While enjoying a pleasant holiday excursion to Paris in 1937 to see the Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne, the Doctor, Anji, and Fitz stop off at the Spanish Pavilion for an up close and contemporary view of Pablo Picasso's Guernica, a massive mural depicting the horror of the firebombing of the small town by Axis war planes during the Spanish Civil War. Upon viewing the famous painting however, the team find they have a startling lack of reaction to a piece so viscerally rooted in modern culture and so empathetic in its portrayal of suffering. Rather than assuming their own lack of taste in fine art is the problem, the Doctor decides that the heart of the mystery must lie in the bombing itself, and so takes the TARDIS on a short hop to Spain a year previously to investigate. Eight drops off Fitz a few miles outside of the doomed town a week before history reports that the nazis test their aerial weapons by razing it, and intends go with Anji to Barcelona to wait for Fitz and study news reports entering and exiting the country. Unfortunately, the TARDIS lands five months early and almost immediately afterwords shuts down, protecting herself against some kind of temporal attack, and stranding Anji and the Doctor in the process. They're forced to wait in the increasingly unstable city for Fitz to meet with them, all the while something lurks in dark corners, preying on those who venture into the night streets alone...
Tropes present in History 101 include:
- Amateur Sleuth: Anji becomes one, accumulating a truly massive amount of notes and newspaper clips over the five months she and the Doctor are stranded in Barcelona, in an effort to find related anomalies to give them any clue what they're looking for. It's...not terribly successful.
- Deep Cover Agent: Sasha is a Russian spy, or so he leads Fitz to believe. He's actually an agent working for Sabbath.
- Dirty Communists: Given this is set during La Guerra Civil Española, there are a lot of them.
- Fake Russian: Sasha. The book never reveals anything of his true identity before his Heroic Sacrifice other than that he's working for Sabbath.
- From Bad to Worse: This book was described by one critic as a "meat-grinder", and it certainly puts all three of our heroes through hell before its end.
- Heroic BSoD: Eight goes through one after the TARDIS shut him out. Understandable, after the Earth Arc, that the thought of being trapped in the 20th century again (and in a historically brutal war, no less) would be so upsetting.
- Intrepid Reporter
- Pop-Cultural Osmosis Failure: Anji sings a snippet of "Mulder and Scully" by Catatonia, which neither Fitz nor the Doctor has apparently heard.
- Viewers Are Geniuses: There are a great many historical dates and figures referenced without much context, with varying levels of plot importance. Luckily, Mags L. Halliday was thoughtful enough to include a bibliography and recommended reading/watching list in the back.
