Recap / Animorphs: The Warning

Following

Narrator: Jake

The Animorphs find that some humans are posting information about Yeerks on the internet.

Tropes:

• Acceptable Breaks from Reality: A meal is served on a one-hour flight, very shortly before descending to the destination. Flights that short might get the snacks and drinks cart in about the middle of the flight but a meal is more involved. Marco deciding to roll around in a Salisbury steak is more dramatic than if he'd gone for a soda can or bag of peanuts, and having this near the end of the flight means demorphed Jake is only hanging around on the plane as a ticketless kid in close-fitting clothes and no shoes for a short time.
• Affably Evil: Joe Bob Fenestre comes off as mild-mannered and polite for someone who's secretly a Serial Killer and Yeerk cannibal.
• Ambiguous Ending:
  • Whoever burned down Joe Bob Fenestre's mansion, either trying to kill him or leave him vulnerable to be killed, is never revealed. Jake's narration opines that there's no telling if that happened naturally, or if someone set it to "deprive that evil creature of sanctuary", and if so there are plenty of suspects. Visser Three, Cassie, possibly one of the other Animorphs... Jake himself...
  I guess you'll never know.
  • It's never said what happens to Fenestre; if he managed to find somewhere else to hunker down, if Visser Three captured or killed him, if one of the Animorphs did him in... He'd designed his mansion and surrounding grounds to be as secure against Visser Three as he could manage. When noting that the house burns down after a few days, Jake specifically reminds the reader that he'd warned the Controller that he was only safe in the house.
• Ask a Stupid Question...: Esplin the Lesser's response to Cassie asking him how he gets Yeerks out of their hosts. Jake goes Oh, Crap! and Marco and Tobias contribute nothing for the rest of the conversation; they hadn't realized what Cassie had.
• Badass in Distress: Rachel and Ax get captured by Joe Bob Fenestre's guards. Esplin the Lesser places them in bio-stasis, which thankfully pauses the morphing clock.
• Bittersweet Ending: Jake lets Esplin the Lesser walk free to continue killing humans and eating Yeerks. Cassie tells Gump, the boy in the chat room, to not trust his Controller father and she and Jake don't fully reconcile over the choices they've recently made. Someone, maybe Visser Three or Cassie (possibly Jake himself), burns down Joe Bob Fenestre's mansion, leaving him exposed to presumably be murdered. The Animorphs are able to pick themselves up and in hanging out helping with Cassie's chores and making jokes they start to feel better and more like themselves. For now.
• Blind Mistake: When Jake is trying to break into Fenestre's mansion in while rhino morph he tries to charge through doors, rather than walls, but he can't really see the difference and at one point makes his own door without slowing down much.
• Broken Pedestal: As the CEO of Web Access America Joe Bob Fenestre is filthy stinking rich, which Marco admires to the point of jokingly worshiping him, but this praise stops coming when he proves to be ready for morphers. Later, when Cassie says rhino Jake is really damaging Fenestre's decor, Marco says he can afford it. This can be seen as another note of admiration — rich enough that it doesn't matter if a rhino rampages through his house! — but in the audiobook, at least, his voice has a sullen quality.
• Catfishing: Marco tries to prank Jake by sending him a flirty email while pretending to be Cassie, which Jake sees through. Marco later learns that his online girlfriend is actually a retired 73-year-old postal worker.
• Cain and Abel: It's possible for Yeerks to be twins if they grow from the same grub. Joe Bob Fenestre's Yeerk is Esplin 9466 Lesser, twin to Esplin 9466 Prime, AKA Visser Three. When Esplin the Lesser greatly helped the invasion by founding Web Access America, the Visser took exception to his lesser brother being almost as important as he, and banned him from the Yeerk pool, condemning him to Kandrona starvation. It didn't take...
• Collateral Damage: Esplin the Lesser hunts down human Controllers so he can process and consume the Yeerks. He doesn't actually say he kills their hosts but the implications are very clear. Additionally, he seems to nudge things along to encourage people to be infested, even if they're children, to create more targets for himself.
• The Diaper Change: A pair of tired parents gets off a long flight carrying a screaming baby, and have to pause to remember whose turn it is to change its diaper. Jake's able to swipe the dirty diaper to plant in an ashtray near the gate they need, since fly morph has poor eyesight but can always smell poop.
• Didn't Think This Through: Hearing how Esplin survives without ever having to leave Joe Bob Fenestre's head, Jake's disgusted but he and Marco both think this rogue Controller is doing them a favor by killing so many Yeerks. It's Cassie who really considers where those Yeerks come from and objects.
• Emergency Transformation: When Jake is swatted as a fly he's only briefly coherent and quickly loses all ability to comprehend what's happening around him. The others are able to cluster around and move him somewhere safer, where they get him to demorph. Jake is traumatized but feels thanks to The Chains of Commanding that, as soon as he's out of his Heroic BSoD, he can't show it or give himself any further time to recover mentally.
• Episode on a Plane: A few chapters on a plane, anyway. Since they have to travel too far to use their raptor morphs, the Animorphs turn into flies to stow away on a commercial airplane. Six flies on a plane is a lot, especially since instead of all staying out of the way they buzz around and Marco samples someone's Salisbury steak. Jake gets swatted and almost dies, and is too rattled to immediately turn back into a fly. Thankfully it's the nineties, so as a human kid he's able to just find an unattended seat and walks off the plane when it lands, which doesn't rouse any suspicion.
• E.T. Gave Us Wi-Fi: Visser Three's brother took a obscure human computer tech and turned him into the billionaire owner of Web Access America, the books' version of America OnLine.
• False Flag Operation: Jake discovers a website about Yeerks, complete with a chatroom with a number of people who claim to be escaped Controllers. Both the website and chat are a mix of true and false information and the Animorphs wonder if it's legit or a trap.
  • The people in the anti-Yeerk chat talk about resisting the Yeerks and while some may be legit, others are obviously Controllers. "YrkH8er" spams "Kill all Yeerks!" until someone mentions suspecting the Sharing, at which point they say no, they've checked it out, it's legit. They also tell Gump to talk to his Controller dad, which is sure to get him infested. And, of course, Joe Bob Fenestre, a Controller and the CEO of Web Access America, is there as "Fitey777". His arrival in chat to talk about a deputy police chief Controller was likely deliberately timed, as this completely distracts the others from advising Gump.
  • Fenestre is the one who set up the website in the first place and it is a trap, but not for the "Andalite bandits". Barred from the Yeerk Pool, he has to kill and consume other Yeerks to survive and the chatroom is an avenue to finding them, as the humans sometimes identify Controllers he can have abducted for his needs. And, of course, sometimes they're infested themselves, and a child like Gump is a lot easier to get at than an infested adult...
• Fly Crazy: Jake gets swatted while in fly morph, leaving him dazed and dying while the others drag him to the bathroom to demorph. When he does, he notices that his first instinct is to swat his friends. He's left in a Heroic BSoD for a while after that.
• Handy Helper: Jake's rhinoceros morph has terrible eyesight: he can't see further than about thirty yards but even within that zone everything's in black and white, and so blurry that he can't tell a human from a tall lamp or a bookcase. Movement stands out and that's about the best you can say. As such, he has to rely on the other Animorphs (who are all in bird morphs) to act as spotters for him.
• Honor Before Reason: When Cassie lunges at Fenestre for killing humans Jake stops her and won't attack him himself, even after realizing the true implications of how Esplin is staying fed. This isn't because of any stance about killing in cold blood or finding a use for the wealthy Controller, it's entirely because Jake had told him he'd be safe.
• Hot Sauce Drinking: The Animorphs get kicked out of a Taco Bell because Ax slurped up all the packets of hot sauce. The manager advises them to buy him a bottle of Tabasco.
• Immune to Bullets: Downplayed. Most of Fenestre's guards are equipped with shotguns that spray pellets at great range. They're very lethal to birds, but as Jake had hoped, the rhino's thick armored skin protects him. All the shotguns do is sting and give away where the guards are, since his rhino hearing is a lot better than his eyesight. A handgun is better able to pierce through and cause actual injury, albeit not enough to stop him from taking out the shooter. When Jake demorphs, a squashed bullet emerges from his shrinking flesh and drops to the carpet.
• Impersonation Gambit: Jake's first idea for getting into Web Access America is to acquire and morph the regular humans going in and out of the building. It's the first time in the series the kids have considered using the morphing technology to impersonate unwitting humans. Immediately after proposing that he thinks that something feels wrong about that. Cassie then verbalizes that thought, and they come up with something else.
• Implied Death Threat: Jake tells Fenestre that if he answers their questions truthfully they'll let him live. If he lies... Jake trails off meaningfully.
• Just Plane Wrong: A whole lot of airplane security-based dated elements aside, the meal served at the end of the one hour flight. Even if this one came out at the behest of one of the airline's board of directors (he ordered a Salisbury steak, which fly-Marco splattered into immediately after Jake thought doing so would be suicidally stupid) it would have happened mid-flight so everything would be cleared away before the descent.
• Let's See YOU Do Better!: Ax is unable to hack Web Access America because Marco's computer is too primitive. When Marco, a little miffed from all of Ax's previous posturing, mocks him for it, Ax responds with this.
• A Lighter Shade of Black: Esplin the Lesser might be a ruthless manipulator, but he's not the monster his twin is and is pragmatic. However, he is still a serial killer with no regard for human life, killing ten humans a month to get at the Yeerks in their heads. That he has a dark face and "empty eyes" while telling the Animorphs this instead of gloating might or might not mean some vestige of conscience, but it's not enough to stop him.
• Logging onto the Fourth Wall: Subverted, as the book never states a url for the website warning about the Yeerks.
• Monstrous Cannibalism: Esplin the Lesser has found a way around his Kandrona ban: Capture a Yeerk, put it through some unspecified long, involved process, and have his host drink it. He thus survives outside of the Yeerk pool as he can just draw the nutrients he needs this way, though every three days he does need another victim.
• Never Say "Die": The book does say death or die several times. Then, Fenestre says he's become a cannibal and "how do you think" he gets Yeerks out of their hosts? Jake thinks of this as "wiping out" over a hundred Yeerks in a year and keeps Cassie from "annihilating" him, at which point she demands to know if Jake understands what Esplin is doing and says that he'll go after Gump. Then Jake excuses her outburst to the Controller by saying she's lost friends and says if they won't harm him in his own house but if they ever find him in the outside world, that "protection" won't exist.
• No Party Like a Donner Party: Esplin the Lesser is consuming other Yeerks to stay alive rather than because he enjoys it, it appears. Jake is disgusted but inclined to leave him to it until Cassie underlines for him that he can't possibly be killing unhosted Yeerks.
• No-Sell: Dogs try to attack rhino Jake and run off whimpering. He felt something scraping his armored skin.
• OOC Is Serious Business: Cassie gets angrier here than she's ever been shown to be before, both at Esplin the Lesser for murdering humans and at Jake for blithely overlooking that part when he's inclined to let the Controller go on killing Yeerks.
• Out-of-Character Alert: A couple of these. Jake doesn't recognize "bio-stasis" or know what it is, though Fenestre clearly believes it should be common knowledge for Andalites, but he does know terms relating to human computers. Soon after that, Cassie furiously shouts <How are you getting the Yeerks from their human hosts?!> and lunges for him. Jake notices the Yeerk visibly wondering why an Andalite would care so much about humans dying, and is able to invent a hasty excuse for both lapses.
• Pain to the Ass: Rhino Jake charges one of Fenestre's guards, feels the human's "soft, mushy body" on his horn, tosses his head, and...
  … Let’s just say that particular man won’t be sitting down for a long, long time.
• Refuge in Audacity:
  • The Animorphs need a distraction so that Ax and Marco can get into Web Access America's command center. Jake and Rachel adopt their battle morphs and proceed to start mopping the floor, which turns out to be carpeted. It works, though it helps that they're far away from Yeerk activity.
  • To get Joe Bob Fenestre's guards off his back, Jake talks to them as a tiger and convinces them that the situation is way above their pay grade. It also works, thanks to the fact that all of Joe Bob Fenestre's personnel have to be normal humans, not Controllers.
• Plane Awful Flight: For the most part the Animorphs' flight out to the Web Access America headquarters is just very boring, but near the end Marco decides to see if airplane food tastes any better to a housefly (it does) prompting the passenger whose food he's rolling around in to complain and the stewards to make an effort to swat them. Jake is hit and almost dies, only surviving because the others manage to drag him to the bathroom to demorph. He disembarks quite traumatized. For the part of the other passengers, of course, six flies on a plane which don't just stay quiet and out of the way is a lot of flies in an enclosed space.
• The Reveal: The Animorphs try to find the identities of the people posting on an anti-Yeerk web page because they want to find out if it's a trap for them, or a sign that they might have allies. In fact it's a way for Esplin the Lesser to spot Controllers so he can capture fellow Yeerks to consume. Some of the people likely were legit, but Gump is nine and basically powerless to help, others are out of town, and some signed up to Web Access America with a false name and therefore can't be traced.
• Rhino Rampage: Jake needed a morph that can bust through walls and shrug off shotgun pellets so he and the others can get in and save Ax and Rachel. Rhinoceros is what he chooses for this.
• Schizo Tech: From Ax's point of view, at least. Apparently, Andalites invented computers before books, and instant messaging before telephones. No phones makes sense, as Andalites use Telepathy, so transmitting sound to communicate at a distance wouldn't be intuitive and presumably finding ways to transmit thought-speak took longer.
• Screaming Plane Baby: Two tired parents with a squalling baby get off their flight just as the Animorphs are wondering how they'll be able to find the right gate as flies, which have poor vision. The answer is to steal that dirty diaper and plant it in the right place, since flies can smell poop from a great distance.
• Serial Killer: Jake and Marco are prepared to leave Esplin the Lesser to his business until Cassie asks how he gets Yeerks out of their hosts. His response leaves no ambiguity - or no more than is required by Never Say "Die", which here mainly relies on implication rather than words like 'destroy' - that whatever he does kills the hosts as well. If he did have a non-lethal way he'd have said so.
• Shoot the Dog: Fenestre/Esplin the Lesser has no malice towards humans and there's a slight indication that he might consider killing them Dirty Business. Nevertheless he has no compunction breaking open their skulls to get at the Yeerks within.
• Smelly Skunk: One of the guards at Web Access America's command center manages to keep his nerve try and get a grizzly bear, tiger, and red-tailed hawk to leave. Jake has a skunk!Cassie spray him, as "no one's brave once they've been sprayed by a skunk."
• Spotting the Thread: Jake's first clue that Joe Bob Fenestre is not a normal Controller is that his security is completely Earth-based. No Dracon beams, no Hork-Bajir, and no human-Controllers screaming about Andalites; just human security guards with guns, bug zappers, and guard dogs.
• Symbiotic Possession: Maybe? When the Animorphs confront Joe Bob Fenestre, Esplin the Lesser says he and Fenestre have been partners for years and are on good terms, since Esplin wrote the Web browser and made him rich. They're two of a kind, two losers desiring more. When Jake says Yeerks don't have partners, Esplin laughs and says no, they don't. He's clearly fond of Joe Bob but the human can't have much choice about him being there.
• There Was a Door: The rhino's poor eyesight means that Jake misses the door he was aiming for and hits a wall instead. He gets through anyway, though it takes him two tries instead of one. His eyesight is so poor that he hadn't realized this wasn't just a tougher door.
• Toilet Humour: Marco has some material to riff on when Jake realizes they have to steal a dirty diaper. Soon afterwards, Tobias morphs to fly for the first time and gets lost in the fly's instincts. As he returns to his senses, he finds himself in a smooth bowl partly filled with water, which Marco recognizes as a toilet. And then it goes dark...
  Marco: <Caution: falling objects.>
• Tough Leader Façade: Jake feels that he can't let on that he's afraid, even after his near-death experience as a fly, to anyone but Cassie, and even with her he tries to downplay it. He feels that the others look to him and if he shows fear it will give them "permission" to give in to fear themselves. Indeed only Cassie seems to think Jake was more than momentarily disturbed by his experience. When they have to get home, she suggests using some other morph, trying to protect Jake without actually saying so, and Marco and Rachel basically shrug and say that housefly worked last time.
• Uncertain Doom: The fates of Joe Bob Fenestre and Esplin the Lesser are unknown as they're never directly referenced again, but the house is gone at the end of the book. Logically, none of the Animorphs are likely to seek him out and murder him themselves, at least at this point in the series. Visser Three doesn't have those kinds of compunctions, but he does want to know how his twin has survived without access to the Kandrona, so he'd want to capture him alive. He likely would have killed him after that
• We Need a Distraction: Rachel's idea for letting Ax and Marco snoop around in the computers at Web Access America is to set a fire, which Jake vetos in favor of something harmless but impossible to ignore. Well, who wouldn't be distracted by a tiger and grizzly bear mopping a carpeted floor, roaring here and there to keep all eyes on them? Later, Tobias distracts people at the Gardens from Jake acquiring a rhino by snatching cotton candy from a child and flying around.
• Wham Line: When Cassie asks how "Fenestre" gets his Yeerk victims to consume from their hosts — after all, a Yeerk sits inside of the skull of its host, and can't casually be induced to leave it — his response is ice cold.
  Fenestre: Get them? How do you think I get them?
• What Happened to the Mouse?: After this book, Fenestre and Esplin the Lesser are never spoken of again, presumably going into Visser Three's custody and/or being killed. What happened to the website and the maybe-legitimate escaped Controllers and others who'd found out about the invasion and wanted to find a way to resist it? Some were outside of the area the Animorphs live and if there aren't more Yeerk pools (it's never said one way or another) they might escape capture or being killed, but if the Animorphs can find out where they live, so can the Yeerks.
• What Measure Is a Non-Human?: Cassie only cares that Joe Bob Fenestre is killing humans. She's still a few books away from getting to know a Yeerk and coming to understand that the enemy are people and Not Always Evil, so the idea of indiscriminate slaughter of them doesn't bother her yet.