I’m not even going to swear to you that Marco is my first name. See, I’m hoping to live awhile longer.

Well then you probably shouldn’t reveal in this book that Visser One is your mom.  I’m just saying, that’s a bigger give away than your last name.

Today’s totally pointless side-track opener is Marco walking home from the store and coming across some guy getting mugged.  Marco does the whole ‘not my problem’ line of reasoning, but…I don’t know, maybe I just have a bit too much faith in humanity left.  But I still like to believe that people who don’t help in a mugging are doing it because they’re scared, not because they just don’t give a shit.  There’s a big difference between “if I step in, the mugger might shoot me instead” and “uhg, old guy getting robbed, that’s so annoying, back to my life now.”  More to the point, Marco has always seemed like he would lean toward the former, not the later.  He’s not a guy that doesn’t care, he’s just a guy that’s really scared for the sake of his dad.  So what’s with random ‘pretending like I don’t give a shit’ reasoning in this opener?  He’s got so many other options, any of which would be both valid and in character.

But then Marco randomly changes his mind, and I do mean randomly.  First he thinks that it’s not his problem, then he notes that the three muggers are large, then he morphs into a gorilla.  That’s it.  No changing his mind, no further thought, nothing.  Just goes ahead and does it.  Like I said, it’s in character for Marco to actually give a shit and like people, so this is fine to have happen, but there’s still a missing step in there.

So Marco becomes a gorilla and fights off the three incredibly stupid muggers.  (Because, see, these muggers actually thought they could fight back.)

I had no intention of killing anyone. I hoisted the knife guy into the Dumpster with his friend. He wasn’t breathing real well, but I figured he’d survive.

…

……

………………………..

MARCO, NO!  BAD MONKEY, NO COOKIE!

If you don’t to kill people, then don’t toss them head-first into brick walls with your full gorilla-strength.  And don’t assume that “not breathing real well” is something to be shrugged off.  That’s A PRETTY MAJOR PROBLEM.

Once he’s got all the muggers ¾ths of the way to killed, with time able to take care of the other ¼th, Marco figures he’s done a good day’s work of murdering people, only to find that the old man he saved is now trying to shoot him, too.  Because, duh, no one sees a rampaging gorilla and thinks “he saved me.”  They think “oh, shit, it’s a fucking rampaging gorilla.”  Those things don’t really distinguish between friend and foe.  That old man has no reason at all to think that the rabid zoo escapee won’t turn on him next.

Which just goes to show you why you should never get involved in other people’s problems.

Actually, I think it’s more an aesop on why you shouldn’t beat the crap out of people and call it heroism.

Next day Marco is retelling the story of how the old man was totally a poopie head and tried to shoot him, and no one points out that…well, it’s really his own fault for charging in like that and scaring the crap out of the old man.  Honestly, Marco, you were a gorilla.  So the thugs were charging at you?  Who cares.  Let them run into you and bounce off.

Standard info-dump on everyone else and the backstory and all that jazz.

“I think Marco did the right thing,” she said. “What was he supposed to do? Just walk away? I don’t think so.”

I’m really not a fan of where the books are going with this.  Now we’ve seen two instances of the kids doing non-Yeerk vigilantism, and in both cases they’ve gone to severe extremes.  Tobias and Rachel caused massive property damage, and Marco probably just killed three people.  There’s other cases in later books where they do the same thing, using morphing to solve problems that didn’t need morphing.  And yet when the inevitable argument comes up, it’s always a stark “yes or no,” never a “well, maybe try something a little less holy-shit crazy.”  Marco could have gone back to 7-11 and called the cops, or stood in the street yelling for attention and trying to scare the muggers off.  Or just morphed and not thrown people head-first into brick walls.

There’s very much a “fuck authority” message being slipped in, and while I’m sure kids love the idea of batshit to fix problems in grandiose ways, I’m also sure that’s not really a message we want to reinforce for them.

On to the actual plot.  The kids are all gathered to go see Ax.  Ax wants to go home, but they’ll need to steal a spaceship in order for him to do that.  Marco points out that that’s dangerous, but Ax argues back that bigger danger means bigger honor.

Oh, for fuck’s sake.  No.  Even in societies where honor really is a big thing, no.  That’s stupid.  It’s stupid because no one who’s actually watched their spaceship full of friends blow up would say it.   You know who says stuff like that?  Lily-ass poets who never leave the house and just daydream about going to war.

Also, the Yeerks kind of want to infest the whole galaxy, and they have a special hate for the Andalites, so this is not an honorable war.  This is a war for survival, even for Ax’s people.

I guess it could be that Andalite brains are drastically different from ours and they care more about honor than survival, but we don’t actually get much confirmation of that over the course of the series.  Yeah, they talk about honor a lot, but they don’t apply it often, and in most other cases they match up with human psychology.  So there’s not much attempt to play with this except to spout off a few random lines and then prove Ax wrong in the process.

This seems really out of place, too.  More like something you’d hear from someone making up a warrior society than something you’d hear from any actual military.  It’s just…romanticized and impractical.

The plan is to make a distress beacon and get the Yeerks to send down one Bug Fighter to check it out, at which point they’ll have to fight off a Taxxon and a Hork-Bajir to get the ship.  Yup, one of each.  Taxxons can pretty much be taken out with a pebble, and Hork-Bajir can be stepped on by an elephant without too much trouble.  And yet everyone goes on about how terribly dangerous this is.

You know what would help here?  Guns.  You’re going to be laying a trap.  Just put someone up in a tree with a gun and shoot the aliens as they come out.  Why haven’t you stolen a few of these already?

…is Ax’s Dome still at the bottom of the ocean?  Could they go back some weekend and scavenge it for alien tech, or did the Yeerks unsink and/or destroy it?  I don’t think the last book said one way or the other.

Anyway, Ax needs to go shopping at the mall to get stuff for his beacon.  But they’re going to start his morph a half-hour bus ride away from the mall, even though there’s an abandoned construction site right across the street.  And a random patch of woods right next to the construction site.    Yeah, he’d still need to ride the bus to get that far, but why can’t these kids ever figure out the concept of resetting their morph clock?

But no, instead they’re going to have to just go shopping really fast to get there and back within the 2-hour limit.

After he morphs, they worry that he’s going to attract attention by being strange, but the strangest thing he does is stutter.  Humans stutter.  Not in the same way Ax does, but a layman probably wouldn’t know that.  They’d just think he’s got a speech impediment. 

They get to the mall and immediately lose Ax.  So says the text.  What the text ignores is that this rigorously-trained military cadet has run off without so much as a by-your-leave the second he got distracted.  Ax, why did you do that?  You can be awed, but you should also be trained to stick to your Prince.

Jake slowed instantly. “You’re right. This many people, some of them are sure to be Controllers.”

Therefore we should talk openly in the middle of the crowd about how some of them are probably Controllers.  …?

They track down Ax buying coffee at a Starbucks, because I’m sure that’s what Ax’s training told him to do in an unfamiliar environment: jump in and poke everything.

I know he’s not fully trained yet, but he’s trained enough to be allowed on a ship, and that has to count for something.

Ax discovers taste, but apparently not the burns that come from gulping coffee right after it’s handed to you.  (Or is that just me being a food pansy again?)

They finally make it to Radio Shack, where Ax finds everything he needs except one item.  So handy that humans are only one baby-step away from interdimensional travel.  Apparently we’ve already got all the basics for sale as common electronics!

And then Ax randomly runs off again.

Are we sure this guy is really a cadet? 

I mean, there are plenty of ways to show him as an awe-struck fish out of water without having him hare off like a two-year-old throwing a tantrum.  Because, that’s really what this reads as.  Not a rational, semi-mature teen (or teen-equivalent), but a toddler.

They track him down to the food court where he’s busy shoving everything into his mouth.  No, okay, he’s never had a sense of taste before.  If, say, the boys got their shopping done early, Ax asked to try some food because he’s never had it before, and they go to buy him a sticky bun because they don’t know what will happen, that would be one thing.  He could lose it then because he’s getting a sensory overload.  But to have him just willingly split from the group and dive into this?  Stop being such a toddler, Ax.

Ax’s toddler antics also attract the attention of the mall security guards, who then proceed to chase him, with good reason.  Unfortunately, Ax freaks out and starts to demorph so he can run better.

Also, the text keeps calling the guards ‘cops.’  It’s really irritating.