It's Animorphing Time: Book 6 - The Capture

Sometimes you just gotta starve out the worm in your head (not RFK coded)

Oh yeah we are back to talk about the Animorphs in the year of our Lord 2024. Took a bit of a break in October because work, as the kids say, “be crazy.” To be fair I read this book in October but just didn’t have the brain power to write so here we are! 

The Capture is the first book we have published in 1997 and the POV switches to our first narrator, Jake. He is focused on his brother Tom who has been a Controller (someone with a Yeerk infested brain) since the first book. Now that the team has a full blown alien on their side, Jake is concerned that his compromised home-life is going to cause issues. 

The team gets the idea to infiltrate The Sharing which is a local culty, do-good, club that is just a disguised meet-up for Controllers to dump their Yeerks out into a pool to recharge. This is the Yeerks biggest weakness as they need to recharge in these alien pools every few days unless they die. To get into the sharing, Jake and company are going to morph into cockroaches. Jake beta-tests this transformation and once again, we are treated to quality body-horror.

My fingers melted together and formed a single, many-jointed bug leg. Antennae jumped out of my forehead. They seemed to stick out forever then curl back, like they were being blown by the wind. 

My waist squeezed, and the lower part of my body swelled, forming a swollen insect abdomen. Swollen and brownish yellow with ripples, sort of like the Michelin Man. 

Then, when I was about a foot tall, I felt the last of my bones dissolve. I could actually hear it happening. My spine had been grinding as it shrank. Then, suddenly, I heard a squishy sound, as all my internal organs lost their bone support. 

My skull melted away. It was the last sound I heard clearly, as my ears and human sense of hearing faded. 

I was a bag of loose guts. Almost deaf, halfblind, as my human eyes shrank and the lenses became distorted. 

After getting caught in a roach trap in an attempt to avoid his family, Jake morphs back (breaking the trap in the process) and gets scolded by the team for trying to morph on his own without anyone there to supervise. 

Jake also, once again, makes a strange comment about his cousin. 

I guess most guys would say Rachel is prettier. Personally I don’t think of her that way because she’s my cousin. But Rachel does look like some kind of blonde supermodel.

Oh, Jake. I just…

What we learn though is that the Controllers have taken over the Hospital. For them it is an easy way to recruit more folks without raising the alarm. When the team infiltrates a Yeerk meeting, they find out that the governor is coming in for an operation. This same governor is going to run for president and so the Yeerks want to mind-meld with this dude’s brain so that there could potentially be a YEERK PRESIDENT. 

Not only is this a decent twist for a kids book but there are other worries for Jake that give this plan emotional weight. If the Animorphs succeed in dismantling this wild Yeerk plan, Tom (Jake’s brother) could suffer the wrath (even die) by the hands (hooves?) of Visser Three. Tom is heading up this operation and leaves the team in a quandary. But obviously fuck them Yeerks, we got a planet to save (brother or not).

The Animorphs morph into flies to get into the Yeerk controlled Hospital. Oh, and I also thought this was funny due to conspiracies around hospitals. There are people who think that hospitals are used for medical experiments and dark government activities. I’m not sure if this is what Applegate and Grant were going for but it certainly made me giggle that it plays into that “fear.”  

Anyway, the team enters via flies and discover a room with a Yeerk pool and heaps of Yeerks chilling in it. Morphing back into humans, Jake decides he’s gonna fry them. Turning the heat up, the worms begin to boil. Controller forces arrive into the room to start SHOOTING AT CHILDREN. In the altercation, Jake falls into the Yeerk pool. Rachel turns into an elephant and demolishes the hospital on the way out as Marco carries Jake in tow. 

After getting back to safety, we discover that Jake has a Yeerk in his brain. Jake can hear his thoughts but when he speaks, it’s someone else controlling him. Through an interrogation by the team, they also figure out what’s going on. The only way to beat out the Yeerk is to starve it and not let it get to one of its pools. Ax morphs into Jake to go home and let his parents think that Ax is him (and apparently eat all the food in the house). 

The final pages involve a starving Yeerk screaming inside Jake’s mind. 

The Yeerk cried in pain, again and again. And the visions came floating up, crystal clear, as if they just happened. 

Visions of the good times in the Yeerk’s life. And of bad times. The emotions were strange. Alien. I guess that’s the word for them. There was no memory of love. I guess Yeerks don’t do love. But there was affection. Pride. Fear. Regret. Those I could understand. 

This rather empathetic moment for an evil slug race is good nuance for a kid’s book. 

The Yeerk dies and falls out of Jake’s head and he can return home. And no, this wasn't an RFK origin story.