Hello and welcome to yet another thrilling episode of The Intergalactic Academy’s Animorphs Re-Read! (Or, as I like to call it, TIAARR.) Today we’ll be covering book #7: The Stranger, AKA ‘It’s a Wonderful Life: Animorphs Edition’.

I mentioned last time that I had almost no memory of this one, but it turns out that that isn’t entirely true; I remembered the plot of The Stranger perfectly, I just thought it happened a lot later in the series. This doesn’t bode particularly well for some of the later books, which I genuinely can’t remember, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.

Now, on with the re-read!

If your first thought upon looking at this picture is 'Where the hell did all the extra mass come from?', congratulations! You just might be a huge nerd. Don't worry, you're in good company here.

Rachel is once again in the narrator seat. The book starts off with her and Cassie going to shake down a circus owner who’s been abusing his elephants, which annoys Rachel in particular because she’a actually been an elephant. (Man, I didn’t realise so many of these books start off with opening scenes that would make PETA throw a parade for the Animorphs.)

After delivering some elephantine justice by impersonating a member of the International Elephant Police (no, really), Rachel heads off to a regular Animorphs meeting. There, Marco and Tobias reveal that they’ve discovered an alternative entrance to the Yeerk pool: inside a Gap changing room. Apparently Controllers go in with some clothes and come out at a secret entrance in the movie theatre. And I do mean in the theatre itself, since Marco apparently found the exit by realising that more people were coming out of some screenings than had gone in.

Now, I’m not usually one to nitpick when it comes to Animorphs books (although I’m all too happy to nitpick elsewhere, trust me), but this strikes me as being…uh, slightly implausible. How many people could realistically go into a changing room and never come out before someone – employees, other customers, store security people – would notice? Do the Yeerks secretly run Gap? And ditto for the movie theatre; surely someone would notice all these extra people appearing in the middle of ordinary movie screenings.

Although given what happens next in The Stranger, I don’t really see why I’m complaining. Still, it’s the little things that count when it comes to willing suspension of disbelief…

The kids all decide to go and infiltrate the Yeerk pool again, even though none of them really wants to, in hopes of locating the Kandrona. A Kandrona, in case I forgot to mention it before, is a generator that produces the same kinds of radiation emitted by the Yeerks native star; it’s why they need to come out of their hosts and bathe in the sweet, radioactive waters of the Yeerk pool every three days. This is actually a pretty neat concept, since it means that the Yeerks are bound by their own evolution; they evolved around a certain kind of star, so a different star (like ours) won’t sustain them.

Kind of like Superman, if you think about it. (If you really think about it, I mean.)

And before I carry on with the plot, I’d be remiss if I didn’t quote this:

Marco rolled his eyes. “I’m telling you, Ax and Rachel belong together. The two of you are sick. Someday you could get married while bungee-jumping into an active volcano.”

WHOOOOO.

Rachel is all set to spend a quiet evening at home before going on a suicide mission the next day, but what’s this? Her parents are splitting up and her dad wants her to move across the country with him, where she’ll be able to reap the benefits of the high-paying job he’ll be starting in his new home: endless shopping, gymnastic training from an Olympic gold medalist, and the freedom to fly back home every weekend if she wants to. Oh, and a 100% reduction in the rate of suicide missions. The choice is hers, which is a phrase they could have emblazoned across the cover of this book given how prominent a theme it is.

She heads off to the mission still wracked with indecision. Needless to say, things go horribly wrong pretty much instantly when the kids, all in cockroach morph, are slurped up by a Taxxon.

The Taxxon transformer. It apparently transforms from a Taxxon into an 'alien', in much the same way that I hope to one day become a mammal.

But just as they’re all about to be eaten, time stops, they all unmorph and Tobias is transported into the Yeerk Pool with them – except he’s in his human body. (WE KNEW YOU COULD DO IT, TOBIAS.)

This is where the Animorphs series gets its ‘Q-like’ character. It turns out that they’ve been rescued by a rather mysterious fellow known as an Elimist, a near-omnipotent group of entities that the Andalites are aware of but don’t really understand. After showing the Animorphs various scenes demonstrating Earth’s beauty (we have the best planet in the universe, go figure), the Elimist gives them a choice: they can be transported instantly to a distant, Earth-like planet, where they and their loved ones can carry on the human species, or else he can return things to the way they were when he intervened and they can die. Either way, he says, the Yeerks are going to win.

See? I told you he was a lot like Q.

The Elimist has got nothing on Q's fashion sense, though.

The kids turn down the Elimist’s rigged offer, but not before Rachel noticed a droptube (read: magic elevator) nearby. As soon as they’re back inside the Taxxon’s throat, they all start to unmorph and come exploding out of its body with a bit of help from Ax’s tail.

This part is a bit confusing, because the human members of the team all immediately morph into their ‘battle’ forms and go rampaging through the Yeerk pool. So…wouldn’t that completely blow their cover? At least some of the Controllers present would have to know how morphing works, and I doubt they could fail to notice a bunch of half-human/half-cockroach monstrosities bursting out of a live Taxxon and then turning into assorted carnivores. It’s never really explained how they get out of this one with their cover story intact.

Anyway! Plot holes aside, this whole section is pretty interesting. On balance, I like the ‘supernatural’ elements of the series (let’s call them what they are), and the Elimist in particular adds a lot of intrigue to things down the line.

He also might just have something to do with Jake’s crazy post-Yeerk vision from the last book. But more on that much later.

The kids return home, exhausted and traumatised after yet another brush with death. Rachel continues to agonise over whether or not she should live with her dad, resulting in this very un-Rachelish outburst to the others:

“NO! No, I’m not some stupid TV character. I’m not some comic book, Marco. I’m scared, okay?! Just like all the rest of you. I’m scared of what almost happened to me last night. I’m scared just knowing that place exists down there. I’m scared about what happens to me. I just wanted to run away but I didn’t think I could, so I was brave because that’s the way I’m supposed to be. But now everyone’s going, ‘Oh, just come live with me and we’ll go to ball games,’ and ‘Hey, forget moving to another state, we have a whole other planet for you.’ And the more exits I see, the more scared I get, all right?”

(The ‘stupid TV character’ thing is a referencing Marco’s habit of comparing Rachel to Xena, something that now seems hilariously dated.)

After some uncomfortable silence, the kids start to rethink the Elimist’s offer. He returns (in ALL CAPS DIALOGUE form, no less) and gets all ‘ghost of Christmas future’ on their asses by transporting them to…well, the future.

And what a future it is! The Yeerks have won, as per the Elimist’s prediction, and Animorphs City is infested with Taxxons and other bad things. (Like Yeerks, I guess.) Oh, and we get this little exchange, after Ax refuses to stop saying ‘twenty of your minutes’ and ‘three of your miles’:

“They’re everyone’s miles,” Marco said. “You’re on Earth, Ax. We all have the same miles.”

<What about nations that use kilometers?> Ax asked smugly. <See? I am learning.>

REPRESENT

They spot the new and improved Yeerk pool, which is the size of a football stadium, before being confronted by the newly-promoted Visser Three, now Visser One. Apparently nobody wants to be Visser Two, because you never hear about him/her. He’s accompanied by future-Rachel, a Controller, obviously knew when and where the kids would appear because she lived through it. She reveals to present-Rachel (Rachel Prime, if you will) that the Yeerks took over a few years after the kids made first contact with the Elimist. The Animorphs were all made into Controllers…except for Tobias, who got cooked and then eaten with the others.

Man, I remember being severely disturbed by that idea when I was a kid. It’s still pretty unsettling.

Rachel is all ready to tear Visser One’s head off, but the Elimist brings them back just before she can do it. Given what they’ve just seen, the kids decide to accept his offer…except nothing happens. Surprise!

Yes, it turns out our friend is even more Q-like than you might have thought. Over the next few days, Rachel mulls over the fact that Visser One/Three initially referred to them as ‘six humans’, before correcting himself and saying ‘five humans and one Andalite’. This seems to imply that he didn’t know about Ax (maybe Ax died in morph or something?), or that the group’s composition in his timeline was actually different. In other words, the future isn’t written in stone, because something was different to what future-Rachel was expecting.

Then she realises the solution to another mystery: the reason why the giant Yeerk pool was located where it was is because it was close to a skyscraper that as inexplicably left standing even though all the buildings around it had been levelled. She figures that this is because the Kandrona is almost sacred to the Yeerks, and they’d want to put it somewhere overlooking their territory – a literal replacement for their sun, in other words.

Armed with this shaky assumption, the kids go on yet another daredevil mission to destroy the Kandrona. Man, a lot happens in this book.

They almost die (I’m getting sick of typing that), but in the end Rachel manages to push the Kandrona generator out a window where it thankfully fails to land on anybody. Success! For real, this time!

Well, sort of. The Elimist butts in to tell them that a replacement Kandrona will be ready in three weeks, and was in fact already en route to the same building, but suggests that their mission was not in vain. He also strongly implies that he doesn’t really know the future, thus confirming their suspicion that he only showed them one possible future in order to set them on the right track towards the Kandrona without violating the Prime Directive Elimist rule stating that he can’t directly interfere with a sentient species.

In the end, Rachel decides to stay where she is rather than leave everything behind and live with her dad, a decision that will no doubt result in nothing bad ever happening to her ever again. Especially not near the end of the series. Like, the last book. Nope, nothing at all.

*innocent whistle*

So anyway, that’s The Stranger! It’s a much better entry than I remember, despite containing a few of the kinds of lapses in plausibility that are unusual this early in the series, and sets up some of the bigger-picture mythology that will be developed in future volumes. Now I’m at a bit of a conundrum, though. The next entry in the series in terms of publication date is #8: The Alien (our first ‘Ax’ book), but the next entry in terms of chronology is the ‘Megamorphs’ book The Andalite’s Gift. I haven’t quite decided whether I’ll go with publication order or series chronology order. If anyone has any particular preference, let me know in the comments section!