Recap / Animorphs: The Sickness

Following

Narrator: Cassie

Ax comes down with an Andalite illness that quickly spreads to the rest of the team. Meanwhile Aftran 492, the Yeerk Cassie met in Animorphs: The Departure, needs help.

Tropes:

• All Up to You: One by one, nearly all of the Animorphs come down with the Yamphut. First Ax, then Jake, then Rachel, then Marco, and finally Tobias, leaving Cassie to complete the mission on her own. Illim and Tidwell are willing to help with rescuing Aftran but as they admit, they're a Non-Action Guy.
• And Then What?: Marco, despite being almost too sick to stand, quickly figures out that even if Cassie pulls off the plan to rescue Aftran, they won't have any access to Kandrona, so they'll be forced to watch her starve to death anyway.
• Ass Shove: Cassie leaves her dad to take care of a sick Tobias. Apparently, there was a suppository involved.
• Borrowed Biometric Bypass: Willingly lent. Cassie acquires Illim and rides in Tidwell's skull to get through the Gleet BioFilter.
• Call-Back: Book 17 featured the McDonald's entrance to the Yeerk Pool with its "a happy meal with extra happy" code phrase, Gleet BioFilters, and the small flying hunter robots patrolling the Pool.
• Contrived Coincidence: A human-Controller opens the entrance to the Yeerk pool from the outside just before the Gleet BioFilter can kill osprey Cassie, allowing her to escape. Less contrived is that the entrance leads into a McDonald's, and a regular human sees an osprey flying around in that cramped space and opens the door to let her out.
• Cosmic Deadline: The second-to-last chapter has Cassie put Aftran in her head so they can talk. Aftran asks Cassie to Mercy Kill her as it's faster than Kandrona starvation, her fate, as she can't return to the Pool again, and rejects Cassie's offer to become her host to keep her alive. In the last chapter, Aftran is a whale leaping in the surf as the Animorphs watch her. Between chapters, they had a meeting as soon as they were lucid. Jake proposed to Shape Shifter Mode Lock her in a form of her choosing, and Aftran picked whale.
• Damsel in Distress: Aftran 492 has been discovered as a traitor to the Yeerks, and Visser Three plans to personally interrogate her to get the information she has on the Andalite bandits.
• Death Seeker: A Yeerk host tries escaping the Yeerk pool in hopes that the guards will kill him. They just stun him, because killing him would waste a perfectly good host body.
• Drama-Preserving Handicap: The yamphut quickly makes Ax very delirious and loopy to the point of not being able to tell the others much about his condition - he tells them his Tria gland needs to come out, but not where the gland is. Cassie's forced to put Aftran into his ear so she can look through his memories and tell her where to cut and how much she has to remove.
• Dressing as the Enemy: Cassie acquires a Yeerk and infests Mr. Tidwell to get past the Gleet BioFilter and infiltrate the Yeerk pool.
• Dung Fu: Cassie in osprey morph foils a Hunter-Killer robot by dropping bird poop on its lens.
• Dwindling Party: Starting with Ax the Animorphs fall sick and have to drop out, delirious and unable to stay in a given morph. Only Cassie is untouched.
• Feigning Healthiness: With Ax, Jake, and Rachel already out of commission, Marco is desperately trying to ignore anything that might be an illness, claiming that the gummy feeling in his eyes must be from watching a film in the last period. Cassie attempts to indulge this by interpreting Marco's sweat as a result of the ongoing walk. Seconds later, Marco throws up and has to be carried off
• Five-Second Foreshadowing: While discussing the mission, a terrified Marco begins reciting "Five Little Monkeys" and worries that another one of the team could keel over in the next couple of hours... which he does a few seconds later.
• Foreshadowing: Cassie notices Jake sitting in the barn with his head in his hands, even closing his eyes for a moment before reaching a decision. It's not until the eel morph infiltration mission goes horribly wrong that she realizes that Jake was already experiencing the first symptoms of the disease, namely a headache.
• He Knows Too Much: Mr. Tidwell covers for Ax as he falls ill and Chapman gets suspicious of him, and tells the kids not to bother in their increasingly frantic efforts to hide his uncontrolled partial demorphing, he knows this is an Andalite, and he knows what the lot of them are. Cassie knows what this means and, as the one standing closest to him, prepares to morph and kill Tidwell before he says he's with the Yeerk Peace Movement. After talking to him she also knows that Aftran has to be rescued before Visser Three starts torturing her because she knows who the Animorphs are (she's why Tidwell and Illim know).
• High-School Dance: The first two chapters focus on one, where Rachel forces Jake and Cassie to go together. A problem arises when Ax goes delirious and starts demorphing and panicking.
• I'm Melting!: This is how Cassie describes morphing into a Yeerk, with all of her bones and organs melting away and her remaining flesh turning to mucus.
• Instant Illness: Ax comes down with yamphut at a school dance, and the others manage with difficulty to get him to Cassie's barn. An hour or so later, the first of the other Animorphs comes down with a communicable version. Another gets sick later that night, a third and fourth in the morning. It doesn't affect Cassie somehow, even though she tends Ax from close range(one fan theory is that the sickness actually comes from eating dodgy hamburgers in the last book, which Cassie refrained from). They're all out of commission, rapidly becoming too feverish and unwell to think straight or focus, but other than Ax all they need is time and they recover. Unfortunately, this leaves Cassie to address this and the other crisis of the book by herself.
• I Want My Mommy!: A five-year-old Yeerk host starts screaming for his mother the moment the Yeerk leaves him to feed.
• Misery Poker: In the last chapter, they engage in some one-upping over who had it worse.
  Rachel: My mom didn't let me eat any solid food until today. And it's been four days since I got sick.
  Tobias: (a hawk) That's the worst thing that happened to you while you were sick? I'm not even sure Cassie's dad is a real vet. He tried to shove a pill up my-
  Marco: Yeah, well, my dad brought me baby aspirin from the store. Baby aspirin! Like for a baby.
  Ax: I had a Yeerk in my head. Head-duh.
• My Species Doth Protest Too Much: Illim explains that the Yeerk Peace Movement consists of Yeerks who don't want to enslave hosts and would rather have a symbiotic relationship with them. Most Peace Movement Yeerks don't have hosts at all. This unfortunately leaves rescuing Aftran almost entirely up to Cassie.
• The Needs of the Many: To rescue Aftran from Visser Three's clutches, Cassie in Yeerk morph hijacks a girl who happens to be the first host body to be dunked into the Yeerk Pool, uses her to bite Visser Three and snatch Aftran away, then leaves her body as it's captured. The Visser, whose first assumption is that a second traitorous Yeerk is at play here, then shouts <This creature has no Yeerk!>. Cassie, uncharacteristically, doesn't think further about this. She notes upon infesting the girl that she's "a collaborator", with the series-typical disdain for most voluntary Controllers, but it's hard to tell if she realizes that the host's head may well have been split open to look for the 'Yeerk'.
• No Biochemical Barriers: One can only assume that the disease organisms in Ax's Tria gland are Earth based, as he's been there for one and a half years by then. It would make sense why the ruptured Tria gland would be fatal for him, but only cause flulike symptoms in the rest of the Animorphs. What doesn't make sense is why Tobias got sick, since he's a hawk for most of the book.
• Properly Paranoid:
  • Marco knows by now that the Animorphs trying to do something nice and normal always goes wrong. He's proven right when Ax falls ill during the dance.
  • Later, Marco is immensely worried about the loss of their team-members, fearing that any of them could get sick next... and he's proven correct by being the next member of the team to get sick.
• Race Against the Clock: Two clocks.
  • The first is Visser Three's interrogation of Aftran, which Cassie has to prioritize first.
  • The second is the critical moment of the Yamphut, where Ax's Tria gland has to be removed, lest it bursts over his brain.
• Roadside Surgery: Cassie does have her dad's veterinary clinic on hand to perform surgery on Ax, but it's far from an ideal place for a sick Andalite. Additionally, Walter isn't in the business of brain surgery so he doesn't have anything made to cut into a skull and Cassie has to line up woodworking tools, much to her own discomfort.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: Allison tries hitting on Ax in human morph. A few seconds of Ax's general mannerisms turns her the other way.
• Shapeshifter Mode Lock: When Cassie rescues Aftran, Aftran thanks her and asks for a Mercy Kill rather than having to undergo Kandrona starvation, and turns down Cassie's offer to become her host. Cassie takes a third option to save Aftran by giving her the morphing power, letting her acquire a humpback whale, and letting her go free in the ocean.
• Slippery as an Eel: The Animorphs acquire freshwater eels to try and get into the Yeerk pool through the water pipes. The eels are too small to be a threat to humans, but they do have a habit of biting each other until the Animorphs get their instincts under control. They're also literally slippery, so Tobias grabbed a talonful from the bait shop and came back with only one because he kept dropping them.
• Sick Episode: All of the Animorphs save for Cassie come down with the Yamphut, or Andalite flu as Marco calls it.
• Too Much Information: Marco goes on a diatribe on how many ways there are to refer to vomiting. Cassie is torn between accepting the levity and being grossed out.
• Transformed Ever After: The climax features Cassie successfully rescuing Aftran the Yeerk from execution... only to realize that without Kandrona rays, she's going to die an agonizing death anyway. However, because the Animorphs have the Escafil Device by now, Jake decides to give Aftran the power to morph so she can assume a form that isn't dependent on Kandrona rays, then stay in that form until Shapeshifter Mode Lock sets in. The morph Aftran eventually chooses is that of a humpback whale, which everyone agrees is a massive improvement over her blind and near-helpless Yeerk body, and the novel ends with Aftran performing one last joyful leap as a goodbye to the Animorphs, before swimming out to sea.
• Ungrateful Bastard: Ax refuses to acknowledge Aftran's role in saving his life. Her role involved infesting him to tell Cassie where the Tria gland is, meaning he woke up with a Yeerk in his head. Aftran is annoyed with him for this, and Cassie has to talk him down once she leaves. However, given that the Animorphs unanimously agreed that she couldn't just be left to starve, he probably calmed down later.