Book #148 of 2022:

The Beginning by K. A. Applegate (Animorphs #54)

Well… Here we are. Sixteen months later, I have finally finished my full reread of the complete Animorphs saga, and am ready to review its final volume. Spoilers ahead, obviously.

Thematically as a series, Animorphs has always been focused on the deep trauma of war. On the bloody reality of combat, and the lingering stress that follows in its wake. On gray morality with no easy answers, and living with yourself after making the tough calls; on the loss of innocence, and child soldiers as a metaphor for anyone forced to shoulder adult responsibilities too early. It’s no wonder, then, that this last title wraps up its big battle against the Yeerks, the resolution to the cliffhanger of the adrenaline-laced previous installment and basically the plot of the entire franchise, by about 15% of the way through the text. What came before was the winding story of a group of human teens thrust into the role of resisting and defeating those alien invaders. What follows here is the somber fallout.

Some of this is purely logistical: how will the surviving protagonists strike agreeable terms with the Andalite fleet that had been coming to scour the earth, and how will humanity adjust to the knowledge of extraterrestrial life and the existence of new interplanetary trade and tourism partners? What future is there for the Yeerks, Taxxons, and Hork-Bajir left behind on the planet? What will life look like for the Animorphs, now that the whole world knows their names, faces, and accomplishments? What can they possibly do next, given the sheer impracticality of ever resuming the quiet existence they’d had before the war?

The answers to that last question are fun for readers to learn, at least as far as Marco is concerned. He embraces the celebrity of it all, earning millions in brand endorsements, book sales, and movie rights. (His autobiography is called The Gorilla Speaks. I love it.) He dates models, drives sports cars, and lives in a mansion with a butler he calls Wetherbee. Cassie too is energized by the new opportunities available to an Animorph, although in true Cassie fashion she pivots into a quieter government job as Undersecretary of the Interior for Resident Aliens. And back home on the Andalite planet, Ax has been promoted to prince, given a hero’s welcome, and made captain of his very own starship! It could all be seen as hokey wish fulfillment and an overly-rosy ending, were it not for how the humans clearly remain haunted by their experiences and worried about their friends who have recovered even less. As Cassie notes a year after the ceasefire, she and Marco are “in some way the only two real survivors.”

And that brings us to Rachel. Are we deep enough into the review yet not to accidentally spoil anyone? Rachel’s death aboard the stolen Blade ship at the beginning of this novel is absolutely gutting, even on a reread where I knew the entire time through the series where her story was headed. The worst part is that it’s a perfect endpoint for her personal arc of discovering within herself a ruthlessness, a passion for bloodshed, and an utter lack of caution that works for her right up until the moment it doesn’t. At several points in the previous volumes, she and the others have uneasily wondered how she’d ever adjust to civilian life after the war. It’s fitting that we’ll never know, and that her execution functions as one last great consequence for the team — and specifically for their leader Jake, who ordered his cousin onto that ship in private to kill the Yeerk controlling his brother Tom, knowing she was unlikely to survive. It’s a terrifically cruel writing choice that she succeeds in her mission — with the help of Tobias, guiding her from helplessly afar when she’s blinded by snake venom — but is forced to demorph to escape her injuries, and so faces her fate as a human surrounded on all sides by Yeerks in battle morph. So too is her killer’s salutation of “You fight well, human” and her short exchange with the Ellimist as already previewed in his Chronicles (without her name attached). I hate this chapter. It’s probably one of the strongest and most effective in the entire series.

In the aftermath of losing Rachel, Jake and Tobias are devastated in two very different ways. Tobias retreats into life as a hawk, cutting off all contact with the rest of humanity and trying to forget himself as a simple creature of the woods. Rachel was his primary link to his old identity, and without her or the ability to forgive Jake, he has no wish to function as even remotely human again. Meanwhile Jake carries on in his own depressive funk, making public appearances when he needs to, but feeling empty and shattered by his actions. He never does get back together with Cassie romantically, presumably due to those feelings of guilt and depression, and she eventually moves on to date someone else while he spends his nights in disguise at Rachel’s grave. “That’s how I felt now, pretty much all the time,” the young former general reflects. “Dark. Dull. Slow and stupid. Distracted, but not by anything in particular. Just like there was something else I should be thinking about but I couldn’t recall what it was.” I don’t know if author K. A. Applegate — aka the married team of Katherine Applegate and Michael Grant, which I guess I should mention for one last time — has firsthand experience with such mental health struggles, but it’s certainly a description that rings true to my own.

Jake is preoccupied with the deaths he orchestrated of Rachel and Tom, but also with his impulsive command to flush seventeen-thousand helpless Yeerks out into the vacuum of space in the penultimate novel. In my previous review, I was blunt in calling that act a mass murder and a war crime. That’s an accusation that becomes textual here, and although it comes from the legal team for Visser One, captured and on trial in the Hague for his own foul deeds, it’s not one that the teenager can easily shake. His friends may protest that the charge is too harsh, and the series ultimately doesn’t come down one way or another on the question, but I appreciate that it’s raised and considered at all, and that Jake is troubled by the event and his xenophobic motivations for it regardless. One last ethical conundrum for the group, with perhaps no clear right answer.

Plotwise, all of this is a little thin and oddly structured. We’re hopping around from character to character like a Megamorphs in all but name, and there are three big time jumps in the novel — first one year, then two years, then six months — meaning that this single book alone spans more time than the previous 53 in the main series combined. Unfortunately, the rush to cover such a long period results in a lack of immersive depth, and the impression that we are just checking in on the Animorphs periodically rather than truly following their adventures anymore. There’s not even much morphing of note that goes on after the Yeerk Empire is shattered, although the effort to snap Jake out of his depression by forcing him to morph into a dolphin is nice.

Near the end of the span covered by this story, Prince Aximili is still hunting through space for the lost Blade ship when he encounters a new hostile threat and is taken captive. And our human heroes, now 19 years old and settling into their post-Animorph lives one way or another, must rejoin to stage a rescue attempt (except for Cassie, whom Jake asks to stay behind in recognition of the good she’s doing and the reality that she doesn’t need a new cause as much as the rest of them). That involves some sharing of feelings and unloading of trauma, but all the getting-the-band-back-together sequence really achieves is sending the male Animorphs off into space alongside two new human helpers and an Andalite nothlit, on a ship they name the Rachel (and a mission that’s amusingly and loudly not sanctioned by the Andalite leadership despite plainly having their complete unofficial cooperation). Marco hitting on the sole female crew member is probably the only real sour note in the book for me, but we honestly don’t get to know the three newcomers well enough for any of them to particularly register.

Eventually this iteration of the team finds the unsettling gestalt entity that’s apparently assimilated Ax, leaving us with one last sight of these figures on the brink of yet another battle. In the closing lines, Jake snaps an order to ram the Blade ship and Marco notes how much he looks like his dead cousin right then. Like the finale to the TV show Angel, the tale ends on a cliffhanger just before the fight begins, forever cementing the outnumbered heroes as valiant warriors in our minds.

A lot of this is great and a fitting conclusion to the epic saga that’s preceded it, although everyone’s parents are curiously absent throughout. The visser’s host body Alloran is freed after decades of infestation! The majority of the defeated Yeerks and Taxxons choose to become nothlits and we ignore the genocidal implications of that and the fact that it negates the Iskoort connection that the Ellimist set up in book #26! Wealthy Andalites visit earth solely to morph human mouths and taste our cuisine! The Hork-Bajir move into Yellowstone National Park with Cassie’s assistance! The Chee opt to remain in hiding for some reason! Stephen Spielberg makes an Animorphs movie with Marco as technical advisor!

Still, I’ll confess to wanting more closure, more of a throughline to the extended denouement of this novel, and more thrilling heroics before it, not to mention a lengthier lead-up to the mysterious new villain at the end. (The Angel finale has its detractors, but at least it was building off several long-running plot threads. This business with The One truly comes out of nowhere.) In a closing note, Applegate writes, “I figured the Animorphs should go out the same way they came in: Fighting.” A subsequent follow-up posted to a fansite explains in more depth why the ending needed to be complicated and painful, apparently in response to complaints from her unsatisfied young readers: “So, you don’t like the way our little fictional war came out? You don’t like Rachel dead and Tobias shattered and Jake guilt-ridden? You don’t like that one war simply led to another? Fine. Pretty soon you’ll all be of voting age, and of draft age. So when someone proposes a war, remember that even the most necessary wars, even the rare wars where the lines of good and evil are clear and clean, end with a lot of people dead, a lot of people crippled, and a lot of orphans, widows and grieving parents.” And that’s reasonable enough, but I can’t help but think that the delivery on the page is a little choppy compared to this series at its absolute best.

[Content warning for body horror, gun violence, and gore.]

★★★★☆

Postscript: Thank you so much for joining me in this reread of a series that meant so much to so many of us in the late 90s / early 2000s! I’ve really loved revisiting these books and building out a space here to work critically through what has and hasn’t succeeded for me as an adult reader, both in my reviews and in the engaging comments that people have often left in the replies below. At a minimum, I appreciate your indulgence in putting up with the clog in your social media feeds as these recap-reviews grew steadily longer the deeper I got into the books.

Ordinarily when I finish a series, I like to rank the different individual volumes, but that seems exceedingly difficult with a franchise this massive. So here’s just a recap of my ratings by tier:

★☆☆☆☆
Alternamorphs #1 The First Journey

★★☆☆☆

#28 The Experiment, Alternamorphs #2 The Next Passage, #37 The Weakness, #47 The Resistance

★★★☆☆

#6 The Capture, Megamorphs #1 The Andalite’s Gift, #9 The Secret, #11 The Forgotten, #12 The Reaction, #14 The Unknown, #15 The Escape, #17 The Underground, #20 The Discovery, #23 The Pretender, #27 The Exposed, #32 The Separation, #35 The Proposal, #36 The Mutation, #38 The Arrival, #40 The Other, #41 The Familiar, #42 The Journey, #44 The Unexpected, #46 The Deception, #48 The Return

★★★★☆

#2 The Visitor, #3 The Encounter, #5 The Predator, #10 The Android, #13 The Change, #16 The Warning, #18 The Decision, #21 The Threat, #24 The Suspicion, #25 The Extreme, #26 The Attack, #29 The Sickness, Megamorphs #3 Elfangor’s Secret, #30 The Reunion, #31 The Conspiracy, #33 The Illusion, #34 The Prophecy, #39 The Hidden, #43 The Test, #45 The Revelation, Chronicles #4 The Ellimist Chronicles, #49 The Diversion, #50 The Ultimate, #51 The Absolute, #54 The Beginning

★★★★★

#1 The Invasion, #4 The Message, #7 The Stranger, #8 The Alien, Chronicles #1 The Andalite Chronicles, Megamorphs #2 In the Time of Dinosaurs, #19 The Departure, #22 The Solution, Chronicles #2 The Hork-Bajir Chronicles, Chronicles #3 Visser, Megamorphs #4 Back to Before, #52 The Sacrifice, #53 The Answer

In terms of books with primary narrators, I guess that means I’d rank them Cassie > Tobias > Ax > Jake > Marco > Rachel on average, although they all have their share of greatness.

Overall rating for the Animorphs series: ★★★★☆

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