Recap / Animorphs: The Unexpected

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Narrator: Cassie

A mission gone wrong leaves Cassie stranded in the Australian Outback.

Tropes:

• Accidental Murder: Cassie only intended to stun the second Hork-Bajir Controller hunting her in the plane, but she accidentally flipped a setting on the Dracon beam she stole, causing the Hork-Bajir and Yeerk to get vaporized.
• All Up to You: Cassie starts the book alone. The others are only with her for two chapters at the airport and the final chapter. Mostly, she's on her own. As with the last time she was faced with a really difficult situation and had to go it alone, while she does doubt herself a great deal she also displays a high degree of initiative, boldness, and creative thinking. In that final chapter both Rachel and Tobias are very admiring of her ability to get things done alone.
• Amputation Stops Spread: Treating Yami's grandfather's leg as a case of gangrene, Cassie morphs Hork-Bajir, which is stronger than any human and equipped with a sharp Blade Below the Shoulder. It only takes one cut for the soft tissue, at which point she has an assistant pinch the femoral artery closed to stop it spurting, and another to cut through the bones. Then she demorphs and makes a lot of stitches to close off the major blood vessels. And... it works! The patient's fever breaks and he's lucid almost immediately.
• Artistic License – Animal Care: Cassie mentions helping her dad with some amputations including on deer. Rehabilitating non-tame deer is difficult as they get unbelievably stressed when confined and do very poorly with three legs compared to smaller animals.
• Auto Cannibalism: Cassie feels guilty about shooting a Taxxon pilot and imagines Rachel saying "That pilot would’ve gobbled up his own splattered guts if he’d had a mouth left to do it with. Don’t waste your sympathy. Or your guilt." (It doesn't work, she still feels bad.) Later in the book, the first Taxxon that Cassie kills as a kangaroo indeed tries eating its own spilled guts even as other Taxxon-Controllers swarm to devour it.
• Battle Boomerang: Yami explains to Cassie the difference between returning and non-returning boomerangs. The former are used for games, the latter for hunting. Non-returning boomerangs are fetched by the dogs that accompany the hunters. Later in the book he and his uncles kill three Hork-Bajir with their boomerangs.
• Betty and Veronica: Briefly! Jake never finds out he had a sort of rival and while Yami's interested in Cassie he's respectful of her boundaries. But he's funny, friendly, and sympathetic, and not bad about rolling with a strange situation. Cassie finds herself attracted to him. Yami is the "Betty" in that he represents a kind of normalcy; not the sort of life Cassie's used to, but one without constant fighting and ethical dilemmas, while Jake is the "Veronica" in that he's a fellow Animorph and they've been through such a lot together, some truly awful times included. Cassie notices this attraction and feels ashamed about it. She's already with Jake and doesn't think she should be interested in anyone else. Still, when she gets home she tracks down an osprey postcard. Without letting Jake or any other Animorph see it she writes "No worries" and sends it to Yami so he, having seen her demorph from osprey, will know it's from her and that she's okay.
• Big Damn Heroes: Lourdes sneaks into the Blade ship to find Cassie when it lands in Australia. Thanks to her many Chee abilities, Cassie gets home safe and sound.
• Bird-Poop Gag: Cassie aggravates some CIA-Controllers by pooping on them as a seagull. They immediately cry "Andalite!" and start firing into the air, which alarms the Marines they'd been arguing with and causes a firefight.
• Brick Joke:
  • While hiding in the hold of the plane, Cassie's freezing due to the high altitude temperature and digs through the luggage looking for warm clothing, since she knows there will be trouble soon enough and wants to be able to morph immediately. The plane is headed to Australia in its summer, so she mainly finds warm weather clothing, but at last locates an old man's cardigan under two bottles of prune juice and makes use of them. At the end of the book, Marco says, "Some rich old Australian guy is offering a bundle of cash for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the person or persons responsible for stealing a sweater and two bottles of prune juice from his suitcase."
  • While in Australia Cassie thinks enviously of the Chee that must be impersonating her at home, eating her food, going to her classes, helping her dad in the clinic, and kissing her parents goodnight. Then she thinks that Chee's also doing her algebra homework so it's not all bad. In the last scene, she complains that her Chee impersonator did too well on an algebra test and now her parents think she's a math whiz and want her to take advanced classes.
• Bullethole Door: Cassie's trapped in an airplane bathroom as a Controller opens fire on the door, perforating it extensively. She escapes by flattening herself to the floor, morphing fly, and zipping out one of the bulletholes.
• Clothing Damage: The events at the airport leave Cassie's leotard halfway shredded to the point where she has to check that she's decent before coming to talk to humans.
• Cold Open: The book opens with Cassie searching the airport for a transport carrying the wreckage of a Bug fighter, with nary a word of explanation until the second chapter.
• Damn You, Muscle Memory!: Ax has to fight the Controllers in the airport as a cheetah, as an Andalite seen by normal humans would cause too much of a stir. He keeps trying to flick the cheetah's tail at his enemy, commenting that it's useless as a weapon.
• Deus ex Machina: The battle of the Yeerks versus Cassie and the Aboriginal family is halted before Visser Three can scorch the Earth thanks to two tourist airplanes that fly by, causing Visser Three to retreat before the Yeerks are exposed to the rest of the world.
• Drama-Preserving Handicap: This is fairly far into the series and Cassie's the most skilled morpher on the team who's pulled off some pretty major feats by now, so she should really have the hang of it. After the last book, she's afflicted by a near-crippling degree of self-doubt and poor self esteem that has her scrambling to focus on morphing while at the airport. She can control her morphing enough to pull a Partial Transformation that obscures her identity while also giving her a fully functional body that lets her run and drive, but she freezes up when she demorphs in an airplane bathroom rather than immediately morphing fly as she intends to, and so morphs Just in Time rather than with a comfortable lead.
• Drives Like Crazy: Marco once again crashes a car. And when Cassie tries her hand at driving a getaway vehicle, she struggles initially but after realizing she's been hard on Marco, she does start to figure it out.
  Cassie's narration: If I got out of there alive, I’d never again give Marco a hard time about his driving. He was Jeff Gordon compared to me.
• Episode on a Plane: Something like half the book takes place on a plane in flight, mostly in the cargo hold. Cassie got trapped in there when she was hiding in the baggage as a fly and got knocked out by falling golf clubs while demorphing. She ends up making herself a little nest of luggage to wait for the Yeerks' next move.
• Evil-Detecting Dog: In the "can tell who the All-Loving Hero is" sense. Yami's dog Tjalla desperately wants to hunt kangaroos. In the climactic struggle as kangaroo-Cassie is contending with Hork-Bajir he attacks the Hork-Bajir, and she's hurt defending him. When the Hork-Bajir lopes off, rather than attacking her as a wounded kangaroo, Tjala licks her face and sniffs at her wounds.
• Forgot About His Powers: Cassie in polar bear morph is almost sucked out of a plane flying at altitude and thinks she would have died. Only a handful of chapters later she jumps out as a human and successfully pulls a Polymorphic Plummet that's pretty simple for her, morphing bird on the way down.
• Hearing Voices: Cassie spends most of the book away from the other Animorphs, but as she shows a great deal of ingenuity to survive on the plane she hears them giving her advice. She thinks "Voices in my head. Definite sign of mental illness. Those golf clubs must have hit me harder than I thought" but it does seem more like knowing what they'd say and being able to use their perspectives to figure out what to do, especially since in the rest of the book she's more explicitly imagining what they would say.
• Hypocrite: The human-Controller that Cassie confronts in the plane assumes Cassie is an "Andalite bandit" in morph and tries calling her out for hiding in the body of a child. The Yeerks are doing far, far worse in using actual children as hosts, and for much the same reason she seems to be outraged about - they seem harmless and are Beneath Notice.
• Foreign Queasine: Yami's family serves Cassie a plate of witchetty grub. The larvae look too much like tiny Taxxons for Cassie to be comfortable eating them.
• Heroic BSoD: Jake spent the week that Cassie was missing searching the city like a man possessed.
• Hidden in Plain Sight: Cassie pretends to be one of the frozen passengers on the plane when the Yeerks begin searching it. Unfortunately, the human-Controller suspects she'd try this, so they start using low power Dracon beams on the passengers to see who is capable of reacting to the pain.
• Impostor-Exposing Test: Cassie tries to pose as a passenger. The Yeerks, knowing from their sensors that there's an "Andalite" on the plane who hasn't been affected by their paralysis-inducing phlebotinum, try to ferret her out by shooting everyone with low-intensity Dracon beams and seeing who flinches. Fortunately since they do this one by one at close range rather than firing indiscriminately into the passengers, Cassie's able to turn things around.
• Instant Illness: Yami's grandfather is cut by a shard of Bug fighter early in the morning, and within a few hours is limping heavily and his leg keeps giving out on him. He's collapsed by midmorning, and despite his daughter and Cassie cleaning his wound twice, by nightfall his leg is swollen and festering to the point where Cassie amputates it below the knee. Human bodies don't react well to the alien metal.
• Inter-Service Rivalry: Trying to buy some time, Cassie uses thought-speech to insult the Marines, counting on the odd nature of thought-speak to make them think the CIA operatives are the ones insulting them. When they just roll their eyes and shoot the CIA-controllers dirty looks, she switches to <If the Pentagon wanted real men, they’d have called the Air Force>, which hits them a lot harder, but they have just enough self-control to keep to their posts.
• It's All My Fault: Cassie blames herself for pretty much everything bad that happens and thinks of herself as having disastrously poor judgement. Her actions resulted in getting the Marines into a firefight with Controllers, getting herself trapped on an airplane, the several Controllers who died trying to catch her - she always feels guilty for that, especially when she kills Hork-Bajir - Yami's family's radio antenna being broken, his grandfather getting an infected cut from a piece of Bug fighter wreckage, drawing the Yeerks to them... Yami's grandfather disagrees, saying that her enemy would not have left him and his family alone if she wasn't there. Not in the long term.
• Jurisdiction Friction: At the start of the book, a pair of Marines are guarding a chunk of Bug fighter. Yeerk-infested CIA operatives show up to try and claim it from them, but the Marines don't budge because they don't take orders from civilians. The Controllers shrug and say they'll have a Marine colonel there in a few minutes, which Cassie knows means there's an infested colonel on the way.
• Lured into a Trap: Yami explains that kangaroos kill dingoes and dogs by being chased into the water, then holding them down and drowning them. The wild boomers repeat this tactic on the Taxxon-Controllers chasing them. Taxxons are excellent swimmers, enough so that they can hold the kangaroos down instead, but they're also fragile enough that the kangaroos struggling and raking them with their claws makes them pop.
• Kangaroos Represent Australia: Being stranded in Australia and all, it's only natural that Cassie acquires a red kangaroo to roam the Outback.
• Know When to Fold 'Em: At the airport, the Animorphs' mission is to keep a bit of Bug fighter wreckage intact and in human hands so that humanity might find out about the aliens among them. Jake notices more and more Controllers showing up and decides that this is not important enough to seriously risk their lives, so he and the others haul out of there. Cassie hesitates, wanting to help the uninfested humans holding a firefight with the Controllers, which leads to her being separated.
• Madness Mantra: According to Tobias, the only coherent thing Jake could say while Cassie was missing was "I have to FIND HER."
• Meatgrinder Surgery: The outstation where Yami's family lives has limited medical supplies, and thanks to the two-way radio being destroyed they can't call on the "flying doctor" to come by plane. They dose his grandfather with natural remedies that do something for the pain, but they don't have a bonesaw. Cassie resorts to morphing Hork-Bajir to supply a Blade Below the Shoulder, both because it's sharp and because it makes her a whole lot stronger, able to use that blade to cut the soft tissue from around the bones in one careful slice, through the bone in another. She says that a quick cut causes arteries to spasm and help control bleeding, and has Yami on hand to pinch the major artery and hold it closed. Then she demorphs and uses needle and thread to stitch the main arteries and veins.
• Mêlée à Trois: The Animorphs find themselves under fire from human-Controllers and the Marines they're trying to save, who are also fighting the Controllers.
• Mighty Whitey: Cassie is black. That said, her being an American who's dropped into the Outback and is regarded by the friendly, helpful aboriginal people as possibly holy for accidentally emerging in a sacred place and being able to morph still whiffs of this trope a bit. She also doesn't make the slightest effort to conceal that she can morph from them, like with the people in Animorphs: The Forgotten, but they clearly have a lot more contact with the outside world than Polo and his tribe and share a common language.
• Mundane Utility:
  • Cassie helps a kangaroo tangled in a fence by acquiring her and taking advantage of the acquiring trance making the animal go quiet and still.
  • She later uses Hork-Bajir blades, made to cut bark but repurposed by Yeerks to be weapons, to amputate an infected limb.
• No Name Given: Yami's mother and grandfather are never named.
• The Paralyzer: When scanning the plane looking for her, the Yeerks use a technology that never otherwise comes up to freeze all the crew and passengers in place, unconscious and insensate. Cassie's safe thanks to being shielded by some heavy crates and gets into the cabin where she pretends to be a frozen passenger. Then, when Hork-Bajir Controllers start injuring the passengers to look for fakers, she weaponizes the acquiring trance to steal a Dracon beam from one of them.
• Partial Transformation: While running through the airport, Cassie stays in a humanoid mid-seagull morph, using her estreen talent to create a form human enough to run and drive but animal enough not to be recognized as a human by any Controllers who can see her. After she tries to hide as a fly and is flushed out by Controllers with bug spray, she demorphs into a baseball-sized human fly hybrid to scuttle into a space too small for a human while still being big enough that the coating of insecticide doesn't hurt her.
• Preferable Impersonator: Cassie is annoyed that Erek got way better grades than she normally does while filling in for her, as now her parents want her enrolled in advanced classes.
• Roadside Surgery: Yami's grandfather gets an infected leg from a piece of Bug fighter shrapnel, and has no means to reach a hospital. Cassie puts her medical knowledge and the new Hork-Bajir morph she acquired to use and amputates the leg, thinking he'll need a real doctor soon. At the end of the book she urges Lourdes to call the "flying doctor" for him, someone who visits remote outstations in a plane.
• Rock Beats Laser: Downplayed. Yami and his uncles, armed with boomerangs, attack the Yeerk forces, who are Hork Bajir and Taxxon-Controllers. The aliens are armed with Dracon beams, but Hork-Bajir have long vulnerable snake necks and Taxxons are fragile and stop everything to devour the wounded, so with surprise on their side the humans kill three Hork-Bajir immediately before the Yeerks fire on their location. Whether the humans could have won isn't ever clear because Visser Three retreats when a commercial airplane flies too close to the battle - maintaining the Masquerade of no aliens on Earth is more important than hunting Cassie down.
• Shadow of Impending Doom: Once Cassie is done amputating Yami's grandfather's leg, the shadow of the Blade ship falls over the village.
• Take a Third Option: While Cassie's plummeting from the plane with a Dracon beam in her human hands, a Bug fighter plunges after her. Cassie thinks that she could morph bird but the Taxxon pilot would see her morphing as a non-Andalite, or she could stay human and fall to her death. She can get her friends killed, or herself. Then she realizes that there's another way to eliminate the problem - by eliminating the problem, so she shoots the Taxxon through the windshield. Cassie being a Reluctant Warrior, violence is rarely her first option.
• Tractor Beam: The Yeerks use one on the plane in flight, holding it in place and keeping it pressurized.
• What Happened to the Mouse?:
  • The inciting incident is a chunk of wrecked Bug fighter having been discovered and causing a lot of fuss at the Defense Department, which was trying to get it sent to a NASA base in Washington and assigned some Marines to protect it on the way. Many if not all the Controllers sent to intercept it get distracted by Cassie and rush to try to capture her. At the end of the book Jake says that the Marines drove off in the mountains with the piece of Bug fighter in an armored truck and vanished, and says he guesses it's a tie. NASA doesn't have it, neither do the Yeerks. This is an odd guess given that that sounds a lot like "they got Yeerked", but it's not like recovering a piece of one of their own wrecked ships would have given the Yeerks any actual advantage.
  • A shard from a different Bug fighter was discovered by Yami's grandfather, who notices that it's sharp and decides to use it as a wood-carving tool. He accidentally cuts his leg with it, noting that this isn't the first time and won't be the last, but since it's made from an alien metal the cut gets infected and then putrid with astonishing speed. Where is this metal at the end of the book? Cassie didn't tell anyone on-page that it was dangerous.
• Wrong Assumption: Cassie theorizes that the plane tags labeled SYD mean South Dakota. It's only after she lands that she realizes it was actually Sydney, Australia.