Well, folks.  This is the end of Animorphs Month (plus two weeks).  Sadly, or maybe not for some of you, it’s time to move on to a new project.  And the winner of the poll turns out to be A Discovery of Witches.  Which, as it turns out, is a ridiculous 43 chapters long, so it’ll probably take us into February.  Start dusting off your suggestions for YA Romance, because that’s what our poll for Feb will contain.  But, on to the Animorphs!

The Bug Fighter lands, and a Hork-Bajir comes out, which they defeat easily.  But then Marco thinks it’s suspiciously easily, and I just don’t see it, on account of how there’s an elephant currently stepping on this guy.  When you have an elephant, there is no ‘suspiciously’ easily.  You have an elephant.  And a tiger, and a gorilla. 

But it turns out Marco is correct, and they have Hork-Bajir with guns all long the rim of the quarry, ready to capture the kids. 

Wait a minute.  I thought Tobias was up in the air playing lookout this whole time.  He only swooped in when they started fighting that first ship.  So how did he not notice all this set up going on?

Then V3 appears.  Literally.  “And that was when he came.”  No mention of where he came from.  The grounded Bug Fighter, perhaps?  Seems logical, but still very vague.

V3 banters with them for a while, but none of the kids engage him.  He mentions that he knew it was a trap because Ax used an old, out of date frequency.  V3 says he’s going to take them up to the mothership (and apparently they actually call it a ‘mothership’?) and the kids pick up on the fact that he really doesn’t like V1.

They head onto the ship because they don’t have much choice, and Marco muses about how he’s going to die and won’t have a body for his dad to bury, just like his mom.  A fact which he repeats several times in the space of a paragraph.  I guess they want to really drive in the symbolism before they introduce Eva.

They all feel sorry for themselves as they head out into space, which makes sense.  Then, as they arrive at the mothership, they decide to stay in morph but not fight just yet, in case there’s a chance of escape if they’re patient enough.

I said.

Well, actually, you were more of an annoyance than anything else.  What’s the total count?  Two destroyed ships, when they’ve got countless others on hand, and one freed host, and a handful of dead Taxxons.  Not much of a dent, really.

When they get out of their cage and onto the ship, they see two groups of Yeerks in two different uniforms, one red and one gold, each belonging to V3 and V1 respectively.  I’m just stuck trying to figure out how Hork-Bajir wear uniforms. 

Then V1 shows up and Marco can see it’s his mother.  He freaks out, but it’s a very shocked, quiet freakout, so Jake has time to warn him not to say anything or do anything. 

My mother looked at him and curled her lip. “I took a human host and learned about the planet and the humans. And because of that I was able to begin the invasion that you have now endangered with your criminal incompetence!”

1) Cool, but why did you keep the human host?

2) If you already knew all about the humans, then why didn’t you stick around to finish the job?  Seems terribly inefficient to have to train up a new guy mid-invasion.

3) YOU TELL HIM, EVA!  DAMN RIGHT, HE’S CRIMINALLY INCOMPETENT!

V3 and V1 banter for a while, then she leaves.  V3 thinks about infesting the kids, but then decides not to because he likes being the only morph-capable Yeerk.  Man, this guy is stupid.  So, instead of just killing them right there now that it’s been decided, he puts them in a holding cell.  He also thinks about how Ax is the only one to talk and also everyone’s in morph still, but he doesn’t connect the dots.

I guess it could be that a real Andalite would want to get stuck, to ensure that no more morph-capable Yeerks exist in case he changes his mind about the killing thing, and that’s why V3 dismisses it?

Hork-Bajir, Taxxons, and a few other shapes we’d never seen before

*whines*  Tell us about them!

While the others make poor and desperate escape plans, Marco just mopes and tries to figure out how much of his mom-related memories are actually of his mom and how many are of a Yeerk puppet.  Which I have no problem with.  So many books manage to ruin perfectly good desperate situations by whining too much, or too poetically, or about weird things, or too early, but this book strikes a very nice balance.

The kids decide to morph ants and hope to escape, sans Tobias, but before they can do that, V1’s troops show up.  They’re given directions to an escape pod and told to hightail it out of there.  They figure out it’s because V1 wants to discredit V3, but I think she could do that just as well by pointing out that V3 has a creeptastic fetish for infesting 13 year-old girls.  Eh, whatever, the kids take their opportunity and hightail it out of there.  They have to fight through a bunch of red-uniformed enemy and…

Okay, are the uniformed guys just a special sub-set of the group?  Why don’t we see any red-uniforms planet-side?  Why are they all on the ship, and on top of that, all over the ship?  There’s mention of brown uniforms, too, and we can surmise that those guys are unaffiliated with any Visser.  So why don’t we see any brown uniforms down on the planet?  It’s implied that all the Hork-Bajir down there are nekkid. 

lol

Ax instructed. Then added,

And…somehow that works on this ship, too, even though Yeerks don’t have telepathy, so why the hell would that get built in?  Maybe they included it special for V3, but then how does everyone else use these shafts?

The kids make it into an escape pod just in the nick of time and demorph once they’re safely inside.  As they do, Marco telepathically asks Jake not to tell the other kids about his mom.

The next day Marco and his dad go to see his mom’s grave, and Peter quite randomly mentions that he’s been a shitty father over the past two years, but now he’s over it and is going to go back to his well-paying scientist job.  Because…that’s totally how depression works?  What the hell, book, really?  Peter just snaps out of it and then is fine?  He couldn’t even be like “I want to do better by you” but then struggle with that because, you know, fucking depression?  What a cop-out.

Well, and that’s the end of the first five-books.  On the whole?  I still love these books.  There’s plenty to complain about (plenty) but it’s mostly bad writing and logic sinkholes, which can be their own kind of fun.  The characters are delightful, the issues are interesting even when they’re poorly handled, and there’s only a few times where the message gets actually bad.  Most of the time, it’s a good message that shines through the hilariously bad writing.  In my mind, that still makes them a worthy read.  (Just…what the hell, Peter?)