The Dragon Riders attend Berk's 400th anniversary celebration, where a bounty on Hiccup's head casts a dark shadow over the festivities.
Tropes:
- Ain't Too Proud to Beg: Ryker, when he thinks Toothless is going to kill him.
- All There in the Manual: The cloaked bounty hunter is never referred to by name in the episode itself. The ending credits reveal it to be Krogan.
- Bait-and-Switch: When Throk first appears, holding a dagger over Hiccup while claiming to have been "looking everywhere for him", it seems that he's also after him for the bounty. Turns out he was using said dagger to cut his restraints because he was sent by Mala to rescue Hiccup.
- Beware the Nice Ones: Hiccup, who generally acts on Thou Shalt Not Kill, deliberately unscrews his peg leg when Krogan is hanging onto it.
- Bounty Hunter: Quite a few of these appear this episode, trying to kidnap Hiccup for the bounty Viggo's placed on his head. A few of them manage to succeed.
- The Bus Came Back: Savage, who's been gone for a couple of seasons now, reappears as a former-Viking-turned-bounty-hunter, planning on taking Hiccup to Viggo for the reward money.
- Call-Back: The cloaked figure from Viggo's auction makes a reappearance as one of the bounty hunters after Hiccup. Both Ryker and Hiccup recognize him.
- Can't Kill You, Still Need You:
- Hiccup reminds the first two bounty hunters that if they hit him a second time they'll probably kill him. This buys him enough time to free himself.
- Ryker saves Hiccup from falling but says that it's because Viggo wants to kill Hiccup personally.
- Carnival of Killers: With a bounty placed on Hiccup, bounty hunters from all over the Archipelago target him. Hiccup gets kidnapped, only to be rescued by other bounty hunters as a result.
- Darker and Edgier: Hiccup gets put through some pretty brutal, merciless, humiliating stuff in this episode, from attackers stealing his prosthetic leg so he can't walk to being pulled along by a chain around the neck like a slave.
- Disney Villain Death: Played with. When Hiccup and Krogan are hanging off the edge of a cliff, Hiccup actively kicked off his prosthetic foot to send Krogan plummeting to the water below. It was later shown that he survived.
- The Dog Bites Back: After all the abuse and mistreatment Savage has endured, he's finally snapped and decided to do what he wants. This is a negative example, however, as it's accompanied by a Sanity Slippage, and "what he wants" is to kidnap Hiccup for his bounty.
- Elephant in the Room: It takes until the end of the episode for Hiccup and Stoick to talk about losing all of Berk's gold in the auction.
- Evil vs. Evil: After Ryker cheats Krogan out of the bounty, Krogan knocks him out at the end of the episode and returns Hiccup's peg leg.
- Foreshadowing: Hiccup warns Savage that Viggo won't honor the bounty. Krogan finds this out the hard way when Ryker pays him in rocks.
- From Bad to Worse: First Hiccup is kidnapped by a pair of petty thugs, but seeing as he's not tied very securely and the thugs apparently aren't very smart, it wouldn't seem like it would be too hard for him to escape. However, Savage (who has clearly undergone some Sanity Slippage) arrives, beats up these thugs, and steals Hiccup from them, tying him more securely and even removing his leg to keep him from escaping. Throk arrives and defeats Savage, only for the cloaked bounty hunter to defeat him and capture Hiccup once more, this time chaining him at the neck after Hiccup tries to escape and succeeding in bringing him to Ryker. Ryker betrays the bounty hunter, and recaptures Hiccup himself after the latter tries to escape. It's only thanks to the arrival of the Dragon Riders that Hiccup is saved.
- Giving Them the Strip: Hiccup wins possibly the highest-stakes occurrence of this trope ever when he gets Krogan to let go of him by detaching his metal leg.
- Hope Spot: Hiccup gets one of these when Throk, on Mala's orders, arrives to rescue him from Savage. Unfortunately, the cloaked figure from Viggo's auction, who was pretending to be one of Throk's men, then knocks them both out with blow darts and re-kidnaps Hiccup.
- Humiliation Conga: Hiccup spends a good portion of this episode tied up, chained, or knocked out. It gets to the point where he gets resigned after Ryker grabs him.
- Idiot Ball: Hiccup apparently walks home alone in the middle of the night, without Toothless, despite there being a price on his head and having been previously attacked by bounty hunters. Unsurprisingly, he gets kidnapped as a result.
- I Lied: Viggo apparently never intended to actually pay the bounty price, as when the cloaked man shows up with Hiccup, the bag Ryker gives him is filled instead with rocks.
- Offscreen Moment of Awesome: Mala found out about the bounty and sent Throk to help Hiccup.
- Papa Wolf: As expected, neither Stoick nor Toothless take any crap from any of the bounty hunters who’ve kidnapped Hiccup.
- Price on Their Head: Viggo has put one on Hiccup, likely as a direct result of his latest plot the riders foiled (saving the Eruptadon in "Defenders of the Wing").
- Sanity Slippage: Savage has pretty clearly had one of these as a result of all the mistreatment he's endured from his various Bad Bosses, to the point that he's begun to live up to his name.
- Save the Villain: Toothless does this for Savage after the latter presses Stoick's Berserk Button, looking at Stoick with Puppy-Dog Eyes in a way that implies If You Kill Him, You Will Be Just Like Him!. Stoick returns the favor later, when Toothless is inches away from roasting Ryker.
- Sequel Episode: This is the first episode to directly address the impact of the events of "Last Auction Heroes". Hiccup doesn't want to tell Stoick about the bounty because he feels bad about letting him down, the twins theorize that Viggo is likely using Berk's gold to pay for the bounty, and the VIP guest from the auction is one of the people after the bounty.
- Tap on the Head: Hiccup gets a blow to the head, which doesn't do more than knock him out for a few hours. He does warn his kidnappers against doing it again since it may kill him. Then Krogan knocks him out with a dart, and Ryker punches him in the stomach to knock him out.
- Villainous Rescue: Ryker was preparing to attack Hiccup and the others while they were unaware, only to be stopped by Krogan using Hiccup's leg.
- "Wanted!" Poster: Viggo had one printed for Hiccup. 1000 units of currency in gold. Ruffnut and Tuffnut try to distribute wanted posters of themselves to everyone out of jealousy.
