The Forgotten
The one where *spoilers*
<Maybe that is true, Prince Jake. But my brother Elfangor once told me, “It’s a leader’s job to be lucky.” Sometimes, success is just to be lucky.>
I nodded. It didn’t make me feel any better. “Elfangor’s luck ran out.”
<Yes. We must hope yours does not, Prince Jake.>
I laughed. “Don’t call me Prince.”
<Yes, Prince Jake.>
This book is going to be mostly spoiled in this essay.
This book starts normal enough as any other book starts, with the beginning summary of what the series is about transitioning into a scene of Jake learning square-dancing in school. Jake finds the entire project agitating.
The lights in the classroom seemed blazingly bright compared to the dark gray clouds outside. The teacher was standing off to the side. She was wearing that smug, satisfied look teachers sometimes get when they know they are grinding the students’ last nerves.
“Now promenade left! Bow to your partner, do-si-do!” the stereo drill-instructor yelled.
I promenaded, which consisted of walking like a BIG HONKING GOOBER around in a circle.
This is a funny little mundane vignette of the life of a child. It’s silly, but even as it’s relatable to my experience growing up with teachers and classmates that were huge dorks, it’s also strangely relatable as an adult now. I’m not of the opinion that kids should have to suffer through the same experience I had because it “builds character” or anything like that, but I do think making kids do dumb little dances or performances is mostly harmless for the kids and fun to watch as an adult. I can imagine a teacher enjoying watching kids look silly as a small perk in a generally underpaid job. The icing on the cake involves the little crushes that start around the pre-teen age the Animorphs are at and the insecure self-awareness that happens.
Public schools, or private schools like the Catholic ones I grew up in, often pride themselves on having a mission of forming the future. The primary point is education, but the broader public often uses a lot of flowery language to describe teachers and schools. The school I grew up in had these things called “ESLRs” that I had to memorize around first grade at five or six years old. I remember not really understanding what the words meant most of the time. We went over them of course, but I mostly just learned how to fill in the right words in the right boxes and then walked by the list every day when entering class without being able to really read them again for most of the year. The list called on all students to develop as:
Informed, Active, Faithful Catholics.
Integrated Individuals
Life-Long Learners
Effective Communicators
Globally Aware and Responsible Citizens
Knowing what I know now and taking a look at this list and the project of this blog, I tend to think that, I guess, job mostly well done. Although any informed, active Catholic who is even locally aware and went to Catholic school in Los Angeles while Roger Mahoney was archbishop, kind of by definition isn’t going to be super faithful, at least in all senses of the word.
Anyways, schools tend to view themselves in high minded terms and I think the public, mostly correctly1, does as well. Educational institutions are for forming minds, building skills, teaching discipline, making informed citizens, instilling a love of learning, etc. etc. etc.
But a lot of the experience of actually going to school tends to be a lot dumber than that. This is because school also functions at a much more instrumental level as basic childcare during working hours2. While maybe the seeds of character were being planted in some of first grade, I suspect it was more in the example of adults or parents than in regurgitation of words I didn’t understand as a first grader on little quizzes. Dumb little dance classes like this are a nice little reminder school isn’t all serious work3.
Then Jake the leader starts thinking ahead when suddenly
Then…
FLASH!
I fell!
I fell down and down through the green, green trees!
The opening vignette is broken by a sudden flash to Jake as a monkey swinging through a jungle. I’m not going to bury the lede, this isn’t a daydream as Jake first thinks it might be, this is a flash “forward” in Jake’s timeline. We’re doing a time-travel book! From the humor in the beginning all the way through to the twist at the end this book is a fun ride. We get to see the Animorphs conduct a heist of a bug fighter and fly into space. We get to see time travel. We get to see the Amazon Rainforest. And we finally get to see Jake starting to crack under the pressure of leadership. In the end, the main action of this story is Forgotten4 by most of the characters because of how time-travel seems to work.
So how does time-travel work in Animorphs?
Well, by the end of this book we do get some answers to that question with one major caveat. Let’s start with the travel itself - the Animorphs are in a stolen bug fighter at this point and fall through the Sario Rip
I swept the red target circle toward the black-diamond head of the Blade ship. I squeezed the trigger and kept squeezing.
Brilliant Dracon beams stabbed toward the Blad ship.
But at the same instant, the Visser fired!
Dracon beam hit Dracon beam.
ZZZZZOOOOOWWWW!
An explosion of light so intense I could actually see through my own hand. I could see Cassie’s teeth inside her head!
Okay, so a few pages later as the Animorphs hurtle toward earth we find out the sun is shining on the wrong side of the earth. This seems like the most likely event to have caused what Ax later calls a Sario Rip. Basically, powerful energy beams causing a hole in space-time. At first, they don’t know exactly when they are, explained by this amusing exchange.
“A what? A Sario Rip? What’s that?”
<We blew a small hole in space-time. And were drawn through that hole.>
“English, please,” I warned, “Plain English, please.”
“We were blown through time Jake,” Cassie said. “We aren’t where we want to be. And we aren’t when we want to be.”
I stared at her. “Did we go forward or back? Are we in the past or the future?”
<Yes,> Ax said. <It’s definitely one of those two choices.>
Ax doesn’t have much insight beyond this at first. He was daydreaming in class about an Andalite he was smitten with so doesn’t remember much about learning about time travel.Eventually, after some exciting adventures in the rainforest, Jake confesses to the flashes he has been getting, and Ax proposes these may be Jake having simultaneous consciousnesses intersecting. So, the team went back in time but not very far back in time. This is when Ax does come in to put some contours on what the rules of time-travel might look like.
<…There are now two Marcos, two Cassies, two of each of us. One here, one there. At the same time. The flashbacks only started today. So I suspect we have gone back one day in time, a little less.>
“That’s good,” Marco said.
<No,> Ax said solemenly. <It’s not good. We are in two places at the same time. That is impossible. It’s a time-space anomaly. It’s an unstable condition.>
“Meaning…?” I pressed.
<I think it means that the two groups, the two Marcos, Rachels, and so on, will annihilate each other. Like matter and antimatter, it is not possible for there to be two of us in the same time.>
“So why haven’t we annihilated ourselves yet?” Rachel asked.
<We are still within the Sario Rip effect,> Ax said. <I think. So…so I think we’re okay till we get back to the time when the rip occurred.>
This is great, I love this. I think this is an example of introducing a hard magic system of time-travel into storytelling, but with enough vagueness to be able to expand upon that system as necessary later. Time-travel is a dangerously powerful element to add into a story because it has the capacity to solve nearly every problem while also negating any bad event that happens. If some beloved character dies it won’t pack any emotional punch if the timeline can be rewritten. Imagine if there was some narrative that had a mass casualty event which was almost entirely undone by one trip through time? That would be stupid, no one should take your story seriously after you did that!
So here we have time-travel introduced into the story, but it looks like we’re going to get some limitations as well. There are a lot of ways this has played out in science fiction and fantasy. I
What I’ll call the second-chance or snake5 time-travel there is just a severe limit to a small amount into the past that allows for a do-over, let’s say you can only go back in time five minutes for example to get a second chance. Examples of this include the video game Life is Strange where you are able to go back in time to change basically one decision. In that game, there are also further potential consequences from overusing the power. Another example is Groundhog Day where the same day keeps playing on repeat, but the severe limitation here is that the Bill Murray character basically can’t control the time-travel.
Another way of having severe limitation is to only allow for seeing into the future or past but not interacting with it. Disney Channel’s That’s So Raven had a funny, basically useless, version of future travel that functioned just like this. The short-film World of Tomorrow imagined a future where a great deal of leisure time was spent looking into the past in this manner.
The Animorph story seems to be going more in the direction of general time-travel where certain extreme events can send people forward or backward arbitrary amounts in time. The Ellimist actually already sent them into the future, although there is enough uncertainty in that episode to think that may have been a manipulation more than real time-travel6. Time-travel being more like Doctor Who or Back to the Future or even Star Trek means we need some guardrails to limit the power of time-travel or impose some additional cost. And in this book we’re getting at least two major downsides to time-travel.
The first downside that we’ve run into now is that one person can’t be in two places at the same time. Doctor Who had this rule of not being able to go back on your own timeline7 because of vague dire consequences as well. At the moment, Ax is suggesting that when the day finishes if two of each person still exists, they will be wiped from existence. What exactly the full ramifications of this are is a bit unclear at this point and leaves Applegate some wiggle room to fill in contours later since Ax was daydreaming when he learned what might happen. But something as extreme as all of the Animorphs never existing in the first place seems like it is on the table. But there is something Ax does seem to remember.
<There could be -> Ax started to say. Then he stopped.
“What?” I asked him. “Is there some other way to get back?”
Ax gave me a long look. Like he wasn’t quite sure what to say.
This takes us to the end of the book and the second major way that time-travel is going to function. Long story short, Jake has his neck snapped while in the rainforest and his consciousness is permanently snapped back to the earlier point in his timeline.
Was it a flashback? One of the visions?
No, it was lasting too long. This was real. I was behind the motel. Getting ready to morph and go check out the Safeway.
I looked at my watch. Could it be? “What time is it?” I asked Ax.
<Eight-nineteen,> he said.
Eight-nineteen. Of course. I knew that time. At eight-nineteen, I had felt strange - uneasy about making the decision to go into the grocery store. But I had made the decision to go ahead. And from that decision, everything else had followed. The Sario Rip. The disaster in the rain forest.
Jake makes a new decision. The Sario Rip never happens. Jake follows up with Ax to ask about the events of this book but to everyone else it ends up being The Forgotten8 mission. Ax tells Jake that dying reset the timeline and it never happened so he wouldn’t be able to morph the animals he acquired in the jungle. But Jakes decision also suggests the reason Jake remembers all the events is because it was his decision that actually changed the events. In this book, only Jake experienced, and therefore remembers, everything that happened because he went about changing the outcome.
This is going to be potential set-up for future events, and actually a future time-travel story that I’m thinking of. It also closes off the multiverse “nothing matters” reality with infinite possible timelines problem. Sario Rip timeline events either do or do not occur in reality and once closed off they collapse with only a mirage left on the person who closed them off. That mirage leaves a scar, since Jake remembers dying. Jake has now lived for nearly a day that no one else in the world has extra, boy it would really be brutal on someone’s psyche if a collapsed timeline played out over the course of years9. But time-travel seems pretty rare in these stories. It’ll be awhile until we travel again.
There’s some that have convinced themselves of a dumb stronger form of what I’m sort of saying here, where since the average person forgets a lot of stuff learned in school that the high-minded learning or public value portion of it is entirely frivolous illusion and the only instrumental good of school is as educational capital to signal to employers, we’ll be good workers. This is beyond scope but also isn’t really worth more than an eyeroll and a footnote.
I’m already probably beyond the scope of this essay with this school topic, but I also think it’s just dumb inertia that when pre-kindergarten government childcare is discussed it is considered dirty socialism and most people oppose it but as soon as a child reaches five years old it’s mostly right-wing weirdos who think it’s dirty socialism. To be honest, I think both are dirty socialism, I just think a little dirty socialism is good.
In a weird way, there’s actually good reason to think dumb little exercises involving following directions and moving your body are really good for kids and adults. Again, beyond scope.
Hey, that’s the name of the book!
If you don’t get this reference, it’s probably not for you
I’m not 100% convinced the books entirely address whether this was a trick of their consciousness by the Ellimist or him actually pulling them into a possible future.
except for cheap party tricks
See 4
Huh, I wonder if that’ll come back around