| #50: The Ultimate |
Detailed Plot: During war games to train for if their compound is raided by the Yeerks, Cassie flubs up and has trouble concentrating on morphing because she keeps worrying about her family's safety. She takes Jake's criticism with embarrassment, but notices he's really not himself anymore--not since he was too late to save his parents and brother. Cassie feels bitter about her own mother's unrealistic expectations about proper shelter and hurls a few harsh words, then walks around looking for someone to make her feel better. Marco's sitting around whittling (and seems happy about how his parents are working together on their guerilla warfare), and Cassie scolds him about how he should be doing something useful. When a false alarm about Yeerk invasion turns out to just be Hork-Bajir stopping another attempted escape on the part of Rachel's mom, Cassie gets even more depressed seeing how hard it is for the exiled parents to take it. Cassie tries to talk to Jake, who is expressing very strong sentiments about not wanting to be the leader anymore because he just doesn't know what to do and suspects that everything that's gone wrong up to this point is somehow his own fault. Cassie feels like there needs to be some group discussion, so she calls a meeting and pretends Jake did it. (Then she tells Jake about his meeting.) Once everyone's gathered, Cassie admits this was her idea and asks to clear the air. Rachel's mother insists they're being held prisoner and tries to appeal to the other parents about escaping. Rachel argues with her mother and Cassie's dad suggests the Yeerks can be reasoned with. Jake speaks up and says the Yeerks want their souls. He addresses the group and admits that there is no reasoning with Visser One, though another visser might be more receptive. Eva, Marco's mom, weighs in with some useful perspective on Visser One, since she used to be the host body to his worst enemy and superior. She points out that the only person Visser One fears or respects is Jake, and after some discussion they all acknowledge that they still want him to lead. Jake has trouble shouldering the responsibility but understands why it has to be him, and accepts his fate. They call a private meeting of just Animorphs and figure out what the next thing they should do is . . . which is to make more Animorphs with the cube. There needs to be some hope of the morph-dependent guerilla warfare continuing if something happens to them, plus their chances are better with more soldiers. But they don't have the luxury of watching possible recruits for three days to make sure they're not Controllers, so they have to figure out who would not be a host in the first place. They settle on disabled people. Yeerks wouldn't want them. But the Animorphs do. They decide disabled kids would be their best bet since adults have a harder time adjusting and accepting the situation. Cassie begins to worry that this idea is going to get a bunch of kids who don't have as much experience as they do killed. But Jake convinces her that they also have a right to fight for the future of their planet. They also have to take into account that the morphing might cure some of the people who became disabled due to accident. They'll have to ask these kids to continue faking their health issues if the technology repairs them. They figure out a plan, and they go off to find some likely recruits. After deciding on a rehab hospital, Cassie, Jake, and Marco morph birds and fly to the nearby town. But they're spotted by Controllers near a bike shop and they have to escape into their roach morphs. They demorph and come out in costume, using clothes they found in the storeroom. They join up with a group of young people who are performing for the sick kids at the hospital, and Marco hangs onto an injured bird that they'll be using to give the kids as their first morph. Cassie carries the morphing cube, and Jake worries that he hasn't planned things out well enough. But since the Yeerks spotted them, they're worried they'll get caught if they have to try it again, so they'd better take their chance. The little kids they encounter first are just too young, but they find a ward of older kids who are in long-term care, many of them in wheelchairs. A leader type named James is demanding toward the nurses about getting medication for his roommate Pedro, who can't speak except with eye-blinks. James was in a severe accident when he was four and his parents didn't take him back after. And a kid named Timmy has a severe speech impediment because of his cerebral palsy. Many of the kids they meet are rude to them, but it makes sense in their situation, when nobody pays them quality attention. A girl who claims she's only there temporarily, named Collette, explains most of this to them before going off to play cards with a cystic fibrosis sufferer named Kelly. Jake decides they need to talk to James first. So they do. Jake explains all the crazy details to James, who just listens expressionlessly. When he gets to the end and says they're recruiting, James reveals that he believes it to be a sick joke and he doesn't want to be the victim everyone laughs about. Jake tries to get him to listen, but James takes it as a challenge and manages to knock Jake to the floor despite his being in a wheelchair. Jake is forced to demonstrate his tiger morph to convince James. Other kids come in and see the tiger after he's already done, and they think it's a tame pet tiger. But when Jake starts thought-speaking, they have to go through the story again. Jake agrees to let James pick his own team if he joins as an auxiliary member. He and Collette, Kelly, and Timmy morph pigeons and enjoy the flying, the thought-speak, and the experience of having a healthy body (albeit a non-human one). They fly out to The Gardens for battle morphs, and when they go back into their human forms three of the four are still affected by their diseases. Collette still can't walk because she's been a paraplegic since birth (and lies about its being the fault of a skiing accident); Timmy still has cerebral palsy and can't speak well or stand; and Kelly goes back to her labored breathing. Only James is healed, since his legs were damaged in an accident as a child. He looks to Jake and asks what they're to do next. The Animorphs carry their team members to wild animal cages and help them get morphs. They are very lucky that they aren't spotted or injured, and they are interested to find that the disabled kids get control of their wild animal morphs easily, having very strong wills. This all seems to work well, and as far as they can tell the Yeerks aren't onto them, so they repeat this the next night and basically recruit a large part of the rehab hospital, with James as the coordinator. They end up with seventeen recruits. Cassie's father finds out about the plan and he is appalled at what his daughter is doing, but she finds it necessary to defend Jake's decisions even though she agrees with her dad's principles. But then when they decide to try a school for the blind and start making their move there, a security camera catches them in the act and Tom himself bursts in to capture his brother. He gets Jake to give him the morphing cube while threatening death for their parents, and then he and his men capture the Animorphs team . . . except for Cassie, because she hid before Tom got there. Only she is left to fly to the hospital and get James's soldiers. She rallies the troops and tells James what's going on, and they mobilize. There are a few issues with the morphing and the discussion of how they're going to fight if they have no experience, but Jake and the other Animorphs need them, so James and his lieutenants Erica and Craig motivate everyone and they all give chase. Cassie joins them, reluctantly. They find where Tom's people have taken the Animorphs and manage to start an even fight. James reclaims the morphing cube shortly before Visser One arrives and demands to know where it is. He says he'll kill Tom because he lost it, and shortly afterwards he ends up in a tail-fight with Ax. Jake tries to make a deal with the visser, saying he'll tell him how many Animorphs there are if he frees Tom's host's parents, which the visser laughs at. One of the new recruits, Kelly, gets severely injured in her bull form, and Cassie tries to help her, but she's losing a lot of blood. She needs to demorph or she'll die. And then Visser One starts morphing to a squid-like creature. Marco helps Kelly get out so she'll survive, and Cassie has to rescue Tobias after he's smacked by one of Visser One's tentacles. But the visser is killing Jake by crushing his windpipe in another tentacle, and he demands the morphing cube. The only thing that saves Jake is a random Hork-Bajir cutting off the tentacle--clearly one of the Yeerk peace movement Controllers, though none of them saw who did it. Jake gives the order to evacuate and James repeats it, so they all run out into the night. But Tom has recovered the morphing cube and tries to run with it. Jake stalks him, still as an injured tiger, and tries to stop him from getting away with the cube. Cassie realizes that if Jake has to kill his brother, he'll cross a line and never be himself again, so she stops him by biting one of his legs. It's enough to let Tom get away. Cassie feels that even though it's her fault a Yeerk got away with the most powerful device in this war, she has saved Jake. Whether he'd died at his brother's hands or had to kill Tom, the real Jake would have died if he'd fought. The auxiliary Animorphs all survive and get back to their facilities, and none of them tell any tales or threaten to quit. Jake, however, won't speak to Cassie, and neither of them tell the others what had gone down. They know, though, that the Yeerks now have the morphing cube, and Cassie still feels that she did the right thing. Narrator: Cassie New known controllers:
New morphs acquired:
Cassie: None Marco: None Rachel: None Ax: None Tobias: None Notable: This book is ghostwritten by Kimberly Morris. In this book, the absence of Rachel's father from the hideaway compound from the last book is acknowledged, but all the narration says is that "there was no time to find him." If it had to do with a family member--and Rachel is close to her dad--it doesn't seem like they'd just leave it hanging as a loose end. Rachel probably would have found a way to go check on him. There's also no mention of whether any of the Animorphs' extended families were checked out. We know Rachel and Jake have other cousins, and Cassie's possible grandparents or aunts/uncles aren't ever discussed. It's noted in this book that the David/Rachel altercation from a previous book had an unknown resolution. The book did indeed end without revealing whether Rachel killed David or let him escape, but now it's shown that no one but Rachel knows, and she refuses to tell. Ax's disgust toward disabled people is apparent again in this book, as it was in a previous book (though that was directed at people of his own species). In this book, his excuse for disapproving of the disabled is that they are useless to their people in battle. Seems like an inconsistent thing for anyone to say if the same person has also expressed elitist scorn over a species that fights members of its own species. Dressing up in costumes and randomly joining up with a group of young thespians as cover would not work in real life. Groups that rehearse their acts and perform them will notice extra people who are not supposed to be there. The audience and bystanders wouldn't notice, but the troupe itself would. In a later book, a character named Tuan shows up without having been mentioned before, while Timmy is no longer mentioned. They have the same morph that they chose. In supplementary materials, K.A. Applegate reveals that Tuan was the original name for the character who debuted as Timmy, but nobody updated the later book with the name change. Because there are seventeen auxiliary Animorphs and not all of them are given names, this is easy to miss and could have just been written off as minor characters being interchangeable, but this mix-up is on the record. One of the auxiliary Animorphs, James, was healed from his handicap the first time he demorphed, because it was the result of something that happened to him in an accident. However, when he demorphed his legs were strong and muscled instead of withered. It seems possible that reconstructing him from his DNA would of course heal the injuries of improperly healed legs, but it doesn't make sense that it would also build the muscles for him when he hadn't used his legs in over a decade. Only a few of the disabled children are "healed" by the morphing process, and the rest still have their various ailments when they return to human form. James, the leader of the auxiliary force, is one of them, and this makes perfect sense because he was completely a leader type before he was healed of his accident-caused leg issues. But when it turns out that the only other people who were healed by the morphing were Craig and Erica and then those two automatically became James's lieutenants, it starts to sound a bit suspicious. Giving disabled kids a major, brave role in a war was a gutsy writing decision, but then still handling the leadership roles to only the able-bodied takes away from the significance a little. When James decides to sign on to the group, one of his conditions is that his bedridden roommate Pedro should get to acquire a morph. Pedro is never mentioned again after seeing his roommate and some others leave the facility in their new morphed bodies. It's not explained why Jake didn't give Pedro a morph or what condition he has that would prevent him from being recruited for the first wave. It became impossible to give Pedro a morph once the Animorphs lost the morphing cube, but it seems inconsistent that Pedro wasn't given a morph to start with, given that James so often goes to bat for his less capable friends. Best lines: Marco: "This, Cassie, is the almost-lost art of whittling. It's something people used to do when they were passing the time between milking the cows, plowing the back forty, and doing all kinds of labor-intensive jobs that are now rendered unnecessary by the proliferation of food courts."
Naomi: "I have three daughters to care for. A year from now, I want to still have three daughters. What do I have to do to keep them safe?"
Timmy: "You want to know what hell on Earth is? Having a large vocabulary, an encyclopedic knowledge of musical theater, and a speech impediment."
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