Community General is preparing to begin the construction of a new cardiac surgery division, thanks to the efforts of alumnus Dr. Raymond Huxley and his foundation. However, when Norman gives the opening swing of the sledgehammer, a skeleton wrapped in plastic falls out of the wall. Mark quickly recognizes it as Dr. Gregory Nordhoff, his former mentor at Community General who disappeared following accusations of stealing funds from a research fund he ran. With Mark seeing his earlier days in the hospital in a new light and another murder taking place in the modern day, the hunt for a killer wanting things to stay in the past is on.
"A History of Murder" displays symptoms of the following tropes:
- Abusive Parents: Ray was very cold to Christine due to her resembling his ex-wife so much to the extent that her refused to even look at her until she told him she was going into medicine like him. Then he treated David badly for not having done anything with his life.
- Ambition Is Evil: Ray's drive to focus on new ideas lead him to steal Greg's idea for pacemaker technology and murdered him when confronted.
- Asshole Victim: Dr. Raymond Huxley, who murdered his mentor, got rich off of stealing said mentor's technology for his own, and treated both of his kids like garbage.
- Book Ends: The episode begins and ends with Norman making a speech to begin the construction of a cardiac surgery center.
- Bittersweet Ending: Both murders are solved, and the hospital is ready to begin construction again, with the clinic renamed for Nordhoff. However, Greg and Jane are still dead and Raymond won't face the consequences for his crimesnote . Mark even has one last flashback of Greg and the younger versions of Ray and Jane all having a good laugh and waving at him, saddened by how all those lives were ruined and ended thanks to ambition, greed, and desperate love.
- Bludgeoned to Death: Dr. Nordhoff was killed by two blows to the back of the head.
- Bluffing the Murderer: Mark tells Christine to really wash her scrubs good, as blood on them can set in and even be brought back out in the right circumstances. Soon enough, she enters the laundry room with gloves looking for the scrubs she war wearing when she murdered Jane Ellington.
- Broken Pedestal:
- A lot of the staff at Community General lost respect for Dr. Nordhoff, thinking he stole from his clinic and ran. Jane especially felt betrayed, as she and the good doctor had loved each other.
- Mark considers Raymond a good friend of his at the beginning of the episode. Suffice to say, finding out he was Nordhoff's killer is a bit of a bummer.
- Constructive Body Disposal: The killer hid Gregory's body inside a wall that was part of the construction going on at the time.
- Deliberately Monochrome: The flashbacks Mark has to the time Gregory was murdered.
- Embezzlement: Greg was originally accused of stealing $50,000 from his research fund, but it's later discovered that it was Tubbs that really did it.
- Fridge Brilliance: Applied In-Universe. Mark soon realizes that Raymond was the murderer back in the day, as his scrubs were covered in blood on the day of the murder despite the construction at the hospital shutting down the ORs for that day. Mark hadn't realized it at the time, as Gregory's murder took place on the day of the JFK assassination
, so Mark was too in shock to realize this at the time. - History Repeats: In both 1963 and 1997, a Dr. Huxley committed murder at Community General and was Hidden in Plain Sight with the blood on their scrubs despite surgery being canceled on their respective days.
- Hypocrite: The younger Emmanuel gets angry at Nordhoff when accusing him of stealing from the research fund, when he knows damn well that he himself is the thief.
- Irony: Raymond points out that he made a fortune in pacemaker technology, but now that his heart is so damaged, he can't use it on himself. Considering he stole it from his own mentor and murdered him over it, this could likely be read as Laser-Guided Karma.
- It's All About Me: David Huxley rattles off how many times Raymond Huxley's name appears in the official name of the Raymond Huxley Foundation, thinking it was an ego trip for his father.
- Karma Houdini:
- Raymond dies before he can be revealed as Nordhoff's murderer. Of course, he's dead, so one could still see it as karma.
- Played straight with Emmanuel Tubbs. Steve eventually determines that he is the one who really stole the money that Gregory was accused of stealing, and later investing said money into Huxley's pacemaker. Emmanuel soon admits to Steve he did, but he isn't worried since the statute of limitations has long since passednote , and he's gotten so rich that in his words, he no longer cares about his reputation, so revealing that to the public wouldn't mean much to him.
- P.O.V. Cam: The flashbacks of Mark's earlier days at the hospital are shown from is his perspective. Probably because that makeup may have made him look like three different older people (one of them being a woman), but probably couldn't make him look like himself in his late 30's.
- Slashed Throat: Jane Ellington dies this way, and fittingly for her murderer being a surgeon, the murder weapon was a scalpel.
- Smokescreen Crime: The person who killed Jane rifled through her purse and took her jewelry to make it look lie she died in a mugging gone wrong. Mark doesn't buy into that.
- Whole Episode Flashback: Mark spends good chunks of the episode flashing back to the time of Gregory Nordhoff's disappearance.
- Writers Cannot Do Math: It's told throughout the episode that the murder was 30 years ago. However, considering the JFK assassination was the same day Greg was murdered, and the current year was 1997, that would mean the murder took place 34, maybe 33 years prior.
