| Megamorphs #3: Elfangor's Secret |
Detailed Plot: After a prologue that explains how Prince Elfangor hid the Time Matrix and then failed to reach it in time, the book begins with alternating narrators, and it's clear immediately that something is different than it should be because Tobias--a human trapped in hawk form whose technically human father was an Andalite in morph--discusses being romantically involved with Melissa, the daughter of Chapman (a Controller). That's not the case in the story up to this point, so clearly, something odd has occurred to change the past. Tobias, narrating, also seems to think DNA is a foreign concept, and finally, the first chapter ends by mentioning free humans owning slaves. The book switches to Jake, and more things are "wrong": Rachel appears to have been replaced by Melissa as one of the Animorphs, while Marco is excited about Pong as a new video game and they are all part of a so-called "Empire" with prejudice against black people and Jews. Jake's family is loyal to the Empire and he sometimes suspects Cassie of being subversive, despite the fact that she owns slaves herself and keeps a low profile. The Empire is in a war in Brazil, killing "Primitives" for their land. Clearly a very screwed up universe they live in. And Erek the Chee--apparently still an Animorphs ally--has given them information that might be important in fighting the Yeerks in relation to this war. Jake declares that he doesn't want a world filled with Primitives any more than he wants a world filled with Yeerks. Then the Drode appears, and they don't recognize him because this is an alternate reality. In preparation for a possible fight, Marco begins to morph into a grizzly bear, which is narrated to be his favorite morph (even though in the normal timeline his favorite is a gorilla, and Rachel's is a grizzly). The Drode, despite approving of the oppressive alternate reality, tells them it wants to help them because Visser Four used the Time Matrix and changed their timeline. Visser Four was demoted after being defeated by the Animorphs on Leera in a previous book. But why would the Drode want to help them even though he serves Crayak, and why was Melissa part of the group while Rachel wasn't even there? The Drode explains that his master Crayak doesn't want a Yeerk to have such a device, but "the rules" between him and the Ellimist prevent either of them from taking it themselves. Crayak has offered to let the Animorphs follow the Time Matrix (and Visser Four) through time and try to snatch it, but the price is that one of them has to die. The Drode also answers that Rachel wasn't in the group because in that alternate future, she was considered in need of "re-education" because she was a bold and headstrong female, so she hadn't ever been in the situation where she'd become part of the Animorphs. In that future, people with defects become slaves or go for "correction," and Rachel's disposition made her defective. They have two minutes to make the decision, and Jake immediately votes yes. Marco realizes that this means he intends to sacrifice his own life, because there's no way he'd sacrifice anyone else's. But faced with a future in which slaves are kept, human technology is fifty years behind schedule, and the Yeerks are closer than they should be to taking over the world, they have no choice but to accept Crayak's bargain. And immediately they're in the past, fighting French soldiers who believe they're English spies. Rachel and Cassie are together, and since Cassie has taken a little bit of French in school she understands a bit of what they're saying, but none of it is good. Rachel morphs to an elephant so she can attack, and Cassie uses her wolf morph. They easily overwhelm the French soldiers who think they're witches, but before Rachel loses her temper and kills someone, Jake and Marco arrive and help calm things down. Jake gets a French soldier to tell him what year it is and what this war is about, finding it's the year 1415. They have to be careful to not mess up the future by killing anyone or changing any circumstances besides Visser Four's. Jake is determined to end Visser Four's "personal history." They decide that the best way to find Visser Four is to find someone who looks like he comes from the modern world. The medieval soldiers all look pockmarked and have rotten teeth, so Visser Four should look different. They finally find him: He's an archer on the English side of the battle they later learn is the Battle of Agincourt. But before they can really act, the archers start shooting arrows into the sky, and since they're birds at the time this is a pretty serious problem. Marco gets shot and Rachel has to drag him out of the mud. Cassie comes in as a horse and tries to rescue them, but she gets shot and they're stuck on the battlefield. Ax spots Visser Four climbing a tree and aiming to shoot the English king, King Henry, and he urges Tobias to stop him even though his first inclination is to try to help Rachel. As Visser Four tries to shoot the king, Tobias manages to stop the arrow, but since what he does is not real birdlike behavior, the Visser realizes the "Andalite bandits" are onto him. Ax keeps the Visser busy while Tobias morphs a Hork-Bajir and Jake functions as his horse, and the sight of a Hork-Bajir riding a horse freaks the soldiers out enough to move away from the injured group of morphed Animorphs. This gives Cassie enough time to run away with Marco and Rachel. Meanwhile, Ax is trying to attack Visser Four in his bird morph, but he escapes into a church and closes the door, where Ax can't enter because he has no hands to open the door. He's not fast enough in his morph to stop Visser Four from using the Time Matrix, which is hidden inside. Because they're tied to the Visser traveling through time, they're suddenly yanked forward until they are in another soldiers' camp, this time with George Washington's men. Most of them are in morph but Marco demorphs and steals George Washington's boots and some clothes to blend in and keep warm. They don't find Visser Four immediately, but assume he will try to attack Washington and they decide they have to protect him. But it turns out Visser Four has betrayed the new American forces and drawn the Hessians' attention to them as they're crossing the Delaware, so an ambush that shouldn't have happened occurs. Jake is shot in the head and immediately killed, with the whole back of his head missing, and the others don't know what to do. Rachel has to tell Cassie to come get his body when it's thrown overboard into the water, since Cassie is a dolphin. Rachel, enraged, tells Ax to go attack the Hessians, insisting that it's his duty because they killed his prince. Ax kills a Hessian while Tobias tries to stop him. Tobias can't believe Jake is gone either, but then suddenly everything changes in another time jump and Tobias is flying around the sail of a boat. On the ship, Marco and Ax are in the hold, and they're trapped behind a bunch of rope. Ax cuts his way through and Marco uses his gorilla morph, and they witness Visser Four knocking out a crew member and setting a bomb with gunpowder. Marco begins to chase Visser Four, hoping he'll lead Marco to the Time Matrix. Meanwhile, Cassie is in the ocean as a dolphin and Rachel just appears on the deck, human. The crew is surprised to see a pretty girl in a leotard on board, and they assume she's a stowaway. But then the crew has to start firing at the French, and a cannon battle ensues. Rachel sights Visser Four trying to get away by climbing ropes, and Marco in his gorilla morph can't climb well enough to catch him. Rachel morphs a chimpanzee and is easily able to follow him, and she threatens the Visser, who fears her and claims he won't tell where the Time Matrix is unless she lets him live. But before she can attack, she's blown in half and killed. Tobias sees it happen. Soon they realize they could all die. Ax and Tobias follow Visser Four to the Time Matrix, but before they can stop him from committing his final action, the Visser shoots the barrel of gunpowder, blowing up the ship. Of course, they're also yanked through time with Visser Four, and suddenly they appear on the campus of Princeton University. The students are almost all white men with crew cuts, and Tobias goes to a storeroom and finds clothes for his human morph to wear. Then he emerges, finds a textbook, and looks up how history was rewritten. There was no "Revolutionary War," but only a colonial rebellion in which George Washington had been defeated. Tobias also doesn't know what the business on the ship was about except that Trafalgar was involved and a very important ship had been destroyed before it could complete its mission, killing Admiral Lord Nelson. There was no United States. America was still part of England. Cassie appears at the University too, as a dolphin. She'd been escaping into the dolphin mind's carefree nature, trying not to think about Jake being dead. But the Time Matrix pulled her along anyway, and she appears on cobblestones at the college. As she's morphing back to human, Tobias comes along and encourages her to hurry, and informs her that Rachel is also dead. As if that wasn't bad enough, some Princeton students witness the end of Cassie's demorph and think she needs a doctor, but once she's fully human, a student onlooker asks her how she did that and uses a racial slur while doing so. She's absolutely shocked, and then deals with it by saying she can change her color to white if they want her to. At which point she morphs a polar bear and kicks the crap out of the guy who said it. He apologizes in panic, and then Marco arrives . . . and so does Rachel, who's inexplicably not dead. They interrogate the students nearby, and find there are still slaves in 1934, and that Visser Four's purpose in coming to Princeton was to kill Albert Einstein. But Einstein isn't there due to history's having changed; he lives in Germany, and there is no successful atomic bomb-related work being done for this country at Princeton. Visser Four has apparently outsmarted himself. But once Visser Four figures out that there's no bomb to stop, he starts jumping randomly around in time to try to lose the Animorphs. Obviously he's hoping the effect will begin to delay and he'll have time to complete his next mission before they show up to interfere. The Animorphs know they have to get the Time Matrix themselves so they can go back and make sure Washington crosses the Delaware. They're dragged through time and hit D-Day in Normandy, and are terrified to find themselves in the battle. Marco becomes a fly and tries to escape the gunfire. Ax is in the water and Tobias is flying above. Ax begins to wonder about the alternate oppressive future that Visser Four somehow created, and how they might have changed that even though some of the Visser's goals were succeeding. Ax realizes he killed a Hessian man during the Revolutionary War battle and believes that must have had an effect on the future. They find out Visser Four has alerted the Germans that the invasion of Normandy needs to be stopped, so tank reinforcements arrive and the Animorphs have to figure out how to hijack the Time Matrix. They realize that only Jake could be killed, so now whenever any of the others receives a mortal wound, they are temporarily disabled but revive easily. This helps a lot in facing the Nazi soldiers as they pursue their goal. They realize they have to blow up a tank to stop more tanks from coming down a narrow passageway, so they disable one with a grenade thrown inside by Rachel's bald eagle. They also encounter Hitler, but he's just a driver because of the different circumstances. Tobias wants to kill him even though he isn't the person he is in the usual timeline, and goes after him in Hork-Bajir morph. When shrapnel from the tank explosion crushes Visser Four below the waist, he is pinned and sees that the "Andalite bandits" are humans because he witnesses their demorphing. The Animorphs try to figure out what happened, and why this time the French and the Germans are allied against what they were thinking of as the U.S. forces (even though there is no USA). They have no idea who the "bad guy" is at this point. But they do know that Visser Four can't reach the Time Matrix or they're out of luck, and they witness the Yeerk coming out of his host's ear. They catch him, and Marco throws him into a fire. Then they have to figure out how to use the Time Matrix. But what battles do they need to undo? What actions do they need to "fix"? Cassie figures out that the best way to stop this from ever happening is to stop the man who became Visser Four's host from being born. While interviewing him, Cassie finds out that the host--John Berryman--recited Shakespeare in his head to bother his Yeerk, and so the Agincourt battle was altered so that the play wouldn't have been written. Berryman tells Cassie about his parents' meeting and they set off to use the Time Matrix to stop it from happening, and off they go to prevent John Berryman's creation. After they succeed, suddenly Jake is back with them because none of it ever happened. He doesn't remember being killed and they are the only ones who remember this history. There's some doubt as to whether their future is really better since it legitimately includes the Holocaust, but the only thing they can really do is put things back how they were and go on to fight the battle. Narrators: Tobias, Jake, Cassie, Rachel, Marco, Ax New known controllers:
New morphs acquired:
Cassie: None Marco: None Rachel: None Ax: None Tobias: None Notable: Jake's family is claimed to have Jewish blood in this book, and Rachel says her dad is Jewish. The slaves in the book seem to have a numbering system on humans, which is interesting because Yeerks also use numbers to refer to themselves. K.A. Applegate seems to like using such things as symbols of depersonalization. This book includes some historical details that suggest quite a lot of research was done, but it's also interesting that realistically, the kids don't understand the significance of the battles they attend or the changes they made, because like most people they don't actually know what the details of history are. This realism really adds to the storytelling. This book implies strongly that a white person called Cassie the N-word. The narration avoided saying it--surely due to this being a kids' series--but that was a bold move as well as being a realistic one. Cassie's reaction--feeling like she'd been slapped, then turning into a polar bear and beating the crap out of the person who said it--is one of the gems of the series. Tobias and Rachel get to kiss in this book. Interesting that Oppenheimer was not targeted as a person of interest in eliminating the H-bomb, since he was the director of the Manhattan Project. Best lines:
The Drode: "Oh, sure, it's all fun and games when they end up starting genocidal wars or engendering race hatred--" Ax: "I do not mean to insult your ancestors, Marco, but if the Yeerks had arrived in this era they would have left to find some other species to infest. These humans have all the parasites they could possibly support."
Jake: "Marco's the one wearing Washington's boots." Cassie: "You don't like black people, Mr. Davis? No problem. I can turn white. Watch me."
Princeton student: "What are you people? You're not human!"
Ax: "I am profoundly tired of your people." Cassie: The Nazis. The ultimate evil. Worth dying to stop them. Yes. Worth my one, puny life. But I didn't want to die. No matter how great the cause. No matter the reason.
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