Last time, they muddle through the first part of their infiltration plan.

Ch10

She chats with Jake about dreams and nightmares from weird morphs. Oh you poor babies you have no idea what’s coming. Then they discuss bugs and how they really don’t want to have to ever do that. Poor, poor babies.

Then she tries saying hi to Melissa, who gets upset and rambles about how everything’s awful, then she gets startled by Chapman. She really needs to start taking acting lessons.

He peered at me. “What’s the matter with you, Rachel? A little jumpy this morning?”
I nodded. “Yes, sir. I guess I didn’t sleep too well.”
“Bad dreams?” he asked.
My mouth was dry. “I guess so, Mr. Chapman.
He smiled. A normal, human smile. His eyes even crinkled up a little as he grinned down at me. “Well, shake it off. Nightmares aren’t real, you know.”

I mean, sooner or later, the fact this girl suddenly became terrified around him at about the same time as she got an exhausted and harrowed look and the yeerk pool started getting periodic nighttime attacks is going to register. She needs to learn to volunteer conflicting information. The old standby is the naked in school thing, but if she doesn’t want to talk about that with an adult, there’s the good old test you haven’t studied for. Maybe pretend she’s so startled because in her dream he was the one who told her she’d missed it. Make it clear your biggest concern is banal teenager stuff, and he won’t suspect you could have bigger issues, plus the best outcome here would be to form a close rapport with him so that he’s sure you’d come to him with anything weird, and then when you don’t he’ll be sure it’s because nothing’s happening.

I don’t think any of the characters will ever do this, and Chapman just seems ripe for the attempt! Someone like Tom that Jake’s in constant contact with would be exhausting to keep up, but all she has to do is sometimes talk casually about her life in a way that suggests she’s really ordinary and doesn’t think Chapman is plotting against her.

Chapter 11:

Rachel is raring to complete the mission of figuring out why Melissa is so sad.

“Your job is not to help Melissa Chapman,” Marco pointed out. “You’re supposed to be spying on Chapman. You’re supposed to be finding some way for us to get at the Yeerks, so that we can all turn into wild animals and get ourselves killed.”

I’m enjoying Marco a lot more than I remembered.

I felt like I’d been boiled down to my absolute essentials. Like I wasn’t even made out of plain old flesh and bones anymore.
I felt like liquid steel.
I didn’t feel the fear of the shrew. I didn’t feel the total confidence of the elephant, either, or of the eagle.
This was different. There was fear, sure. But underneath the fear was confidence. The cat knew there were enemies out there, but he also knew he could handle it.
I felt . . . tough. That was it — tough.

I loved this description because cats are so cool! Looking at it now, it doesn’t seem accurate now. This is how cats act, not how they are. Cats really aren’t brawlers. They kill things smaller than them and run from things bigger than them. Granted, she’s a tomcat so I assume half her brain’s functions just shut off from testosterone poisoning, but I don’t think even tomcats are confident so much as willing to pay the price if it means one day they manage to finally have sex.

We get presumably-accurate-for-the-time factoids about cat vision. Or maybe the writer misread that cats can see better than we do in the dark as cats seeing better in the dark than we do in the light and therefore making out the individual whiskers on his little snout on a mouse twenty feet away as opposed to things just having the brightness upped.

Our current best guess is very different and, I think, more interesting.

Oddly, nothing about smell or whiskers, despite both being very strong senses in cats.

She finally settles on a unified theory of cat that’s about being self-contained, which seems accurate enough. They are a social animal, but they’re pretty terrible at it. But it’s

Ch12 Rachel smells another scary tomcat smell that makes her think If this cat appeared, I would have to submit. I would have to make myself smaller and less threatening and accept his dominance. and man, I have never seen that happen. That’s dogs. Tomcats attack until the other cat is driven off or dead. Maybe hippie Californian cats are different.

Just remember: It’s fun being an animal for a while. Not so fun when it’s permanent. The two-hour clock is ticking.

I think this is fodder for the theory Tobias deliberately got himself stuck in morph and came to regret it afterward.

She really, really can’t keep control of the morph and it’s funny.

We learn that both Chapmans are weird robot people, which is to say the wife is infested too. Principal Chapman heads into the basement and Rachel hits the limit of telepathy with Tobias. She informs us they know there’s a limit but don’t know what it is, which is to say the author probably doesn’t want to lock it down yet, but given the materials around don’t seem to matter this just makes Rachel and friends sound like idiots for not finding out the distance when it’d be so easy.

She follows the guy into his secret basement room and watches as a hologram of Visser Three shows up to yell about how he wants them to find the “andalite bandits” and come to think of it bandit is a really weird word to use. Let’s go with translation weirdness.

Then Visser Three sees the cat and gets mad and orders it killed.

Ch13

Chapman is just oh god what. Rachel meows. Visser Three decides to eviscerate it with his illusionary tailblade, and Rachel reacts as a cat, by trying to swat at the tail. Visser Three agrees with me that this is hilarious and laughs. He should totally have a pet cat, it would make his villain thing that much better. He says he can already tell cats are awesome and if only they were bigger so they could be hosts. I have good news about that, Visser Three!

“Yes, a pity,” Chapman said warily.

Also funny: apparently none of his subordinates will ever tell him lions and tigers exist. Come to think of it, the fact the andalite bandits use Earth animals probably takes forever to register to him because he isn’t in a human host so he wouldn’t recognize them. They’re just random monsters to him, just like his own morphs are to the humans.

What’s also interesting is he’s convinced by how the cat is acting that it’s probably not an andalite who’d keep control, but later we learn their morphing lessons are a joke so they’d probably do even worse at controlling a morph than random teens, who at least aren’t going into it with a false sense of competence.

I figured it was time for me to do something in my own defense. I walked over and rubbed my flank against Chapman’s leg.
“What is it doing?” Visser Three demanded.
“It is signaling that it wishes to be fed.”
“Interesting. Claws and teeth and ferocity mixed with the subtlety to manipulate creatures larger than itself. A worthy creature. Yes, let it live, for now.

Reading this, I can’t believe we never got to see Visser Three keeping cats. Has fanfic rectified this?

We find out there’s an agreement with the real Chapman to leave the girl alone, and Visser Three raves that he doesn’t care just solve this problem already. Then he either actually transforms or just hits a button to switch hologram forms to some creature that apparently evolved solely to prey on yeerks in hosts (a degree of specialization that’s at odds with another book about how the yeerk planet (and universe in general?) has almost no biodiversity). Then he shows a video of killing another yeerk. His computer is probably meticulously ordered videos of minion-killing so he always has the right one on hand.

The other yeerk shows up and they talk about how much this sucks, then Melissa appears for help with homework and they blow her off. Rachel goes upstairs to purr at Melissa while she cries about how her parents don’t love her.

This leads to Rachel declaring war on the yeerks…again, because that’s how she already felt from the start. It’s weird, her revelation here looks like it’s tailored to Marco’s character instead.

Ch14:

Rachel gets a C in math, recaps and also mentions her family is divorced and she went through typical divorced kid feelings.

<Flying is like the nicest thing in the world,> I said dreamily.
<Yes, it is,> Tobias agreed. <One of the nicest things. But there are things you miss, too. Sitting back on the couch with a can of pop and a bag of chips and no school the next day and something good on TV. That’s a good feeling, too.>
He didn’t sound like he was feeling sorry for himself. Just like he was mentioning something that happened to be true.

So yeeah he definitely did it on purpose. He keeps talking like the others might actually decide to be birds and he has to explain it isn’t a good idea.

We’re reminded now of Marco’s family situation. I think the other two have boring families, and Tobias is a bird.

Anyway, Rachel’s “plan” is go back and make Visser Three more suspicious when the same cat has suddenly decided to hang out for private communications all the time. You know, cats have good hearing, she could at least try lying down outside the door and seeing if she could make it out from there. Even if Chapman notices and is a bit suspicious, he doesn’t want to kill the cat because it’s trouble for him. (Also, she has a perfectly good shrew form that would be able to hide better.) To their credit, the others are going along with this not because they’re idiots but because Rachel doesn’t mention the nearly dying. Then Tobias privately says something to Cassie to clue her in that Rachel’s acting weird.

Ch15

Rachel heads in once again. Turns out Cassie put flea-Jake on her. There’s no reason to have hidden this. Visser Three rages about the group and actually seems competent today:

“They used Earth animals in the attack on the pool,” Visser Three said. “They used powerful, dangerous Earth animals. Find out how they obtained such morphs. My experts here tell me such animals are rare on this part of the planet.”

You know, if they were andalites, that could’ve been an interesting story too. I mean, somehow there’s no language barrier, and probably they’d just have met up with friendly humans and learned what they need to know in a conversation or two and it’d have been terrible, but if they couldn’t understand the language and were trying to run guerrilla warfare on an alien planet… Sneaking into the zoo, trying to figure out how to deal with alien animals in boxes built by other aliens, doesn’t that sound exciting?

They find the cat again and this time figure out that definitely a morph. It’s now cat vs person, and Rachel does surprisingly terrible given she actually knows where human weak points are yet just mauls the guy’s hands.

“You’ve made life very difficult for me,” Chapman said. “Very difficult. If I have to let Visser Three take the girl, my host will make life annoying for me. Do you know how tiring it is to have an uncooperative host? No, of course you don’t. But trust me, Andalite: I will gladly kill you.”

I don’t think this is ever developed properly. I mean, willing/unwilling hosts will keep being referenced, but in practice it doesn’t seem to matter.

He orders her into the cage or else she’ll be killed right now, which, given she just heard that she’ll get tortured and then yeerked, doesn’t seem too bad a deal. So she goes in. Right after she’s locked in and it’s no longer useful, the humans start fighting against their hosts and flailing around.

“Stop it, Chapman,” Chapman said. “Stop it or I’ll break you! I’ll leave you nothing but a shell! You cannot win. No host has ever succeeded in rebelling!”

I don’t believe this was ever followed up on at all. All freed hosts seem pretty non-shelly. Chapman explains that each battle will weaken the host until it’s eventually over, then points out one of the plot holes of the series: trying to strangle yourself while ranting that resistance is futile is something that humans think is weird and ends with you in a psych ward. And since the yeerks have to go back to the pool, all you need to do is get enough control to flail around in public once and you’ll be locked up and the yeerk will die.

Chapman tries to leave with cat-Rachel, and Melissa comes out in time to see Daddy is stealing her cat. For some reason, Chapman doesn’t just say that it’s some other tom that got in until Rachel thinks to have Tobias drive actual Fluffer over.

Jake is still a flea on her, and they just sit together rather than, say, Jake jumping off, getting behind the seat, and trying to demorph, then turning into a tiger and busting out with Rachel. I mean, worst case scenario, he sees Jake mid-morph, realizes they’re humans and not andalites, and has to be killed. But they’ve already killed innocent aliens while Chapman is a collaborator, so suck it up and bite through his neck. Instead, Jake nobly insists on staying where he is and being super useless until Rachel scratches him off.

You know, if this was Jake in the carrier, Rachel would’ve hopped off, turned into an elephant, and trampled the car by now. I guess the moral is Rachel should never be the primary morpher, she should be kept in reserve for when the plan inevitably goes pear-shaped. (Also, that everyone else should also have an elephant morph. Eventually someone else gets rhino but I forget who and anyway they should have thought to get it immediately.)

Chapman heads to the construction site because…I guess the yeerks have now made that their new home? Maybe after going through all the trouble of killing all the homeless people there they figure they might as well stay. The scary ship of Visser Three lands because what is subtrifuge.

I guess I was glad he was scared, too. Maybe Visser Three would become the Vanarx and suck the Chapman Yeerk out of Chapman’s head. Maybe the true Chapman would experience a few seconds of freedom before he was killed. Maybe the Chapman Yeerk would suffer before Visser Three finished him off.

Why would the yeerk-eater thing mean the host dies too? Hosts are useful, just plug a new yeerk in there.

Ch17:

Rachel reminds us Visser Three has an aura of evil because he’s a corrupted space elf, and his mindwammy is so intimidating she almost confesses on the spot. (Kind of wishing the series had gone more into this instead of it fading away in favor of the andalites just being holier than thou idiots, empath aliens can be creepy.) Only the cat’s total indifference to giant unknown monsters saves her, because cats only fear specific things and never the unknown. She also reminds us about the other aliens: scary ones apparently good but hard to believe, ugly ones definitely evil because ew.

Meanwhile, Visser Three realizes that wait, he has seen a bigger one of these guys! It was that stripey thing that attacked last book! Chapman says that yeah there’s actually lots of big ones, probably guessing this ends with him getting stuffed in a leopard but it’s better than getting killed right?

Rachel just refuses to talk because she knows she won’t pass as andalite. Rachel needs to share this very important info with Jake, who was screaming all over last yeerk attack and will be screaming all over in this rescue.

And Chapman explains that the host can fight back and humans will think this is weird. You know, it just occurred to me that this means every other species they’ve taken did not think it was weird, meaning their “infiltration” of those planets can’t have been particularly taxing, which in turn means they’re actually doing a really impressive job of it this time. And…we find out that Chapman isn’t actually a voluntary host, it’s that somehow his wife decided to be one, and god damn I did not remember this.

“My wife who was no longer my wife … my wife who was one of your creatures . . . threatened . . . threatened to give you my daughter.” Chapman managed to raise one clumsy hand to his eyes. “I forgive her. She was weak. And you feed on weakness.”

So also, the fact she fought back against the yeerk a few pages back is meaningless because her yeerk already suggested this. Then the yeerk gets control back and says wow, he’s so strong and also the wife is too just not as much.

And so, the question of why people are voluntary hosts in the first place is just kicked down the road for later. I recall an actually semi-satisfying answer eventually, but it’s quite a few books in.

Ch18

Then it turns out Jake totally didn’t leave her because clearly being a flea is super useful right now. He also says the rest of the gang is following to save her and that’s very good for them but he should’ve been a tiger ten minutes ago already. Only now does he finally think to hop off and try doing that.

Meanwhile, the other kids are running construction equipment instead of morphing and murdering. Wow, the early books are weird. And apparently it takes forever for his ship to take off, and despite that probably being the same as always he flips out and hacks open one of the ugly aliens for saying so, then the other ugly aliens feed on it. Ugly things are just terrible in all respects, you see. And Rachel unmorphs enough to get hands and get out of the cage. And Visser Three turns into a stone giant because the Evil Overlord List only specified that turning into a giant snake never helped.

Ch19

The kids manage to blow up one of the minor ships but not his doom aura battleax ship, and then Tobias flies Rachel away from the stone giant. I’m not sure we’ll ever see anything as versitile as last book’s fireball-throwing thing. Visser Three takes out the frustration on the rest of the aliens.

Ch20:

Rachel puts a note in Melissa’s locker saying her dad secretly loves her a lot. Her mom is just evil though. This seems like a particularly lackluster attempt because Melissa also seemed to feel Rachel was ignoring her too, so the best response would be to try harder to stay her friend. That also positions you to actually give her human support and not creepy stalker messages in her locker.

“Well, we destroyed a Yeerk Bug fighter. We made Visser Three nervous. And -“

Looking at it now, I’m pretty sure this is supposed to be an actual victory, while at the time I just saw this as highlighting the utter futility. I figured they had plenty of ships. It’s generally pretty hard to tell how many resources the yeerks have, since they can apparently hollow out underneath a whole town and otherwise don’t seem to show any clear resource problems.

And we end with Tobias stating that they’ll keep fighting until the andalites come. I wonder if that was ever meant to happen? Like, write the books, then when interest drops you have a ready-made ending?