Narrator: Rachel
After acquiring a crocodile, Rachel finds that she can no longer control her morphing.
Tropes:
- Body Double: Cassie acquires and morphs into Rachel to throw any Controllers off her scent when she has to run offstage to burp the crocodile.
- Body Horror: To burp the crocodile, Rachel has to morph it right out of her body. As in, the crocodile emerges from her back while she morphs into a grizzly bear.
- Born as an Adult: The crocodile, after Rachel finally burps it out.
- Involuntary Shapeshifting: Morph allergies cause the morpher to morph uncontrollably when they feel strong emotions, even bypassing the usual limitation of having to morph back into one's natural form and going directly from one morph to the next.
- The Juggernaut: Rachel in grizzly bear morph, Cassie in squirrel morph, and Marco in llama morph lose horribly to the crocodile. It's not until Ax arrives that it goes down, and it took three strikes from his tail blade when most creatures only need one.
- Kill the Lights: During the climactic battle, Cassie in squirrel morph shuts down the lights to allow Ax to sneak up on the crocodile without being seen by humans.
- Logical Weakness: The Lebtin javelin fish that Visser Three morphs into uses water pressure to launch its javelins. This makes it vulnerable to puncture wounds, as the Visser finds out when Rachel bites him as a crocodile and causes him to go flying like a deflating balloon.
- Man Bites Man: When the crocodile's mind surfaces, Rachel is still a human. The crocodile takes over her body and bites Jeremy Jason McCole.
- Nice Character, Mean Actor: Jeremy Jason McCole turns out to be a jerk. It's not enough that he revels in having millions of teenage girls at his whimsy, he sells out the human race to the Yeerks for a movie deal.
- Never Smile at a Crocodile: And how. The crocodile is not only intelligent, it's also a large predator that hasn't needed to evolve for millions of years. Cassie is right when she says that nothing in her morph arsenal will be able to beat a crocodile.
- No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: Rachel jumps into the crocodile pit to save a kid who fell in. While she does save him, he gets seen as a hero for riding a crocodile (Rachel in morph) to safety, while Rachel gets known as "the girl who fell into the crocodile pit". To make matters worse, she's allergic to crocodiles, which leads to her house collapsing and Visser Three nearly killing the team when she loses control of her morphing.
- Obnoxious In-Laws: After their house collapses, Naomi takes Sara and Jordan with her to her own mother's house (Dan took Rachel to a fancy hotel), "until the old woman drives me stark raving nuts." It's an opinion Dan agrees with.
- Playing Possum: Rachel lets Visser Three assume he's killed her with one of his javelins, only to bite him when he swims too close to her.
- Screw This, I'm Outta Here:
- The Yeerk in Jeremy Jason McCole abandons its host to be eaten by the crocodile.
- Jeremy Jason McCole moves to Uzbekistan after his experience with the Yeerks nearly gets him eaten by the crocodile.
- Smitten Teenage Girl: Rachel and Cassie spend the book fawning over Jeremy Jason McCole. Even after he becomes a voluntary Controller and insults them to their faces, they still think he's cute. This proves more alarming when Rachel tests her sister Jordan's reaction to hearing about a club where she can meet Jeremy Jason McCole (The Sharing) and Jordan volunteers immediately, leaving it obvious what the Yeerks will do once they have him as a mouthpiece (infest his fangirls by the dozens, if it wasn't obvious).
- Super-Power Meltdown: Being allergic to an animal whose DNA you acquire results in uncontrollable morphing. Ax claims that this is the morph equivalent of a sneeze. Eventually, a new instance of the animal that was acquired is created from excess mass in Z-space and expelled from the morpher's body.
- Trampled Underfoot: The Yeerk in Jeremy Jason McCole meets its end after fleeing its host when Rachel accidentally steps on it as a grizzly bear.
- Visit by Divorced Dad: Dan flies back into town the moment he hears that Rachel fell into a crocodile pit. He proves useful in keeping the media off her back after both of her falling incidents make the local news.
