This week’s Hamster & Gretel sees the return of a catchy-tune dealin’ villain while keeping it relatively simple with a disastrous event inadvertently caused by Nordle and Tobor.
Gentleman Prefer Fronds
The younger students – read: Bailey, Gretel, and Nordle – are heading to their botany club’s annual competition. This year is extra special, as their gardening hero, Dr. Archie Astor will be in attendance to judge this year’s event. This scientist is known for encounters with all kinds of plant life and is especially inspiring to Nordle.
However, we know Nordle’s tendencies to do whatever he can to win, including using the evil devices that belong to his father (Professor Exclamation) to get a leg up on the competition. As such, Gretel and Bailey make him promise to play fairly, and not use anything to help him win.
He pretends that he was never going to do that, and quickly and with the help of Tobor dispenses all of the questionable techniques, formulas, and equipment he was, in fact, going to use to help himself win the competition.
Kevin has been asked to film all the action of the event – yes, the plant growing event – for their parents, and is outside setting up a brand new camera to do so.
Inside however, Astor arrives and Nordle realizes that his orchid might not be up to snuff. Fortunately, he has a bit of his father’s growth serum still and pours it onto the orchid, making it look bigger and better than the one that originally won first prize – and the admiration of Dr. Astor.
Outside, Kevin is oblivious and messing with his camera as the dumped chemicals and tech is causing a patch of vines to ravenously engulf the gym.
Inside, Nordle thinks Astor is stunned by his plants, and in a way, he kind of is as he becomes increasingly interested in the ever growing vampiric vines to wrap up the gym and lift it high into the sky to absorb all the nutrients inside. But the gym doesn’t have any nutrients, it’s a building right? Well, yes but in this case, Astor means all the humans that are inside the gym. Realizing the danger, Hamster and Gretel stage a scene in which she falls out of the building and Superhero Gretel rescues Student Gretel out of view (but within earshot) of everyone else. Somehow, only Nordle’s sentient orchid has caught on to what just happened.
After retelling various stories, Gretel and Hamster (with the help of Bailey and her phone) are able to figure out how to vanquish all the vines, depriving them of sunlight and water. The best way to defeat them though is through an electric shock. The building has been elevated and is now cut off from those electrical lines, but Tobor has a pretty big battery and sacrifices himself to save Nordle and everybody else, sending a charge through the vines.
They dry up and crumble, but one of the vines comes crashing down near Kevin, destroying his new camera while Hamster and Gretel lower the gym safely to the ground level.
As the sentient orchid tries to explain what he learned about Hamster & Gretel, the original first place winner comes and electric shocks the orchid into oblivion as payback for taking away her win. I guess we’ll never learn what the Orchid had to say.
Sock it to Me, Bailey
Once again, Bailey and Gretel are shunned to be by themselves in the lunch room. This time, because they don’t have the trendy near Party Animal headphones. They are the latest trend to sweep the school, and we immediately see a commercial that gives us the bad vibes simply because their mascot is a masked DJ, peddling these to every one in town.
So of course Bailey and Gretel want to get their hands on them, and fortunately Hiromi’s comic shop has a number of pairs that they just received after selling out everywhere. Too bad by the time the girls get to the shop, they are already also sold out.
Hamster calls Gretel to share that he was able to acquire a pair for them, much to Bailey’s excitement, but Hamster meant that he got pairs for himself and Gretel. Awkward.
Back at home, Kevin is wearing his dad’s dancing outfit because it’s a much overdue laundry day, and his Mom thinks it's time that he starts doing his own laundry, and these clothes smell so bad that he should probably do it twice. Hamster comes in later to get his hoodie out of the dryer and agrees.
The hoodie is because he, Gretel, and Bailey are heading to the park to go to a special silent DJ party that is only for those with Party Animal headphones. But how is Bailey going? She bootlegged a pair using her dad’s headphones and putting a fuzzy animal sleeve on top of it to make it look like everybody else's.
However, as they soon discover while they are there, the music getting pumped into the headphones is coming from the masked DJ and as such, Bailey’s do not get the music and she’s stuck listening to a podcast.
This works out quite well because there’s treachery afoot as we suspected from the jump, and the headphones are hypnotizing everyone with the Taco Crunchies song, meaning it's the work of the Earworm who has returned to take his revenge on the food company for not paying his royalties.
Unfortunately, Gretel and Hamster were both wearing the headphones and are now hypnotized too. Bailey does what she can but to no avail. She needs backup for this one, and heads over to Kevin, stuck in the middle of his laundry duty.
Fortunately, he still has enough of his stinky clothing that Bailey comes up with the plan that the smell is so bad that it could break their hypnotized condition. They head to the Taco Crunchies factory where everyone was headed to start slingshotting stinky socks at everyone. Fortunately their plan is working, and everyone is coming out of their hypnotized state. Sadly, they don’t get to Hamster and Gretel before the Earworm catches on to what is going on, and Bailey has about one more sock shot left in her before she gets pushed back into a river of salsa at the factory. She fires the nasty sock into a machine that is pumping the fake taco smell into the food, which creates a noxious cloud of sock stench that frees everyone, including Hamster and Gretel from their trance.
The villain is quickly defeated thanks to his awful suit, and we are reminded of today’s lesson that you don’t have to be included in everything, sometimes it's better to be left out. Thanks Hamster & Gretel.
This episode of Hamster & Gretel is now available on Disney Channel and the DisneyNOW website. You can also catch up with earlier episodes streaming now on Disney+.