The Predator

The first book about the Animorph that cracks all the jokes? Yeah, grief? I think that's about grief.

“I'm an 18-wheeler headed down the interstate

My brakes are gonna give and I won't know ‘til it’s too late

Tires screaming when I lose control

Try not to hurt too many people when I roll” The Mountain Goats - Matthew 25:21 

Being Catholic can mean growing up in a big family. It didn’t for me, but my parents both grew up in large families. My mom was one of seven children and dad was one of fourteen. My mom has a running joke of telling people about how big our family is by first saying that my dad grew up with a lot of siblings, and then follow that up by saying she grew up in a small family with just six siblings.

Christmas parties were a massive affair. Beyond my uncles, aunts, and first cousins, we also grew up visiting my mom's cousins during the holidays. My Tia's house party at Christmas was so packed that people would have to eat in shifts and then get shooed quickly away from the table if they stayed too long. For both sides of the family, I was on the younger end of my generation. In fact, for my dad's side of the family, I was the absolute youngest of the grandchildren while growing up.

Since so much of both of my parents' families were nearby in California, I grew up around extended family a lot of the time. But being the youngest it also felt normal to not really know my cousins on a deep personal level. I was probably always a step behind other cousins in developing and usually two or three steps. My sister made friends with my youngest cousins, and I was just the quiet younger brother that wasn't my sister's best friend yet.

Still, I loved my family growing up. I loved that it was big, and I loved my aunts, my uncles, and my cousins individually. I still love them. They are varyingly kind, funny, intelligent, talented, interesting, caring, introverted, extroverted, contemplative, and fun loving. I went to a lot of weddings, celebrations of love and commitment that I found enjoyable. I went to some baby showers or first birthdays. And there were always the yearly get togethers during the holidays.

Of course, this blog is now about a series that involves themes in a dark storyline where children deal with some tough stuff. And the downside of being in a close extended family is that in addition to all of the life milestones you can celebrate with a lot of people, you also end up going to a lot of funerals. Funerals and loss are a strange universal of the human experience. I have been to a lot of funerals and have seen the variety of ways different people in my family have responded. As my daughter grows, I may have to find ways to explain death before she is quite old enough to grasp the concept. I have so far not had the experience of immediate family -parent, sibling, spouse or child - pass away. But such loss is in my future, and if not, the alternative isn't exactly preferable.

One of my favorite ways to look at ethics is through the lens of can implies ought. That is to say, if you have the ability and power to do good you also have responsibilities to do good. This is why I love spiderman or spiderman like superhero stories with the cheesy “with great power comes great responsibility” theme. This is why I love thinking through politics where individuals command policy and budgets that can impact large numbers of people’s lives. Most of the time, those movies disappoint me by not actually thinking that deeply about the theme of great power requiring responsibility¹. Most of the time, managers, owners, politicians, and leaders disappoint me in not taking seriously the responsibilities of power.

But on the flip side is my other favorite way of looking at ethics of ought implies can and the unending ways in which our action and agency is limited by chance, circumstance, and ability. Death is one of those stubborn facts that none of us can escape forever. Dealing with the pain of loss is hard to fault someone for, even if the way you are dealing with that pain hurts the people around you. Grief isn't good or bad but it just is grief because it is grief, and that grief can absolutely destroy a can. 

This is far better articulated than I could in the song quoted at the top of this piece with the metaphor of a truck that has its brakes give out. 

Marco's mom has passed away. Before Elfangor gave the Animorphs powers, before they first visited the Yeerk pool, before Melissa cried to Rachel as her cat, before Tobias embraced being a hawk, and before Ax was rescued, Marco's mom was dead. And Marco is the reluctant Animorph. Unlike the rest of the group that each has found their reasons to fight Marco has consistently pointed out how they are just kids. The plans the Animorphs have are often half-baked, and they have almost no chance of winning this war. I brought up the just war doctrines in the first of these essays, Marco could be thought of as correctly pointing to the third criteria

there must be serious prospects of success

A look back at the first few books you can see Marco's point. In the very first book the Animorphs rush to infiltrate the Yeerk pool and barely manage to rescue one person while Tobias gets trapped as a hawk. In the second book, Rachel fails to gather much intel of substance and barely escapes so the rest of the series can happen. In the third book, the four of the Animorphs who can still morph nearly get trapped as wolves before their mission even has a chance to fail leading to Tobias having a breakdown. And in the fourth book, they have maybe their first victory in being able to successfully rescue Ax, but the victory comes from a sort of Deus Ex whale just as it looks like they are going to be caught by Visser Three.

So, now to jump into the first book narrated by Marco. In the starting vignette Marco saves an old man from muggers by morphing a gorilla while on his way home from picking up some groceries. Then the old man he just saved turns on him

Unfortunately, I had forgotten one thing.

G-g-get out of here you … you monster!

The old man. The one I had risked my life to save. He was standing, facing me. He was shaking with fear and red in the face

Oh, I thought. So that’s where the gun went

Marco feels reinforced in his belief that you shouldn’t be getting involved in other people’s problems. The book moves on to the main story. Ax wants to go home and tell the Andalites about the Invasion going on down on earth. The main story revolves around trying to capture one of the Yeerk spaceships to be able to allow Ax to travel home. Marco, of course, thinks this is a tall endeavor totally out of their capabilities, but Ax tells him he knows how to make a distress beacon that will then result in only one ship coming down to investigate. Thus, they will only have to deal with the Taxxon and Hork Bajir crew of the small investigating ship.

So, there are three parts to the mission. They need to gather parts for the distress beacon that can be purchased. They need to gather the alien part from Chapman’s house where he contacts Visser Three. And they need to use the distress beacon to lure and capture the Bug Fighter.

This plan goes perfectly with no hiccups whatsoever, which makes this a fun although boring book that makes Marco realize that a handful of kids with morphing powers can win a guerrilla war against a parasitic species with intergalactic travel capabilities. I’m kidding, it’s a shitshow.

The first thing they do is go to get some technical supplies from the mall with Ax in a human morph. The trip to the mall ended up making me laugh. See if you can spot the parts that may have dated themselves.

The mall was a zoo. Wall-to-wall people. Old people moving real slow. Married people with squalling babies in big huge strollers. High school kids trying to look cool. Mall police trying to look tough. Good-looking girls carrying bags from The Limited.

Your basic Saturday at the mall.

“Okay, where is Radio Shack?” - Jake wondered

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Is it up on the second level? You know, down by Sears?”

“Is that it? Or is that Circuit City?”

It’s kind of incredible how all four of these brands have declined since these books were published to the point where most malls in America probably don’t have them. Sears filed for bankruptcy in 2022 and only has a handful of stores remaining, The Limited has only been available online for a few years now, Radio Shack saw a decline in the early 2000s that eventually led to bankruptcy in 2015, and Circuit City, I kid you not, failed to avoid bankruptcy when Blockbuster withdrew its 1 billion dollar buyout bid².

Anyways, so Ax is an Andalite who has never discovered taste before. And the Animorphs trip to the mall comes to a disastrous end when Ax is introduced to taste and discovers the food court and cinnamon rolls. He starts picking scraps of food from the food court. The mall cops understandably think Ax is a crazy person. Ax hits one of them in the face when he throws away one of the cinnamon buns he is eating, not understanding the words “throw away” that Jake instructed him to do with finished food earlier. And provoked, the mall cops chase Ax through the mall and into a grocery store where Jake, Marco, and Ax decide to hide as lobsters in the grocery store lobster tank.

This works, but of course they also stay in lobster morph for almost two hours because of the drowsiness of the tank. And when Marco discovers where he is as he is demorphing, well, it freaks him out.

But just then I again felt the sensation of pressure on my shell. My pincers came free. Someone, or something, had removed the rubber bands.

And suddenly I felt a warmth billowing around me.
Steam

<Oh, no.>

[Chapter 8]

<NOOOOOO!> I screamed silently.

I knew where I was! I was in someone’s hand, about to be dropped into a pot of boiling water.

So that’s part one of the mission done and near-death experience number one for the book. Marco has a nightmare about it right away waking up at 3 in the morning in a cold sweat by his dad, who is apparently often awake at 3am. The next part of the mission for this book is worse. I might try and cover why I think the ant morph experience is so much worse in a future essay³, but suffice it to say these are hive creatures and also result in yet another near-death experience saved by a quick morph out. Here is the morning after that experience.

I was cool. I was fine. I slept okay. There were dreams, but I just put them out of my mind.

When I got up the next morning, I ignored the fact that my dad’s eyes were red, like he’d been crying. He was getting worse, not better, as we got closer to Sunday. To the second year anniversary of my mom’s death.

But I had to put that out of my mind, too. I had to put a lot of things out of my mind. It was getting to be a habit

…

One of these days, I thought, one of us is going to go crazy. Totally, lock-me-up-in-a-rubber-room nutso. It was too much. This wasn’t how life was supposed to be.

One of us would snap. One of us would lose it. It could happen, even to strong people.

I knew. It had happened to my father. I used to think nothing could ever destroy him. But my mom’s death had.

He used to be an engineer. A scientist, really. He’s incredibly smart. We had a nice house. We had a nice car. I used to live practically next door to Jake.

So here’s where we come back to grief. Marco doesn't blame his dad for snapping despite the pretty clear impact it has had on Marco's life. His dad was cruising through life and fundamentally fell apart. On the one hand, Marco is a kid and his dad has a responsibility to take care of him and that inability from his dad snapping has landed them in poverty. But Marco’s dad, like Marco, is faced with a loss that he is now trying to cope with.

Remember that vignette at the beginning where Marco saved the guy from a mugger? Marco does the grocery shopping because his dad can barely function. Maybe Marco uses food stamps and often passes this petty crime and poverty. I agree with Marco here, this could happen to anyone. Even strong people. Grief is a universal experience that everyone will inevitably experience. The consequences of that grief for any individual person may not be as drastic, but that paralysis Marco’s father finds himself in can even happen to the strong.

Here I’m going to divert for just a second, because this is true of poverty too. The Predator was released in December 1996. The United States had just gone through a debate on welfare reform based on scares about so-called welfare queens and people mooching off the system to stay in poverty. A year later the program Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) was replaced with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). In both cases, the benefits are supposed to be going to poor families, however in the case of AFDC benefits are given as long as you have poor children and a parent who can’t work due to death, disability, or absence. TANF, on the other hand, places more expectations on parents in the form of things like work requirements. TANF also is just a fundamentally different program that gives wide leeway for states to use the funds in basically any way they see fit as long as it is broadly targeting any of the goals of the law of welfare reform, while those funds don’t increase much year over year. 

All in all, families like Marco’s, that experienced things like the death of a spouse, get screwed over. Although TANF started by serving 68% of families with children in poverty by 2010 it only covered 27% of them, dropping in percentage and total served even as the total number in poverty grew. I emphasize Marco’s story here because it highlights that poverty isn’t the same people every year. The poor aren't some coherent collection of people with meaningful demographics or attitudes or anything like that. Poverty can happen to any of us who are unlucky enough to find ourselves dealing with disability, death, or just bad luck at any time⁴. 

Matt Bruenig most succinctly breaks this down into a few different categories of poor in the United States. The three biggest categories - children make up around 9 million, elderly a little more than 8 million, and the disabled about 6 million. Then the fully employed, sometimes called the working poor, make up just over five million and the next two categories are students and caregivers. One of the things to notice about these categories is that they are categories individuals are going to fall in throughout their lives at some points. Everyone starts as a child, we’re all hoping to make it to old age, and I can promise you that disability is a much easier category to find yourself a part of than you might think. You have to go pretty far down the list of poor people until you get to the unemployed, and even in that category you have people like Marco’s dad - unemployed after being consumed with grief from the unexpected death of his spouse. Again, the sort of pain that even the most fulfilled and happy life will see at some point.

Oh, right, I did mention Marco’s mom’s death was unexpected right⁵? I guess that should bring me back to the book, which I’m now claiming is a tragedy about how the welfare debate failed families like Marco’s. Marco is tired of the near death experiences and freaked out that he’s going to disappear just like his mom did. He decides that this is going to be his last mission, and it is hard to blame him for that. He doesn’t think he really can be the difference in this war, but he can make a difference in caring about his dad, and his death almost certainly would be the final blow for his dad.

So Marco tells Jake that once they get Ax home he’s out. But of course, this part of the plan goes wrong too. To breeze through the climax quickly - they end up captured by the Yeerks headed for space and as prisoners are shown a view of the earth and the Yeerk mothership.

It was a gigantic, three-legged insect. The center was a single, bloated sphere. The sphere was flatter on the bottom, and from the bottom hung a weird, mismatched series of tendrils. Like the tendrils of a jellyfish. Each one must have been a quarter-mile long.

…

It just hung in orbit, like a Predator⁶ gazing down hungrily at blue Earth below.

Visser Three shows them the Yeerk mothership, and then shows them off to Visser One who - surprise! - is Marco’s mom. They do live to fight another day, I’m not gonna give you all the details you’ll have to read it yourself. It’s probably not a surprise that Ax doesn’t get home, and this isn’t actually Marco’s final mission.

Marco visits his mom’s grave with his Dad at the end of the book. His Dad is getting his old job back, he’s decided it is time to step up and take care of Marco again. This book suggests that Marco continuing to fight is a new reason to fight, for his mom’s freedom and the hope of having her back. This is even teased in the promotion on the back of the book.

Marco never wanted to be an Animorph. He never wanted the ability to change into any animal he touches. He just wants to chill. Whatever happens, happens.

Jake, Rachel, Cassie, and Tobias know why Marco feels the way he does. He's worried about his dad -- the only family Marco has left. And if anything happens to him, his father will be all alone.

But something is about to change Marco's mind. It seems the Yeerks have a little surprise waiting for him. And it's definitely not nice. Now Marco has a reason to fight...

But I think you could look at it another way as well. Marco’s dad is stepping up too, he is allowing Marco a little bit more space so he can fight.

1. Although, spiderman type tv and movies also have humor that I enjoy. Humor kind of like Marco’s. I considered looking at Marco’s humor as well but I think that might be a later essay.

2. This one little part of the book nearly sent me down a rabbit hole to make this entire essay about the Global Financial Crisis and what happened to all these companies. But that’s a story for another day. Suffice it to say Katherine Applegate is a witch and reached into the future to destroy all of these stores in this single part of the book, and Cinnabon should really watch its back or consider offering some money for the free advertising these books have given them.

3. Yeah, that’s another theme that this book ended up at

4. If you want a debunking of the so called 3 part poverty avoidance formula look elsewhere.

5. Huh, I wonder if that’ll come back around

6. Hey that’s the name of the book!