Frida holds a town hall meeting to figure out why the Nisse keep stealing from each other while Hilda tries to decode her radio's cryptic messages.
Tropes:
- A Day in the Limelight:
- For the Nisse, and Frida, whose idea it was to organize the townhall meeting.
- To a lesser degree also for Alfur. He does not have much screentime, but this is the only episode this season where he gets to play a plot critical role. He helps Hilda decode the radio messages, and thanks to his research they are able to pinpoint the source of the radio signals to be in Tofoten.
- All for Nothing: Subverted. Hilda initially assumes that her efforts in decoding the radio frequencies in search of her father were all for naught after it was revealed the frequencies come from Victoria Van Gale. However, a day later, Victoria ends up bringing a guest onto her radio show... her father, making her realize that he is in Fairy Country.
- Alliteration & Adventurers: Among the items Frida's Nisse "borrowed" from her includes a board game labeled as "Courage & Contracts" with elves and a lindworm on the cover.
- Ambiguous Situation: Frida sees that her Nisse has taken her book, "The Legend of the Great King Condon", again. It's unclear if Frida has taken back the book or has just left it with her Nisse, believing that the latter would just take it again.
- Ascended Extra: The nisse from Frida's house. Previously, he only made one non-speaking cameo at the end of Season 1's "Chapter 9: The Ghost". Here, he is a supporting character who actually gets dialogue.
- Bag of Sharing: A non-videogame example. Nisse are so used to stealing things from people or their own kind, that the idea of sharing their items genuinely confounds them. So the conflict is resolved by creating a library-like sharing place where they can borrow specific items and return them later after a limited amount of time.
- Call-Back: The mysterious disappearance of Anders is brought up again, with Hilda believing he might be in danger, because the cryptic messages from her radio is an encrypted version of her catchphrase that Anders knows. She turns out to be right, as he is revealed to be in Fairy Country.
- Cliffhanger: After finding a way to resolve the Nisse situation, the gang discovers that Victoria van Gale and Anders are sending messages about the "hooded ones" while Anders is messaging Hilda directly about something. With Alfur's help, they triangulate a possible location to go rescue them: the Fairy Mound in Tofoten. Hilda and her friends head over by train to investigate, hoping that her mom doesn't find out. Unfortunately, Johanna quickly becomes suspicious when she finds them missing.
- Darkest Hour: Hilda reaches hers when it seems the radio signals were a dead end and did not come from her father but from Victoria van Gale instead, forcing her to face the fact that Johanna was likely right and Anders simply abandoned her again. And worse, in her obsession over the radio she ruined Frida's townhall meeting and caused another rift in their friendship that clearly affects her, Frida and David. The song "Van Gale's Lullaby" perfectly fits the scene showing the aftermath of it all.
- Didn't Think This Through: While Frida had good intentions, as Tontu tries to point out to Frida, the idea of a town hall meeting trying to get the Nisse to talk to each other was doomed to fail, given how inherently territorial and viciously distrustful the Nisse are of each other.
- Does This Remind You of Anything?: Frida's "town meeting" for the Nisses ultimately feels a lot more like a family counseling session, with the Nisses voicing their feelings to one another with another, complete with holding an object when it is their turn to speak, and descends into violent chaos when the "talking things out" turns into rage.
- Fantastical Social Services: The main plot is driven by Frida's efforts to resolve the Nisse conflicts by hosting a town hall meeting to work out a compromise. After Hilda inadvertently ruins the meeting, her plan to make up for it is to organize a Nisse Lending Library to act as a hoard of lost objects that they can all share.
- Foregone Conclusion: Hilda asks Alfur to not tell her mom about her going to Tofoten. Unfortunately, Johanna has been so used to Hilda disappearing in her adventures, whether she lets her or not, that she becomes suspicious when her daughter and her friends are nowhere to be seen. The moment she spots Tontu alone at the end of the episode...Johanna: ...Where are they?
- Food as Bribe: David suggests they offer this to get the Nisse to come to the meeting since it always gets Tontu to come to Frida's parties. It works.
- Funny Background Event: When chasing down a Nisse that stole their radio, Hilda and Tontu teleport through Gerda Gustav's house, while she’s mimicking singing after she was done taking a shower.
- History Repeats: Downplayed. While Hilda and Frida suffer from a fallout in their friendship again, and it happened because of the Nisse stealing their stuff, it didn’t go as sour as in Season 1 and they quickly made up, not to mention they found a solution to the problem with the Nisse.
- Insistent Terminology: Once again, every Nisse claims that “they don’t steal, they just borrow things so they can keep them forever ”.
- Jerkass Ball:
- Tontu is a much bigger jerk than he usually is towards Hilda and her friends. From taking Hilda's stuff without permission to doubting Frida with her meeting. While true that the meeting was going to hell, he could have at least tried to help out in some way.
- Not even Frida is immune to this. Frida is more concerned about trying to get the Nisse to get along with each other rather than Hilda's desperation for finding her father. She calls Hilda out on ruining the meeting and not even caring about Hilda's despair at the thought of her father actually abandoning her. While true that Hilda was partially responsible for the chaos, Frida could've at least tried to help or try to comfort her as Hilda never intended to do any harm to Frida's progress.
- To a lesser extent, David, despite seeing Hilda's sadness about her father's absence, chooses to ditch her just because "it's pizza night". Although Hilda was acting very different, David could have at least apologized for her situation.
- Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: After some progress had finally been made, Frida's town hall meeting goes completely sideways after Hilda and Tontu notice and chase after the Nisse that stole her radio, sending the other Nisse into a frenzy and undoing any progress Frida might've made. She gets promptly called out for this by Frida once they get home, causing Frida and David to briefly fall out with her.
- Not in This for Your Revolution: Hilda is way too preoccupied with finding her father to care about resolving the Nisse conflict and initially only joins when she thinks the Nisse know where he is (they don't). Eventually, she ends up completely wrecking Frida's town hall meeting after she notices the Nisse that stole her radio, not caring or realizing what she had done until she gets called out by Frida. She makes up for it by the end.
- Not What It Looks Like: When Frida and David enter Hilda's room, we all see it being essentially turned into an investigation hall, with Hilda spending days in her room, completely absorbed by her search, yet she insists she hasn't gone crazy.
- Odd Name Out: This is the only Hilda episode of which the title does not start with "The".
- Rail Enthusiast: One Nisse is shown to live near a train station and wear multiple conductor hats. He even asks if there will be any "train food" at the Nisse meeting.
- The Reveal:
- The strange location Victoria van Gale has ended up at after the events of "The Windmill" is revealed to be the Fairy Country.
- The real reason behind Anders’ disappearance at the end of "The Job" turned be his abduction by fairies, and he has been trying to contact Hilda through radio waves with Victoria’s help ever since.
- Seen It All: When Kaisa sees Hilda and Tontu chase another Nisse through the library, disappearing into Nowhere Space through the xerox machine, she just shrugs and continues with her work.
- Shout-Out: Hilda tries to decode radio frequencies and newspaper clippings to find an alleged secret message from her father. Sound familiar?
- Took a Level in Jerkass: While the Nisse have proven to not be the nicest creatures towards each other, they just try to stay out of each other's way. In this episode, they've hit their absolute worse. With Frida's nisse stealing Frida's book again, that same nisse dragging Frida along with her, and the other nisse not only stealing from each other but also getting more violent with each other in the meeting. To make matters worse, they attack the Raven Leader just because the latter had a good sash on her. It's only when the lending library is made the nisse start to get along.
- The Un-Reveal:
- It's never revealed as to why the Nisse started to steal from each other as of this episode.
- When realizing her Nisse took her book again, Frida is obviously not happy. However, we never learn if she really did take her book back or decided to just leave it with her Nisse.
- What Happened to the Mouse?: Frida forlornly giving her Nisse a new timer and that same Nisse getting the timer without Frida looking is the last we see and hear from him. He's not seen at the lending library, leaving his relationship with Frida a mystery but it's possible that they're now on good terms ever since Frida learned to teach the nisse to share.
- What the Hell, Hero?: Frida calls out Hilda for inadvertently ruining the Nisse meeting.Hilda: Well, that was a total disaster.Frida: No thanks to you.
- Where It All Began: After hearing Victoria and her father Anders in trouble on the radio, Hilda and Alfur pinpoint the exact location where they might be: Tofoten; specifically, the alleged Fairy Mound which they tried to find at the start of the season.
