OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)Hailey and Beta meet Alphred, a cleaning robot who Beta suspects is a Chaos Bot in disguise, but turns out to actually be his robotic ancestor. Later, Hailey tries finishing a corn maze as part of her list but nearly gets lost.OUR TAKEWell, so much for being three for three on surprisingly good Disney cartoons, because this one left me pretty lukewarm. From what I understand about the premise of this show, the titular Hailey is given word from the future that the world will be destroyed or controlled by something relating to global warming, so she needs to complete a task each episode to somehow prevent this, but is sometimes interfered with by Chaos Bots who also go back in time to stop her stopping them. Sounds like a sufficient story engine for an episodic show that has room to ramp things up as the seasons progress. Like with Big City Greens and Kiff!, even though it’s not a holiday special or a season premiere, it seems we’ve landed on a relatively important story point where Hailey comes to terms with her feelings for her best friend Scott. That may be a record for recent kids cartoons to follow up on a romantic subplot so soon. Apparently kissing Scott has been a part of the important list of things to do, but it’s only now that Hailey realizes this is because she actually has feelings for him.Oh yeah, there were other things that happened in these two segments. Silly me. Yeah, so, the first part with Beta meeting what is kinda sorta his robot dad was neat. Honestly, the most prominent thought in my head throughout that was that Alphred could’ve easily been played by David Tennant, though that’s mainly because I’ve been watching Ahsoka. I’m sure many other male British actors deserve chances to voice British robots, like Matt Smith or Peter Capaldi. Other than that, Beta seems like a perfectly fine little mascot sidekick character. Maybe next season we’ll meet Gamma and Delta and so on. The other segment, while not Halloween themed exactly, it is kinda FALL themed with a spritz of supernatural spookiness as Hailey and Beta try to escape the maze and avoid starvation. Maybe this is the 90’s action cartoon kid in me, but I feel like this was a neat opportunity for the scarecrow to be a Chaos Bot that operates by creating an illusion that Hailey needs outside help to get out of. Then again I haven’t really seen an episode with a typical chaos bot so I don’t know if that lines up with how they’re usually written as antagonists.
