- Narrator: Marco
The Animorphs plan to steal a Bug Fighter so Ax can escape Earth and return to the Andalite homeworld.
Tropes:
- 10-Minute Retirement: Marco tries quitting the Animorphs, only to learn that his mother is the host to Visser One, giving him a personal stake in their mission.
- Ant War: With morphing into Fluffer again being out of the question, the Animorphs try morphing into ants to sneak into Chapman's house. Unfortunately, they acquire ants from near Cassie's barn, so the ants near Chapman's house take exception to ants from a different colony crawling into their turf. The Animorphs barely manage to demorph before the enemy ants tear them limb from limb.
- Bed Trick: Touched upon when Marco reviews his memories while wondering how long his mother had been infested, and a memory of his parents making out gets its own paragraph. For Eva's part, it's a different trope entirely.
- Chronic Hero Syndrome: In the opening, Marco sees an old man getting mugged, tells himself to stay out of it, then morphs into a gorilla and steps in.
- Cooked to Death: Narrowly avoided when Marco, Jake, and Ax morph into lobsters to escape the cops, then get bought by a woman who tries to boil them.
- Delicious Distraction: Going to the mall for some items found in Radio Shack goes awry when Ax in human morph is brought past the food court, and goes to try and buy food.
- Enemy Civil War: Visser One and Visser Three don't like each other. Visser One was in favor of a stealth invasion, which was taken out of her hands when Visser Three was put in charge of the Yeerks on Earth. Visser One ends up sending her troops to release the Animorphs from the Pool Ship just to spite Visser Three, allowing them to inconvenience him another day.
- Hive Mind: The ant morphs have no "self", instead seeing themselves as part of a whole. As a result, the Animorphs scream in terror when they regain their human intelligence.
- Lured into a Trap: The plan was to lure in a Bug Fighter with a distress beacon and take down its crew. Unfortunately, Ax's knowledge of Yeerk frequencies is out of date, so Visser Three knows it's a trap and sets up a trap of his own to catch the Andalite bandits.
- No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: The old man Marco saves as a gorilla picks up a gun and tries to kill him. Marco concludes that heroism just brings problems.
- Secret-Keeper: Jake is the only other person to recognize Eva as Visser One's host, but Marco begs him to not tell the others.
- Subspace or Hyperspace: Ax explains zero space, or z-space, as the dimension where FTL travel is possible when it becomes apparent that humans are too primitive to know about it.
- Villain Respect: Visser Three enjoys the brutality of Earth's wildlife, particularly Jake's tiger morph.
- Wham Episode: Marco learns that his supposedly deceased mother is alive as the host to Visser One, setting his goal to save her as the driving force for his actions for most of the series.
