your friend, book.  If he’s being tormented because he can’t fully sink into the brain of the hawk, no matter how he tries, then he shouldn’t be shocked by suddenly remembering who Marco is.

Tobias suddenly snaps out of his “watching a horror movie with mild interest” mindset and realizes “oh, shit, I should/can do something.”  He jumps into action and scratches up the Hork-Bajir’s eyes, looks around, sees all the other Controllers that are closing in on this guy to get him, and spontaneously falls back into being Tobias again.

And…yeah, that’s it.  Huh.  How anticlimactic.  It’s really kind of strange, he has this awesome break-down and flips out, but all the payoff we get is a little mini-vacation in the woods?  And he bounces back from it quick as a snap?  I’m all for emotionally torturing Tobias (face it, that’s the appeal of this character) and giving him angst and break-downs, but this bit feels more like the author suddenly realized she was backed into a corner and had to get on to the invisible ship plot, so she just “oh, shit, here’s a plot hole patch.”  It’s just such a total shift in tone and pace from everything else in the book, just a pointless side-trip into weirdness that feels like it has nothing to do with the rest of the book.  And it’s even stranger, because it should be connected.  It’s a great opportunity to see Tobias struggle and grow as a character, but it’s just tossed out there like an on/off switch and not used nearly to its full potential.

So after Tobias ‘suddenly’ recovers his sanity, he flies back to his Rachel to tell her where he’s been.

You know, I can see why Tobias would freak out over killing a mouse the first time.  But his friends react the same way.  He’s freaked out because it means giving in to animal instincts, and he’s afraid that…well, afraid of that reality vacation that just happened.  But Rachel reacts to the story about killing the mouse, not necessarily the story about hiding in the woods.  It makes it look as if she’s that freaked out by the murder of small rodents, which seems a strange thing to get this upset about.

Tobias also tells her about the guy he rescued, and that guy will never be seen or heard from again.  We can only hope that he hooked up with that chick that Cassie rescued from the pool, and they both went off to reassure each other that they aren’t mutually crazy.  Maybe they bought some shot-guns and moved to a cabin in the woods and all their old friends and neighbors thought they were crazy and preparing for the zombie apocalypse.  (Which…kind of fits with brain stealing aliens, yes?)

Tobias and Rachel talk for a while about it’s okay for him to hunt but the Yeerks are totally unnatural and that’s why they need to be stopped.  Because…what, was anyone confused on this point?  Even so, that’s a terribly ethnocentric way to look at things.  What the Yeerks are doing is totally natural.  It’s what they were built to do.  Take shit over.  The closer analogy would be that even though they Yeerks are predators, prey animals aren’t exactly defenseless.  Hell, we had a whole bit about how raccoons are mean and fight back all the time. 

Just because something is made to eat you doesn’t mean you shouldn’t fight back. It has a right to eat, you have a right to live, both those rights can’t coexist, so you just have to duke it out to see who wins this time.  Because fuck natural.  “Natural” is pretty brutal, it turns out. 

The next day they all go on the mission as planned, because apparently no one needs to be reassured that Tobias isn’t going to flip out right when they need him most.  Trust issues?  What’s that?

In the sack was a small watch. It weighed almost nothing. There were also some fish hooks, fishing line, and a small lighter. All together it only weighed about two ounces.

Ahaha, no. 

Why can’t one of the wolves carry this?  They’re larger and stronger, and flying is a very delicate operation that gets thrown off by even a little extra weight.  That’s why birds eat shit close to where they kill it, rather than fly south for the winter while carrying around a sack lunch.

They sit around fishing for a while, then worry because they aren’t catching any fish and they don’t want to wait a whole week to try again.  Then they worry because even if they find a fish, they can’t test it out.

So.  Cassie knew fishing would be iffy before they showed up.  Did she not also know that you can go buy a live trout and skip all the drama, and also then they’d have days and days to test the morph out?

Tobias goes flying around to check out the area while the others acquire the fish.  He sees all the Controllers coming, gets the others to hide in time, and then spends far too long describing the arrival of the invisible ship that has already been described half a dozen times.

Suddenly, Visser Three arrives!  Oh noes!  He’ll…be able to do absolutely nothing more than everyone else was doing, so it doesn’t matter.  Wooooo, scary?