Recap / Animorphs: Elfangor's Secret

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Narrator: All six Animorphs

Visser Four digs up the Time Matrix from where Elfangor hid it two decades prior, so the Animorphs must stop him before he changes history to make humans easier to conquer.

Tropes:

• Accidental Murder: Seeing Hitler at the alternate D-Day battle, Tobias immediately puts a Hork-Bajir blade to his throat. Cassie argues that he shouldn't, this isn't their reality and this one probably hasn't done anything. Tobias argues back but doesn't seem inclined to just kill him. Before either of them could persuade the other, the Captain of the combined French-German force, ignored when he tells Tobias to release his driver, opens fire and causes Tobias to twitch, cutting Hitler's throat.
• Alternate History: The Animorphs follow Visser Four with the Time Matrix and experience him changing the outcome of battles and other historical events to his benefit: the American Revolution is crushed, the English lose at Trafalgar, the Normandy landings are against a united Franco-German force (where Hitler is just a driver with a low rank), the French win at Agincourt (the last one was because the Visser's host was a former actor, and kept reciting Henry V at his Yeerk). In the end, they hit the Reset Button by ensuring the host's parents don't meet.
• Alternate-History Nazi Victory: Subverted when Visser Four tries to make the D-Day landing fail as he'd caused the American Revolution to fail, all in an attempt to weaken human resistance to the Yeerks. The Animorphs arriving on scene assume that despite a total lack of familiar insignia or flags, the people storming the beaches are the "good guys" and if they don't win the battle the Nazis will win the war. However, the villain's already changed time quite a bit, and so the defenders aren't Nazis but an allied French and German force. Hitler himself shows up as a low-ranking chauffeur in the army, and thus has no clue why these people are suddenly very angry at him. The Alternate Timeline the villain creates does turn what would have been America into a fascist empire that is highly reminiscent of the Nazis, complete with antisemitism, misogyny, eugenics, a "triple-S"...
• Alternate Timeline: Visser Four used the Time Matrix to create a world where humans are easy pickings for the Yeerks. The Drode smugly explains how the Yeerks are only a few short months away from total conquest of humanity.
• Alternate Universe Reed Richards Is Awesome:
  • Downplayed with Melissa. She's a member of the Animorphs in the alternate timeline, but we barely see her. She's naïve and does what Jake tells her to, meaning she's inoffensive in the misogynistic, totalitarian regime of that other world. He does note that she's Cassie's best friend despite being white and worries that if he tries to turn Cassie over to the Triple S as a radical then Melissa will try to help her.
  • Inverted with Hitler, who's merely a soldier driving a truck in the new version of World War II. It doesn't stop Tobias's knee-jerk reaction to kill him on the spot.
• Ambiguous Situation:
  • Is the "Nazi America" timeline that the book opens with the result of Visser Four meddling unobstructed, or of the more rushed, chaotic changes made when the Animorphs chase him across time? Early in the book the Animorphs assume the latter, but at the end Tobias argues the former and speculates that their actions may have made for a less terrible "present". He wants to check, but never gets the chance.
  • At Normandy the French and Germans seem to be unified, not just allied countries. They wear insignia that combines the French tricolor with the German imperial eagle, units are integrated with men of both countries and have obvious camaraderie, a French officer waits for the German captain, who acts nothing like a Nazi, to assess the situation without apparent resentment or territoriality. And of course while Hitler is there he's just a truck driver with a low rank. In addition, during the previous jump Einstein wasn't at Princeton but still in Germany, suggesting he wasn't persecuted there. The Animorphs all initially assume that D-Day means the good guys coming up the beach to fight the bad guys, but they really know nothing about the situation and neither do we. Are the "Americans" really a version of the fascist empire from the start of the book?
  • The next Megamorphs is Animorphs: Back to Before, which also shows an alternate timeline. At the end of it, Cassie is revealed to have a unique personal property that means she partially remembers the true timeline, causing the alternate to destabilize. Is that the case here too?
• Arrow Catch: Tobias catches an arrow that Visser Four shot at Henry V with his talons. This tips off Visser Four that the Andalite bandits can follow him through time.
• Ask a Stupid Question...: Rachel interrupts when Jake says Washington's at their second stop.
  Rachel: No way. George Washington?
  Marco: Jake, tell her, "No, Guido Washington."
  Jake: Marco would like me to pass along a sarcastic remark.
• Back from the Dead: By preventing the adventure from happening in the first place, the Animorphs are able to bring Jake back to life with Crayak unable to do anything about it.
• Bad Present: While Visser Four makes a hash of his attempts to Make Wrong What Once Went Right with the Animorphs bearing down on him, the start of the novel shows a world changed for the worse by his meddling with time unimpeded:
  The Drode: The lack of freedom among humans has made their conquest ever so much easier. Your few books, your two radio stations, your single television channel are all censored. Your technology is fifty years behind where it should be. Poverty is widespread, curable diseases run rampant, some women are forced to breed to repopulate the dominant white race while at the same time, in the major cities the poor and homeless are rounded up and shot—
• Boom, Headshot!: Jake dies from taking a musket pellet to the forehead while crossing the Delaware.
• Butterfly of Doom: When the Animorphs get their hands on the Time Matrix they debate if their interference has created a better "present" and consider going forwards to check and meddling, themselves.
  Marco: We start messing with the past, we mess with the future. Maybe we like the way things look to us back in our own time, but maybe we’ve screwed something else up down the line.
  Rachel: We do that every day. Every time we do anything, or do nothing, we change the future. Why is this different?
• Can't Take Anything with You: Maybe Visser Four can take things, maybe not. The Animorphs can't take anything beyond themselves and their morphing outfits - not even Jake's body after he dies. In one scene, dolphin Cassie goes from swimming in the ocean to lying, dry, on cobblestones.
• The Constant: Marco is amazed and annoyed that even with all the radical changes to the timeline, there are still Hippies in the 1960s.
• Death Is Cheap: After Jake dies, the Animorphs find that they can't be killed. They realize that the Ellimist is enforcing to Crayak that only one of them can die on this mission.
• Didn't Think This Through: Visser Four makes a plan to visit various important moments in history and make them worse...but he fails to consider how the changes he's already made might affect the places he wanted to go (e.g., he shows up at Princeton University to kill Albert Einstein, but the Jewish Einstein isn't there because the U.S., which is still part of Britain, is already an antisemitic empire racing toward totalitarianism and it seems this Germany is far less hostile). As such, he has to start randomly leaping through time trying to shake the Animorphs, but while he does escape them long enough to act unimpeded, he tries to warn the Nazis about D-Day. There are no Nazis and he is arrested by the integrated French/German forces.
• Dissonant Serenity: Ax notes that Rachel is quick to show great anger over small things but larger outrages make her cold, seemingly emotionless.
• The Dung Ages: The fifteenth century is this for the Animorphs, who have the misfortune of having bird of prey eyes that can witness all the disease, parasites, and dysentery that the people in that era have. Luckily for them, this gives Visser Four away, as he's the only person there with proper teeth and no lice. They're also able to use this distinction to look for him at Trafalgar, but in Princeton he no longer stands out.
• Emergency Temporal Shift: The Time Matrix is a sphere at least six feet tall and so Visser Four has to hide it somehow and leave it behind to get anything done. When the Animorphs start showing up, he has to dash back to it multiple times in an attempt to escape them. They've been "tuned" to be pulled along and appear somewhere in whatever time and place he does within several minutes of his arrival, but since they're scattered and there's always a lot going on they don't always manage to find him.
• Enemy Mine: The Ellimist and Crayak are eternal foes, and the Drode scoffs at the suggestion that Visser Four with the Time Matrix is any threat to Crayak, but they recognize that Visser Four having the Time Matrix and using it freely is going to cause a lot of damage. Their Cosmic Chess Game is paramount and neither will allow the other to just take the Time Matrix from him to give to favored pawns, though. They agree to a temporary truce to help the Animorphs learn about what's really going on and send them to fix the past, though Crayak insisted that if the Ellimist's pawns were the ones to get a chance, then one of them had to die.
• Equal-Opportunity Evil: Heavily downplayed. The unnamed Empire in the Bad Present does have some non-WASP members of the ruling class, like Cassie, but they're treated with heavy suspicion by the Police State apparatus. Jake thinks to himself that even though his Jewish-blooded father is a registered PoE, Patriot of the Empire, he still needs to be careful.
• Even Evil Has Standards:
  • According to the Drode, Crayak doesn't want something like the Time Matrix in the hands of a mere Yeerk. Marco is skeptical, saying that the Time Matrix could be a threat to Crayak, which the Drode denies.
  • The alternate Animorphs are all a bunch of unrepentant racist slave-owners, but they still fight to save humanity from the Yeerks. And Cassie, at least, is shown to have some doubts about the oppressive features of their society.
• Exact Words: When Crayak and the Ellimist make a deal to send the Animorphs back through time to stop Visser Four, the former insists on a codicil: one of the Animorphs must die during the mission. Sure enough, Jake ends up dying during the Revolutionary War...but then the rest of the team discovers that they can come back to life even after sustaining mortal injuries. Ax realizes that the Ellimist is using this trope: since Crayak specified that only one Animorph would die, Jake's death has granted the others immortality.
• Fictional Flag: Tobias notices that Princeton is flying pale blue flags with the British Union Jack in one corner. Whether this is the flag of the unnamed empire in the Bad Present is unknown.
• First-Person Dying Perspective: After Jake, Rachel's the first Animorph to "die". She falls from the rigging, Visser Four laughing above her as she blacks out before she hits the deck. In the audiobook, her narrator reads those lines in a slowing, flattening way, just the same as the next time she dies. For the remainder of the book any Animorph who dies just feels intense pain and is then better, seemingly not even losing consciousness.
• Five-Second Foreshadowing: In the first chapter Tobias is thinking about his life and mentions Melissa as his girlfriend, then says that morphing uses the essence of animals - "what Ax calls DNA" - and that the Animorphs are probably losing before he gets to his Wham Line about slaves attending their masters. Melissa is the most obvious of the three but normally he does know what DNA is, and at this point in the series the Animorphs haven't got to thinking of themselves as losing.
• Glasgow Grin: Tobias and Ax are both able to rake at Visser Four but as they're in raptor form they can't seriously hurt him. Tobias leaves a shallow, bloody cut on the side of his face that means when he gloats, his grin seems to extend to his ear.
• God Guise: Tobias morphs to Hork-Bajir and rides on Jake's new warhorse morph to fool the English and French armies of 1415 into thinking that the devil has come to play, causing them to draw away from the part of the battlefield where Cassie, Rachel, and Marco are huddled. Tobias even steals a pitchfork for this role.
• Godwin's Law of Time Travel: Inverted — Visser Four accidentally stops the Nazis from existing at all. Though the new American regime is a racist, sexist, antisemitic dictatorship that definitely bears similarities, complete with having a "Triple S".
• Godzilla Threshold: In Animorphs: The Andalite Chronicles Elfangor felt that no one, himself especially, could be trusted with the power of the Time Matrix and buried it. When he returned to Earth in Animorphs: The Invasion and found the powerful Yeerk presence there, the Dome Ship he served on was destroyed and his little brother was potentially killed. He was desperate enough to try and break his promise to himself. What was once woods had become a construction site and while he crashed there only a few yards away from the Time Matrix, he was injured and couldn't get to it.
• Happy Place: After Jake dies and a time jump takes her away from his body and to a naval battle, Cassie retreats to the dolphin's mind. It doesn't understand what's just happened and is happy and in its element. She's caught between helping her remaining friends and staying there until another time jump lands her in Princeton University. Laying on dry cobblestones is not a dolphin's element and the choice is made for her.
• Hellhole Prison: In the "Nazi America" timeline, Rachel has been shipped off to one by her refusal to submit to the misogynistic society. Her role in the Animorphs is instead filled by Melissa.
• He Knows Too Much: At the end of the book Visser Four leaves his dying host and the Animorphs catch him, a helpless slug. All their fury from before is spent and they're all shell-shocked and sad, not wanting to add to the death toll. Marco says well, they can't let him return to the modern day having seen that the Animorphs are human, and if he stays he'll die slowly of Kandrona starvation, so after the others refuse to do it themselves he lobs the Yeerk into a burning tank, saying this is faster.
• Heroic BSoD: When Jake is killed he's dumped overboard and dolphin Cassie finds him, only for her to be transported elsewhere in time and space and not even have his body with her. She's consumed with anguish and guilt, remembering that she and Marco had made an unspoken pact to protect Jake and failed. Lost, she lets the dolphin instincts take over.
• Heroic Bystander: The Animorphs are confused when Visser Four's first stop on his time-travel rampage is the Battle of Agincourt, which is much farther in the past than his other choices and doesn't suggest any obvious benefit to him. They later learn that John Berryman, Visser Four's host, was a low-level actor who played Exeter in a production of Henry V but memorized all the lines and constantly recited them at the Yeerk—to the point where he set aside his plan just to kill King Henry and ensure that Shakespeare would never write the play. The Animorphs are able to identify Visser Four at Agincourt and recognize him from there on, giving their mission higher odds of success - otherwise they probably wouldn't have known until Trafalgar. When freed and dying Berryman is entirely willing to help the Animorphs, even when it means he never exists.
• Hero of Another Story: John Berryman is twenty-five, is commonly speculated to have seen Elfangor bury the Time Matrix as a child, became a not-very-successful actor, was infested by Visser Four and witnessed the Yeerk invasion of Leera, survived the Visser's demotion, and never stops fighting him, reciting Henry V at the Yeerk without ceasing. When he's dying and de-infested and sees the Animorphs, he calls them heroes and helps them as much as he's able - including accepting that Cassie wants to keep him from ever being born. His story would be depressing, but that's an impressive level of defiance on his part.
• Humans Are Bastards: In the early books Ax was quite impressed by humans but being flung into several wars in quick succession and particularly finding out that they'll commit atrocities against one another really sours his opinion. He leans this way without fully committing, as his friends are human, and really struggles.
• Hypocrite: By the end of the book Ax is thoroughly sick of human war and can't believe he's been risking his life for a species that includes cowards who deliberately slaughter innocents. Andalites don't do that, he claims. He then slows down and thinks he absolutely does that while fighting Controllers, and he'd murdered a Hessian officer. Ax doesn't think about how Andalites tried to commit genocide on the Hork-Bajir, and how that's actually a recurring Andalite tactic.
• Immune to Bullets: After being transported to an alternate universe D-Day, the kids find to their surprise that bullets won't kill them. They suffer huge pain for a second, then the next second they're fine. As they get used to this state of being it becomes much more casual; back at Trafalgar Rachel blacked out and was unconscious for a while when hit with a cannonball, but at Normandy Cassie's getting up immediately after being shot in the head. Ax deduces that this is because of the deal that Ellimist made with Crayak to allow their time travel: that one of the Animorphs would die, but only one.
• Intimidating White Presence: The team find themselves in an alternate timeline version of Princeton University (one where the American Revolution failed and the French won Trafalgar).Tobias notices that there are less than half a dozen women in sight, and absolutely no black people, then one student calls Cassie a very bad word indeed. Having just witnessed the death of her boyfriend and her best friend in very short order, the kind, sweet, good-natured Cassie smiles as she tells the racist that she can become white, no problem. She turns into a polar bear, opens her jaws around his head and roars in his face. Rachel reappears at that moment to complain that Cassie is stealing her act.
• I Will Show You X!: Rachel's response to learning that her counterpart is "being taught her place" is to rant about showing everyone "her place" at any chance she gets.
• Karma Houdini: Visser Four at the end of the book is alive and completely anonymous. Before the start, he was demoted after losing Leera but allowed to live and try to come up with new schemes, and so without John Berryman having seen the Time Matrix he's presumably still kicking around on Earth. Infesting a totally different host he'd be unrecognizable, and since the Animorphs never learn his name, unless someone outright told them "that Yeerk used to be Visser Four" they'd have no way to know if any given Yeerk was him. Fortunately his memory is not ripple-proof.
• Kill It with Fire:
  • Visser Four kills Horatio Nelson by causing a small explosion under the waterline within his ship during a battle against Napoleon's forces.
  • After Visser Four leaves the mortally wounded John Berryman, Marco throws the Yeerk into a burning tank.
• Make Wrong What Once Went Right: Visser Four's plan is to make humans easier for the Yeerks to conquer. Thanks to the horrible, totalitarian society that resulted from his historical changes, it works.
• Mercy Kill: Loosely - by the time the Animorphs finally have Visser Four unhosted and helpless in their hands, they've run out of bloodlust, and while they agree he has to die, they're sick of murder. They could just leave him to die of Kandrona starvation. Cassie quietly says that's a horrible way to die. When no one else volunteers, Marco tosses the Visser into a burning tank and tries and fails to sound indifferent as he says this is quicker.
• Mirror Universe: The world created by Visser Four is one where a totalitarian regime has taken over America thanks to all the wars that went differently, including World War II. Therefore, aside from Ax, all of the Animorphs are worse people, being Politically Incorrect Heroes at best. Special mentions go to:
  • Jake is a "junior Nazi" as real-Marco describes, who demands to be called Supreme Leader, is ashamed of his Jewish ancestry, and thinks Ax speaking makes him a "pushy alien" to be put in his place. He's also thinking of handing Cassie to the authorities because of her possible subversive leanings, despite the fact that they are all still Animorphs secretly fighting the Yeerks - compliance with authority is so important to him that it's actively painful to even think about waiting.
  • Marco has an even worse case of Somebody Else's Problem, since he has his mom and Pong (the latest video game in this universe), and he refers to the people in Brazil, who are being slaughtered by his countrymen, as "jungle rats". He's also fully willing to back Jake up in turning Cassie over to the SSS.
  • Cassie is a slave owner. Keep in mind that Cassie is black. And in a twisted way, she's still The Heart of the team, since she's vaguely anti-genocide and thinks of slaves as not completely stupid.
  • The least changed is Ax, since of course Andalite history wasn't altered. He still would be different to a degree given that he's had a year or so of Character Development on Earth and the Animorphs of this Earth, or Jake at the least, are a lot more hostile towards him, but his history and base personality are the same.
• Most Writers Are Adults: Translocated to Princeton, Tobias works out that it's a college because the "kids" are too old to be in high school. Jake starts the series at 13 and end it at 16 and the other humans are likely about the same age. Mid-teens often don't think of college-age students as kids, college-age actually is young adulthood. It's mostly older adults who regard eighteen to mid twenty-year-olds as kids.
• Never Say "Die": This is the Animorphs book with the most frequent mentions of death, dying, murder, etc, and the one where the Animorphs kill the most humans. Ax is a bit euphemistic about beheading a Hessian officer, and Rachel about killing the soldiers in a tank, but it's very obvious what happened.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain!: Crayak agrees to allow the Animorphs to travel back in time to stop Visser Four’s meddling under the condition that one of them dies. The Ellimist takes advantage of this arrangement by making the rest of the team immortal after Jake dies since Crayak only specified that one of the Animorphs had to die and said nothing about the rest.
• Nobody Poops: Marco mentions that half the members of the English army at the Battle of Agincourt seem to have some serious digestive problems and keep ducking into the bushes to do something he really doesn't want to see.
• No Equal-Opportunity Time Travel: Downplayed, since as usual the Animorphs spend quite a lot of their time as animals. Still, all of them appear before people of the past as humans at least once. Jake, Tobias, and Visser Four, who are all white males, get no special comment. Marco isn't questioned either, given that most of the places they find themselves in are warzones with no shortage of young men; there might not have been a lot of people of his ethnicity at the banks of the Delaware, but everyone was too miserable to notice. Rachel and Cassie get called witches at Agincourt but in fairness that happened after they were seen morphing. At Trafalgar sailors leer at Rachel in her leotard, and at Princeton a student immediately calls Cassie a slur and tries to manhandle her, though one of his fellow students protests.
• No Name Given:
  • The book opens with alternate Animorphs living in an unnamed oppressive empire. It may or may not be the country that an alternate Princeton belongs to later in the book, which sends soldiers up the beach at Normandy.
  • The Yeerk who causes all the book's carnage used to be Visser Four but lost the rank when the invasion of Leera failed. No one ever tells the Animorphs his name so they just call him Visser Four, and so must TV Tropes.
• Not What It Looks Like: In 1415, Tobias realizes how bad it looks that he's entering a church, in Hork-Bajir morph (7 feet tall with a spiked tail and horns), and carrying a pitchfork. He apologizes to the priest in thought-speak and tells him it's not what it looks like.
• Oppressive States of America: The Bad Present sees the United States (or, well, an unnamed empire that includes North America) become one of these.
  The Drode: Your country is an empire, ruled by terror and torture. It has made war on the nations to the south. It slaughters peoples it calls 'Primitives.' It enslaves anyone with an IQ below eighty, as well as anyone born with what you call defects. All in all, it's my kind of place.
• Please Wake Up: When Jake is killed, Rachel can clearly see that he died instantly, but Marco tries to hold on to him and Cassie cries his name repeatedly and tries to take him on her back, hoping desperately that he's still alive. They each realize the truth quickly.
• Pretty Little Headshots: Jake is killed with a musket ball through his head. From the front there's just a hole through his forehead. Rachel sees that the back of his head is gone and doesn't elaborate, but she is absolutely certain he's dead.
• Psychic Static: John Berryman used his favorite play, Henry V, to annoy Visser Four, reciting it in his own head day and night. Visser Four, feeling he was being driven insane, tried to use the Time Matrix to kill Henry V as his first order of business.
• Pyrrhic Victory: Upon going to Normandy Visser Four tried to warn the Nazis about the Allies storming the beaches. However, thanks to his meddling in the past there were no Nazis, and the combined German-French forces arrested and handcuffed him. It's unclear whether, absent the Animorphs, he could have managed to touch the Time Matrix they captured and escape, or whether he'd have been executed (or just starved without Kandrona). If he didn't manage, then he didn't enact the other plans Berryman alludes to. Sure, he made humans easier for the Yeerks to conquer, but it appears he never returned to the Yeerk Empire with the Time Matrix.
• Rage Breaking Point: Normally Cassie would certainly hate being called a slur but would probably let it go and just avoid whoever said such things, thinking of them with contempt. In 1934, struggling tremendously with Jake's death, having just heard that Rachel's dead too, she can't take it. She responds by "turning white", AKA morphing to polar bear, pinning the offending man against a wall, clamping her jaws over his face, and roaring. Marco and the newly alive Rachel comment approvingly on how this attitude is more of a Rachel thing to do.
• A Rare Sentence: At the bank of the Delaware, Jake decides Visser Four must be trying to kill the most prominent historical figure present, as on their last stop, and tells his friends to protect George Washington! Marco laughs.
  "There’s three words you never thought you’d say."
• Rain of Arrows: The Animorphs learn what it's like to be animals caught in the crossfire of medieval armies armed with bows and arrows.
• Reasonable Authority Figure: At Normandy, the Captain of a unit of unified French-German defenders comes over to look at Hork-Bajir Tobias and wolf Cassie. While he is German, he doesn't act like a Nazi; he's got weary eyes and is levelheaded, civil, and brave without being vicious, taking the bizarre situation much more calmly than any of the other humans who've seen the Animorphs so far. When Tobias seizes his driver, the Captain tries to get him to let go and when that doesn't work fires at the "monster" with his own gun - yes, in another reality that driver was a genocidal maniac, but to this guy he's just low-ranking support personnel.
• Revealing Continuity Lapse: At the start of the book the Animorphs have no idea anything's wrong, but the readers sure do! In the intro scene where Tobias broods while flying he drops several bits of Five-Second Foreshadowing ending in a Wham Line about slaves attending to their masters on the beach below. The next scene is an Animorphs meeting in the barn in which prominent characters are missing and personalities are drastically different, not to mention the sorry state the world is in. It isn't until chapter 3 that the Drode drops in to finally explain what's going on, restore the Animorphs to their original selves, and task them with stopping Visser Four.
• Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory: While the book opens with the Bad Present and Animorphs that fit into it, after restoring their true timeline memories and personalities the higher powers make sure to "buffer" the Animorphs so that they aren't affected by the changes Visser Four causes while trying to stop him. They speculate that the Time Matrix also buffers the Visser's host and the Visser himself (he lost the battle for Leera and ended up in a position to find the Time Matrix as a result of the Animorphs cooperating to a degree the alternate-Animorphs don't seem capable of). Ultimately by preventing his host from being born they prevent him from having found the Time Matrix in the first place, but still remember everything themselves. Presumably the Visser forgets.
• Ret-Gone: The Animorphs use the Time Matrix to erase John Berryman from existence, preventing Visser Four from ending up in the position to find the Time Matrix in the first place. The world goes back to normal after that, as none of the changes Visser Four made to history ever happened without John Berryman.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here:
  • Tobias repeatedly tries to tell the Ellimist and Crayak that they quit! Now take him and his friends out of here! They don't respond, and Tobias ends up wanting to stay after all to kill Visser Four in revenge.
  • Cassie longs to run away altogether and sinks into the Happy Place of the dolphin's instincts. She remembers that trying to leave the war hadn't worked before and wants to help the rest of her friends, but that would mean fully admitting that Jake was dead, so she sits out the events at Tralfagar in a paralysis of indecision.
• Set Right What Once Went Wrong: The Animorphs have to stop a time traveling Yeerk from changing human history for the worse. Thanks to the Ellimist and Crayak, they're given a Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory and are immune to any of the effects of changing history, as well as traveling along with the Matrix as it passes through space and time.
• Skewed Priorities:
  • The alternate timeline's Jake has really bought in to the empire's values and is bothered by the Yeerks starting to infest the troops because that could destroy the war effort and allow the "jungle rats" to take up land the empire needs! He considers the idea of a world where they keep their territory to be just as bad as one fully controlled by the Yeerks. When Cassie says "Yeah, it would be a pity if some of the Primitives escaped alive" he takes it as confirmation that she has radical tendencies and passionately wants to report her to the "Triple S" despite it being mostly Controllers. He has to tell himself that dealing with the radicals can wait until after the Yeerks are driven out but even that compromise doesn't sit well with him.
  • When Rachel appears on the deck of a sailing ship, she instantly draws a lot of attention and a thirteen-year-old boy on deck is determined to flirt with her. A lieutenant who's much more concerned that they're seconds from exchanging cannon volleys with a French ship gets everyone back on track.
  • The first changes Visser Four makes to the timeline are to kill King Henry V, because he doesn't want Shakespeare to write a play about him, because his host recites it incessantly. This even though the Battle of Agincourt took place centuries before any of the other things he meddles in and requires him to get up in a tree with a bow and arrow.
• Someone Has to Die: Crayak refuses to let the mission happen unless one of the Animorphs dies during it. Obviously, he wants Jake to die, because Jake made the Howlers ineffectual and saved the Iskoort. Even though Jake does die, it doesn't stick. The Ellimist also cleverly twists this into meaning exactly one Animorph will die. This means that after Jake's death, the rest of them become immortal.
• Time-Travelers Are Spies: The French knights of Agincourt accuse Rachel and Cassie of being English spies, until Rachel gets tired of being menaced with spears and starts to morph — then they're called witches.
• The Time Traveller's Dilemma: Averted. Some things in the altered future may have been better, many things were worse. When the Animorphs prepare to perform a Temporal Abortion that will prevent Visser Four from finding the time machine, they pause and debate this trope and Butterfly of Doom. Could they check the 'present day' and see what impact their battling the Visser had on it, compared to what it was when he changed things unhindered? They have the time machine, they might be able to make a lot of things better. Ultimately the fact that they're in the street arguing besides a device that resembles a massive golden pearl causes two people who otherwise would have met and had John Berryman to miss that chance, making the choice for them. With everything reset, Jake asks Cassie if they fixed everything. All Cassie can say was that they "put it all back".
• Torches and Pitchforks: The people of 1415 see Ax demorphing from harrier, assume he's a demon, and form an angry mob.
• Those Wacky Nazis: They don't exist by the point in the book where the Animorphs reach Normandy, but the kids assume that this is like the D-Day they know and the defenders on the beach are Nazis and must be stopped. Rachel contrives to drop a grenade in a tank and kills quite a few people. Too late she realizes that no one is wearing a swastika and asks these are the bad guys, right? No one has an answer, but the implications are that they're not.
• Transformation Horror: The Animorphs are quite blase about morphing themselves by now, but because most of this book takes place long before Yeerks even leave their homeworld they don't go to much trouble to hide their morphing from random humans. Invariably people are completely horrified. French knights who'd been menacing Rachel and Cassie after they suddenly appeared in camp think they're witches. In Princeton, a student seeing Cassie writhing her way from dolphin to human cries out that they need to get a doctor for her. She starts to apologize before she's interrupted by a much more unpleasant student.
• Villainous Underdog: Visser Four is a Yeerk in a human host being chased by the Animorphs, so he has to avoid any direct confrontations. His only real advantage is that they don’t know where to find the Time Matrix whenever he jumps to a new point in Earth’s history. He is even more outclassed after Jake’s death as the rest of the Animorphs become immortal thanks to the Ellimist’s Loophole Abuse.
• Villains Want Mercy: Visser Four begs Rachel to not kill him when she corners him in chimpanzee morph. He changes his tune to laughter when she gets blown in half by cannon fire.
• War Is Glorious: The closest the series comes to this is in Rachel's frank admiration of soldiers, who she thinks are the best of humanity.
• War Is Hell: Underlined in this book more often than anywhere else in the series.
  • Marco finds Agincourt kind of comical until battle starts, at which point the jokes drop away for a while. Similarly, crossing the Delaware is great fodder for creative complaints but not when the shooting begins. He has the worst time of all at Normandy, finding himself in a little boat that's swept with machine gun fire, and has a minor breakdown.
  My brain was about to explode. Too much death and destruction and horror. As bad as my life had been at times as an Animorph, I’d seen real hard-core combat now and it was worse. The men who died in these battles had been like Jake. They’d had no chance. Here, at Agincourt, back on the Delaware River, or on the beautiful, slow-moving sailing ship. No difference.
  Men stood up in the face of the enemy and were massacred. Arrows found throats. Swords found vulnerable flesh. Cannons ripped away limbs. Bullets entered organs by neat, round holes and came out in a shredded mess. Men died never having the chance to resist, to fight, to run, to cry out, to prepare, to wonder. One second they were scared and brave and alive. The next second they were dead.
  • Cassie bitterly thinks that after all this she reads up on the Battle of Agincourt and saw it described as glorious, but she found it about as glorious as murder.
  • Ax keeps trying to find some sort of significance to the bloody human wars he witnesses, but finds none. The Animorphs have nothing to offer him but "that's just the way it's been". Andalites used to make war on each other but it was far back in a long history and he doesn't think they killed children. Seeing this cross-section of human war has him nearly convinced Humans Are Bastards, except that they're mostly not doing anything he's not, and he's seen small moments like a medic facing death to help a dying man.
• Wham Line:
  • The book opens with Tobias monologuing about being free as a bird... then he mentions Melissa in place of where the reader would expect Rachel. It only gets worse from there.
  Even the slaves, standing by to attend to their masters and mistresses, seemed to be having a good time.
  • At first, the section that takes place at the Delaware is on the goofy side, with the human Animorphs boggling at George Washington. The river crossing itself is miserable but Marco's narrating and he makes a lot of jokes. When Hessians on the other side open fire, Marco describes the musket balls hitting people around them, and then-
  A hole appeared in Jake’s forehead.
• What Year Is This?: Unlike Visser Four, the Animorphs have little idea where and when they are at a given point and end up asking this several times.
• Wouldn't Hurt a Child: Ax claims that even when Andalites warred against each other they didn't kill children, that it's not possible to conceive of a greater evil than the deliberate murder of a child. Of course, he only knows that time as ancient history, and modern Andalites, while not inclined to child murder, aren't quite as careful of the children of other species.