- Narrator: Rachel
The Animorphs make a plan to deal with David.
Tropes
- Cutting the Knot: After failing in their stealth attempt to sabotage the Yeerks' plan to possess several heads of state at a summit, the Animorphs try something less clever, morphing into elephants and rhinos and trashing the event space to get it canceled.
- Dangerous Deserter: The Animorphs learn how difficult it actually is to keep track of, let alone fight someone with their powers once David goes rogue.
- Devious Dolphins: The Animorphs escape into the ocean after trashing the summit banquet, only to find David waiting for them in orca morph.
- Didn't See That Coming: David didn't count on Tobias' survival, which allowed Tobias to free Jake, Marco, Cassie, and Ax from David's trap and set up their own trap for when Rachel gets back.
- Dismantled MacGuffin: Ax demonstrates that the morphing cube can be disassembled, which the Animorphs use to hide it from David. In reality they faked this in order to make David think he was winning; what David thought was a piece of the cube was just a Lego brick they planted as part of the trap.
- Fatal Flaw: Ego for David. His need to be the best and coolest person in the room caused him to butt heads with Marco and Jake, and Rachel even more so because she's a girl. When it looks like he has the Animorphs scared enough of him that they'll give him the morphing cube to get rid of him, he doesn't even question it.
- I Lied: When Rachel and David are going to morph to rat to find the pieces of the morphing cube, David instead morphs to rattlesnake and forces the other Animorphs to morph to cockroach or he'll bite Rachel.
- Kill and Replace: A variation. David acquires Saddler (Jake and Rachel's cousin), who was terminally injured in an accident, then drops the real Saddler down an elevator shaft. He claims Saddler would have died anyway, though, so in his mind it's Get Rid of the Body and Replace. K.A. Applegate has stated on Reddit that David did not kill Saddler.
- Let Us Never Speak of This Again: In a very dark example, Ax says this to Rachel after the two of them leave David trapped on a remote island.
- Life-or-Limb Decision: Rachel chews through her own rat tail to escape from David.
- Out-Gambitted: David's arrogance leads him to believe that he has the Animorphs scared enough that they'll give him the morphing cube to get him out of their hair. In reality, they let him think that, and predicted every move he'd make afterward.
- Power Perversion Potential: David sneaks into Rachel's bathroom in morph to watch her shower, and also threaten her.
- Reports of My Death Were Greatly Exaggerated: Tobias turns out to have survived David's murder attempt because David merely killed the first red-tailed hawk he saw. The Animorphs are able to use this to defeat him, as David didn't bother keeping an eye out for an Animorph he thought he'd killed already; at one point he even saw the entire group in dolphin morph from a distance and didn't bother to count and check if he was facing five or six.
- Rhino Rampage: Marco acquires a rhino of his own to help Jake trash the hotel where the summit was supposed to take place.
- Shapeshifter Mode Lock: The Animorphs trick David into morphing into a rat, and walking into a trap too small for him to survive demorphing. Rachel and Ax then wait for two hours to make sure he can't demorph when they let him out.
- Tricking the Shapeshifter: The team defeats David by using an elaborate version of this ruse: they trick him into turning into a mouse to enter a miniature labyrinth with Rachel (by pretending that the MacGuffin he tried to blackmail out of them is there). Rachel escapes the labyrinth, David stays locked inside until he enters Shapeshifter Mode Lock, since he wouldn't be able to demorph without being squished like a pancake.
- And as part of that, they tricked him into thinking he tricked them into turning into cockroaches, which he then trapped in a bottle; Tobias subsequently broke the bottle.
- Visionary Villain: David sees a future where he commands an army of morph-capable criminals, confident that he's "smart" enough to avoid repeating the Animorphs' "mistake".
- War Elephants: Cassie, Tobias, and Ax acquire an elephant to help Rachel and her own elephant morph trash the site of the summit banquet.
