It's time to finally cover the second special edition series from Animorphs. We previously covered the first Megamorphs, which goes for big event stories that ultimately play little to the major storyline themselves, but serve as bigger adventures. And then there's the Chronicles. These ones are a bit more important as they set up the events of the past involving key characters and events. And no event early in the series is as important to this point as the story of Elfangor.
All we really know about Elfangor is that he crashed on Earth, gave the Animorphs the morphing powers, died at the hands of Visser Three, and was remembered as a hero, looked up to by the Andalite race, including his younger brother Ax. So, getting some pieces to the puzzle are definitely needed. And we have a meaty enough tome to give us some. This is going to be our longest blog ever to this point. So, let's take a trip back to the past with The Andalite Chronicles.
Cover #1 gives us a full look at Elfangor and our second major look at an Andalite since Ax's cover on book #8. The Andalite design is always one that stuck with me for how unique it is. That Applegate came up with one of the more complex alien concepts in sci-fi. Blue furred centaurs with a hook tail, no mouth, slits in their faces and two stalk eyes. You see that once, you'll never forget it. And I love the design of the alien world selling the book on being a unique science fiction story. Great stuff.
Cover #2 is not as dynamic, but still works well to give us a closer look at Elfangor's face, with the slit nose and stalk eyes looking even more prominent and somewhat freaky. I like the darkening of the background, as if to sell the cold seriousness of the story to come.
And then there's cover #3 which is also really good. It's simply Elfangor's eye with the reflection of the soon to be Animorphs, signifying the important moment that will also be Elfangor's last. A great reflection of one of the pivotal moments in the series. So overall, three really striking, really amazing covers.
PART ONE: ELFANGOR'S JOURNEY
After a quick prologue that sets up what we know are his dying moments, Elfangor takes us back 21 years before the events of Animorphs #1: The Invasion. So, 1975 at least. The Yeerk invasion has been going on for a while and they've pretty much taken over most of the galaxy. The Andalites continue to fight them, but it's getting more difficult. Despite being an Andalite prince, Elfangor at this time is still a cadet, or aristh as they're referred to. He spars with his teacher Sofor who easily bests him in battle. This is due mostly to Elfangor having more of a mind for the big picture and less quick and close combat. After that happens, he runs into the only other aristh on the dome ship, Arbron. Unlike the serious Elfangor, Arbron is more laissez-faire.
The two are summoned to the battle brigade, which isn't normally where arisths ever even see let alone be summoned to. They arrive to meet the tactical officer Prince Nescord, fighter squadron leader Prince Breeyar and Captain Feyorn, who is a legendary Andalite warrior. They show the two arisths a hologram of an alien species known as Skrit Na, who are a species of smugglers and renegades who often assist the Yeerks. After asking what the two would do to deal with a Skrit Na ship, Elfangor suggests dispatching fighters while Arbron suggests more of a shoot em all tactic, the two are sent for their first ever battle.
Elfangor and Arbron are in a rickety old fighter ship and ready to go. Arbron wishing it were Yeerks, while Elfangor is still nervous about screwing this all up. They fly into space to intercept the ship, only to see a second Skrit Na ship which they manage to shoot with a shredder beam. Now it's their job to intercept the ship with Arbron handing the computer stuff. But first we finally learn what Skrit Na are. They're actually two species of aliens, who really have no loyalty to anyone, even the Yeerks who they've aided in the past. The Skrit are large alien insects who eventually cocoon themselves to become a Na, who look more like the classic gray alien with giant black eyes design made famous in pop culture.
As stated, they're smugglers, often going to peaceful planets and stealing the local species, either to experiment, or just to screw around with because for alien slave traders, they have a sense of humor I guess? The two enter the Skrit Na ship, but get held at gunpoint by a strange alien that they're not aware of before. This being a human woman and a man who were recently kidnapped by the Skrit Na. Eventually things settle down and the woman, Loren, gives the dracon beam to Elfangor and tells him to bring her back to Earth. The other man is injured, but eventually awakes and tells them that his name is Hedrick Chapman. Yes, THAT Chapman, and unlike Loren he's far less enthusiastic about all this.
They arrive at the dome ship and we get some awkwardness as the Andalites learn that humans eat with their mouths and not with their hooves, and not blue and red grass from an alien forest. Loren takes her shoes off to walk in the grass which gives Elfangor a panic attack believing she's ripping her feet off. But their joy is cut short when Elfangor and Arbron learn they're to leave the ship with a war princed named Alloran-Semitur-Corrass, or Alloran the disgraced, though not even Elfangor knows why other than he broke some sort of Andalite law. He shows them the ship they're taking called The Jahar (named after his wife) before telling them that the plan is simple: bring Loren and Chapman back to Earth and erase their memories, which Loren is against.
As they approach Earth, we learn a bit about Loren, how her father had been in the Vietnam war, and it left him mentally scarred, which Chapman mocks because he's been such a delight so far, only for Alloran to shut him up. As we build on a growing friendship between Loren and Elfangor, Chapman is more interested in why the Andalites won't share some of their technology and secrets, because that worked so well when they did that with the Yeerks. Their conversation is broken by Arbron who tells them that the Skrit Na on the other ship had found something on Earth called the Time Matrix. So, looks like that plan to drop off Loren and Chapman's going to have to wait (I mean, we're only page 58 into this 326-page book, so duh).
The Skrit Na have taken the Time Matrix to the Taxxon home world, which is odd that they didn't just take it for themselves or worse, the Yeerks. Chapman realizes quickly why there's worry. The Time Matrix can be used to travel back in time, and could easily be used to create time genocide. Wipe out the first of a species to end any future spawn. He's also on Team Yeerk at the moment, which we know will bite him in the backside. So the group land on the planet and blast through some Taxxons until there's two left. However, they get ambushed by Hork-Bajir. After managing to survive that, they hop a Yeerk ship and begin to leave, leaving Loren in the Jahar with Chapman. But Elfangor gives her a dracon beam in case Chapman tries anything.
As they prepare to acquire Taxxons, they notice the ship's tanker filled with Yeerks. Alloran suggests flushing them out to space, but Elfangor is against it. What kind of monster would just flush a bunch of aliens that can't defend themselves into the coldness of space to die? Oh, it's going to be a looooooooooong time until we get to that, but for now, no flushy. They get the Taxxon DNA and begin to morph, and I mean, when it's human morphing into an animal, especially an insect, it sounds frightening and grotesque. Not so much when it's alien morphing another alien, though that doesn't mean that horse alien turning into worm alien doesn't sound freaky.
They finish their morphs, but now have to deal with the insatiable hunger of the Taxxon, who as we've learned are cannibalistic in nature, meaning that Arbron and Elfangor in particular are going to have to control the alien's instincts. They head into the cargo hold, but don't see any sign of a Skrit Na ship. When a Taxxon ends up injured, Elfangor joins the others to feed, but chooses not to, which ends up getting him caught by a Hork-Bajir named Sub-Visser Seven. He knows that Elfangor is an Andalite morphed into a Taxxon body, and says that there's two options: Either be taken to be interrogated/eaten by Taxxons or let Sub-Visser Seven take over his Andalite body, making him the first Yeerk to succeed in gaining an Andalite host.
Elfangor, of course, chooses not to be taken over and gets thrown into a pit of hungry Taxxons. He morphs Andalite in time, then ducks through the bugs to morph a bird-like alien called a Kafit. But in all of the commotion, suddenly the Jahar lands and out comes Chapman with a tied up Loren and tells the Yeerks that he's ready to trade over the human race. So, uh, yeah. Cool Judas-ing, bro.
PART TWO: ALLORAN'S CHOICE
So... yeah, we start the second part as Chapman is in the middle of bargaining the human race to the Yeerks. However, he's yet to mention anything about the Time Matrix. Elfangor tells Loren that she should comply, but not mention the Time Matrix. Elfangor finds the Skrit Na ship and boards inside, where he also meets Arbron, still in Taxxon morph. Elfangor morphs back Taxxon himself and the two begin to board inside where they have to deal with another species, the Gedd, who were the first Yeerk victims. After making it to the bridge, they close the hatch. Elfangor demorphs, ready to fight, but Arbron can't. He went past the time limit and now he's a Taxxon.
They drive the ship while trying to avoid bug fighters. They can't activate the Time Matrix without alerting the Yeerks, and there's worrying about getting in bad with the fabled Elimists, the supposed creators of said Time Matrix. They manage to escape, but Elfangor wants to go back. That's not in Arbron's plans as he'd rather use the Time Matrix to reverse things to before he was stuck in morph. The two fight for a bit before Elfangor gets a dracon beam which he accidentally shoots into the ship causing an explosion.
Elfangor wakes up, no sign of Abron, but the Time Matrix is still in the ship. He also finds pictures from the human world and finds that he really likes how Earth looks. So, he has nobody with him, Arbron's missing, no sign of Alloran since they started, and he needs to drive through the Taxxon mountains in, what else, a Ford Mustang that's also on the ship. And so far, of all the images we've gotten in this book, the image of a blue centaur alien driving a car while drinking Dr. Pepper in his hooves trounces all others by light years.
Elfangor crashes the Mustang and finds a strange cave filled with tendrils. Taxxons aplenty, including Arbron who speaks with him. He tells Elfangor that this is the Living Hive, the source of life for all Taxxons, and it's not happy about the Yeerks stealing so much of the species. And now, once wanting death for his form, Arbron has accepted his new life as a Taxxon, to work as a voice for the Living Hive, and to form an attack on the Yeerks. He tells Elfangor to tell his parents that he died in battle, then rebuilds the Mustang to be a flying space cruiser, so this image just got stranger.
Elfangor makes it to the ship as he sees the humans are still alive. But Arbron's Taxxon mind is in control, now wanting to feast. Also, Sub-Visser Seven is there with Hork-Bajir. Arbron battles the Hork-Bajir, while another one, Arbron in morph, arrives and manages to subdue Sub-Visser Seven. With the Sub-Visser now captive, they head back into the Jahar. Elfangor asks Arbron to join, but he chooses not too, not now that he's a Taxxon for life.
Back in space, Alloran returns to Andalite form and still wants to blow up the Yeerks carrier, but Elfangor is still against it. They dump the Sub-Visser's Hork-Bajir body into space. Chapman is still in deep for, you know, just blowing the big reveal that Earthlings exist, but he says that he's just a dumb kid who was plucked into this mess, which is kind of right. He again tells Elfangor to kill the Yeerks, but again the young Aristh won't. We learn about the Hork-Bajir war and how it went poorly. How he became disgraced after essentially trying to pull a genocide on the Yeerks with something called a Quantum Virus. In the midst of this tension, Chapman manages to knock out Alloran.
But it turns out that this was all a ruse. You see, the Hork-Bajir that Sub-Visser Seven took over was jettisoned, but not the Yeerk himself. It had taken over Chapman, and in the midst of everything, took over Alloran. Meaning yep, now we know how Visser Three got his Andalite body. Loren is also now a Controller. And now, even worse, the Yeerks are aware of the Time Matrix being on the Taxxon planet. And now bug fighters are aimed at Elfangor. So, just in case there was a probability of things getting much worse, it's definitely made it to that point. But Elfangor manages to trick the others into thinking that the now Andalite sub-visser is the fake and he's the real one, giving him, Loren and Chapman a chance to escape. Elfangor even managing to get the Yeerk out of Loren's head by freezing it and sending it out to space where it won't die from Kandrona starvation at least.
After escaping through Z-Space for a while, Elfangor seems to have no idea what to do now. Doesn't help when Chapman goads him to use the Time Matrix. But Elfangor realizes that maybe Chapman is still working with the Yeerks, so that's not a good option. But he decides to return to the Starsword, his dome ship, which should have enough firepower to repel any planned attack from the Yeerks. They tie up Chapman and Loren asks again about why Elfangor can't just use the Time Matrix. He says that the whole butterfly effect thing aside, he'd be worried that he'd suffer the same fate as the Ellimists who possibly invented the time matrix, then disappeared. After a lot of talk about dimensional stuff, Elfangor asks to see Earth with Loren when this is all said and done.
They arrive in regular space and find the Starsword, which is being attacked by a strange sentient asteroid that can't be hurt by blasters. Sub-Visser Seven and the other Yeerks arrive. He's even been promoted to Visser Thirty-Two. Just 29 more to go, pal! In the midst of this, Chapman breaks free and tries to shoot Elfangor with a shredder, but Loren manages to subdue him and knock him out. After another battle, the ship loses oxygen and gets caught by the giant asteroid, with things again looking like the end. 109 pages left to go, so we're not done yet.
PART THREE: AN ALIEN DIES
The remains of the Jahar manage to get oxygen back in. But now there's the problem of Elfangor, Loren, Chapman and Visser Thirty-Two now trapped in space, falling into a black hole. Now, unfortunately they need to get the Time Matrix, which is strapped outside of the ship, so Elfangor and the Visser have to work together. They manage to retrieve the Time Matrix and use it, but things don't go quite right. Elfangor awakens back on his home world, only there's also parts of Earth there and the Yeerk planet. The Time Matrix created a timeline that merged the three visions of Elfangor, Loren and Visser Thirty-Two.
Elfangor finds Loren, but it doesn't take long to find the Visser, who is in the Yeerk part of this world with strange wheeled creatures called Mortrons, or specifically Jarex and Larex. After Loren throws a rock at the Visser, he has the Mortorons attack. Elfangor slices them in two with his tail blade, but that just turns them into four because of course things were going to get worse. Loren jumps on Elfangor's back and the two end up at her house. They meet Loren's mother, or to be more specific, this timeline/merged universe's mother who would of course know what Andalites are.
Loren runs off and hits a few softballs in an empty baseball stadium in this empty world. It's then where Elfangor tells Loren that the Time Matrix isn't like a time machine. It doesn't send you back in actual time, but in a time set in your memories, to a world created in those memories. As they pass through a McDonald's that was also placed in Loren's memory Elfangor realizes that this world is a spiral and that the Time Matrix is in the center of that spiral. So now it's a race between the two of them and the Visser to get to it first. It also is now fully confirmed that the feelings these two have for one another have gotten more intense.
As they get closer to the center of the spiral, they can feel each other aging rapidly. They find a giant whirling vortex and, with no other options, head inside. They find the Time Matrix, and the Visser with his Mortrons. It's all down to this. The two brawl while Elfangor also has to deal with the Mortrons. With Loren's help, the Morton's are incapacitated, leaving it down to tail vs tail. Elfangor vs the Visser. Elfangor defeats him, with the Visser promising that one day he will kill the Andalite that bested him before vanishing into the vortex. Elfangor then tells Loren to guide the Time Matrix so that they can hide it on Earth. And soon, everything snaps back.
Elfangor and Loren are back on Earth. The correct Earth. The corrected timeline. Elfangor is now in hiding, no longer wanting to be a part of the war. He takes on a human form and attends college and eventually makes it into the computer industry in the eighties, meeting some guy named Bill who was really interested in windows and some other guy named Steve. They never accomplished much, I believe. Chapman also exists in this timeline, but has no memories of the whole affair, so in this timeline at least he wasn't as willing to sell out his whole species.
Loren and Elfangor get married and move into their own house. Elfangor even changes his name to Alan Fangor. Life is going great, until the Ellimist shows up to tell Elfangor that "This is not his beautiful house. This is not his beautiful wife. This is not his beautiful life". He tells Elfangor that Arbron is still alive in the Taxxon planet. Oh, and that Visser guy got promoted to Visser Three. Not only that, but the Yeerks are soon to arrive on Earth. So, this happy little timeline has got to go away. Elfangor has to return to the Andalite world and to help put in motion what will one day stop the Yeerks. Loren's memories will be erased, much like Chapman's.
Elfangor, with no real option agrees, and he sees the visions of what will be his set timeline, including his younger brother Ax. And, for one final bitter twist of the knife, the Ellimist tells Elfangor that Loren will bear his son, which pisses Elfangor off, but he can't do anything about it. The Ellimist then says that there is also a far darker presence in the background, one who is playing a dark game that he hopes the Andalaite will help stop. And then everything snaps back once more with Elfangor in the Andalite fighter. He manages to save the Starsword from Visser Three. Elfangor tells his story to those on the ship, but is told that the story never is made public due to how high in regard Elfangor is. Made a hero despite, you know, just surviving and barely actually succeeding. He has regret for Arbron and wants to go back to Earth, but this can't happen just yet.
Time passes and Elfangor sees Earth once more. His dome ship is destroyed, with Ax's dome falling into the ocean. He crash lands on Earth where five human children discover him. But one of them, the boy Tobias, seems familiar to him. He realizes that Tobias is Loren's son. HIS son. Tobias tells him that he doesn't know what became of his mother, only that she disappeared when he was young. He tells Tobias to go with his friends, they are his family. And thus ends Elfangor's story, with his dying word being "Hope..."
You still here? You made it to the end? Told you this one was going to be our longest blog to date. But an important one for certain. The Andalite Chronicles is definitely our most important Animorphs book at this stretch in the series. And that's because it has to do two very important things: Give us the history leading up to The Invasion and set in motion pieces for the future. And the book does a great job in both. More so the past than the future, but I think what we get with the Ellimist still gives us enough to work with for now. It also really gives us the sense that for as much as the Ellimist claims that they're fixing the timeline to ensure things go a certain way, it also feels like they chose this point in time to really twist the knife into Elfangor. Destroying the happy world he was in and erasing it all in an instant. It sets the Ellimist up as someone who may be doing something for the good of the universe, but they themselves are far from altruistic.
Elfangor is the interesting part of this story. Aside from being the protagonist, the book deconstructs him and everything we know about him. Before this book, we were led to believe of great warrior hero Elfangor, but in honestly, he was just a cadet in way over his head, who barely managed to survive. This continues with The Alien in how the Andalites use their own propaganda to build up heroes and hide the truth. Case in point with Alloran and his attempted genocide with the virus. It doesn't paint the race as this true race of noble heroes as much as an overly proud race more concerned with looking weak. And thus we get the overhyped legend of Elfangor, the same one that Ax knows and carries on the legacy of.
The first two parts of the book I liked more than the third. I think they do a good job in building everything up well, particularly setting pieces in place. Giving us Visser Three's origin, even making you think initially that maybe the Andalite that would be taken by the Yeerk would be Arbron, only for Arbron to end up trapped forever as a Taxxon. It makes for a good mid-book swerve. Loren makes for a great companion to Elfangor and their relationship is fun. The Chapman from the first timeline is an interesting character. A teenage boy who doesn't seem to care about the world around him, no regard for other people, like how he mocks Loren's dad's PTSD. Someone who, if given the power, would sell out the planet to the Yeerks, even if it meant his own life was done for. A strong difference from the Chapman of the fixed timeline who allowed the controllers to take him on the condition they leave his daughter Melissa alone. A once cynical teenager who became a man with a family and conviction.
The third part is fine, but I feel it's rushed. I like the concept of the Time Matrix creating a world built from memories, and the merged world it creates. And we get some good action scenes and great moments, leading to the devastating end of Elfangor's happy world. I just wish it had more time to breathe and build on itself instead of feeling so near to the end of the book that it doesn't get a chance to feel as special as it could be. I will say at least it reminded me of The Stranger and how we saw the alternate timeline of a fully Yeerk-controlled Earth. I do think it's a better use of time travel than The Forgotten at least.
In the end, this one's hard not to recommend. It's a long book, but I think it flowed far better than I thought it would, giving us enough moments of pure action and enough slower moments to build our characters. And with it being split into three parts and three books, it becomes even easier to digest at about 107 pages or so each. Although, why is part two called Alloran's Choice when the one making a choice was Abron? I don't think Alloran had a choice in getting a Yeerk in him. Regardless, you can tell that Applegate's visions for the Animorphs universe are starting to take effect and that there are clearly big plans for the future along with a few gems still to come. We might have to wade through alien toilets and oatmeal to get there, but they'll be there. The Andalite Chronicles gets an A-.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.