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Monk: Mr. Monk and the Game Show (2004)
Mr. Monk shows some independence
Trudy's father, Dwight Ellison, visits Monk and asks him to investigate a case of potential fraud on the TV game show he operates. One guy, who is a bit of a dolt, has been running up wins on the show and has winnings in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Ellison is pretty sure the host is in on the scam, but reviewing tapes of the show revealed no winking or change in facial expression that would indicate some kind of code between host and guest.
Kevin Dorfman is back from his lottery winning adventure, after blowing through his lottery winnings via the usual methods - marriages to gold diggers, bad investments, worse advisors. Dorfman wants to tag along, and says a road trip to LA will be great fun. Once there, complications ensue, including memories of Trudy, and Monk wanting to enter her childhood room at her parents' house, but wondering if he is ready even after all this time to confront so much of Trudy's things at once. As for the game show investigation, of course a murder enters into matters.
This format without Stottlemeyer, Disher, or Sharona was caused by contract disputes with the three who thought that since they were part of the formula that caused the success of the show that they should get a raise. But the format works for this one episode and shows that Monk's condition has really improved over the last three years. Here he is, taking a road trip without Sharona or fourteen suitcases of luggage and wipes, and minus any anxiety about finding his specific brand of bottled water. And the tedious Dorfman doesn't trigger him, perhaps because Monk is focused on minutia too, so he tolerates Kevin more than most people would.
Monk: Mr. Monk Takes the Stand (2009)
I always wondered why this never came up before...
... especially in some of Monk's wilder cases like that of the astronaut.
Here Monk has accused a sculptor of murdering his wife. The artist had been working on a sculpture that he could not have possibly completed in one night if he had taken the time to drive to his wife's house, committed the murder, and driven back. He has a delivery receipt for the marble from the previous afternoon, thus proving he has not been working on the sculpture before last night. Monk postulates that the artist used his jackhammer to reduce the slab to gravel and spread it in his driveway, and that the statue in his studio is something he completed from some other slab of marble at an earlier point in time.
Normally this would be the end of the episode, but in walks a prominent attorney to defend the artist in court. When Monk takes the stand the attorney has figured out all of his weaknesses and ties him in knots. The artist is acquitted. Is this the end of the story? Watch and find out.
This show is only about 45 minutes in length, so there was never time to see what happened in court or if any of the defendants had attorneys who tried to push back on the theory of the crime as delivered by Monk. In short, to give us Order they had to shortchange on the Law. Here we see the opposite for a change.
The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel: Pilot (2017)
Mrs. Maisel finds her voice
The pilot, set in 1958 New York City, although I don't think the pilot says the exact year, is fascinating. It shows a young Jewish woman of about 26 years, Midge Maisel, who has her dream life according to schedule. She graduates from college with a completely impractical degree, has the big wedding immediately after, and produces two children in four years. She has a spacious apartment several floors below her parents' spacious apartment, so they can handle babysitting when she needs it. She lacks for nothing materially.
And yet, sitting here in 2024, her life is so 50s. She lives her life to please her husband, Joel Maisel. There's nothing wrong with pleasing your spouse, but this is all one way. Midge's husband, Joel, has a caretaker VP job in his uncle's firm. Lacking purpose in that job, he sets his sights on doing stand-up comedy. Except he really doesn't have any instinct for it. In order to get better time slots at the local pub he enlists his wife to cook a briscuit or some other tasty dish to bribe the manager. Midge makes little notes about what works in his act and what doesn't. She is totally supportive. When they get home late at night, she gets into bed with her makeup still completely on. She waits until Joel is asleep to scrub her face, put on vanishing cream, and put her hair up in rollers. Then, before Joel awakens, she gets up and puts the makeup back on and fixes her hair so she can look perfect for him when he awakens.
And then one night, Joel bombs at the club. He blames her for everything. When they get home, he tells her he is leaving. Oh, and by the way, he informs her (I'd say confess but he is totally without remorse) that he is having an affair with his secretary, a woman who can't figure out how to use a pencil sharpener.
When she goes upstairs to tell her parents what happened, her mother goes into hysterics and her father blames her and says she must get him back, affair or no affair (I must mention Tony Shalhoub is a national treasure). So, dressed only in a robe and her nightgown and chugging a bottle of gin, Midge takes the subway back to the comedy club to ponder the disintegration of her life. There she takes the stage of the comedy club and puts into words what she's going through, exposing her trials. Unfortunately she also exposes her breasts, which gets her arrested. Complications ensue.
I haven't gotten very far in watching this series yet, but what I've seen so far is excellent. The dialogue is sparkling and delivered to perfection by the cast. The soundtrack and art design fit the time and place to a tee. And it shows the exacting standards society held women to at that time, with the expectation that they'd be wives and mothers and that if anything went off course they'd be to blame.
Monk: Mr. Monk and Sharona (2009)
A contrast in styles
Sharona returns to San Francisco to deal with the settlement of her uncle's wrongful death. He fell down some steps on a golf course at a country club and hit his head and died in the process. Sharona was expecting that the settlement would be about five thousand dollars, but it turns out to be "real money", although the audience is never told the amount. Sharona does say it is enough to send her now grown son, Benjie, to college.
But then Monk is in the room where the settlement was made, looks at a few of the photos of the scene, and begins to make those Monk noises indicating this might not be the scene of an accident. Sharona doesn't want to hear it, because if this is murder there is no check. Complications ensue.
This was, of course, part of a season long set of episodes tying up the loose ends of the characters, and so Bitty Schram is brought back one last time to wind up the story of Sharona, Monk's nurse when he first had his breakdown and for the first two and a half seasons of the show. So Natalie and Sharona are at first glad to meet, each having heard so much about the other. But as they work on this "case", their very different styles rub each other the wrong way. Natalie is more the assistant - she was never a nurse. She is even more formal in how she addresses him as "Mr. Monk". Sharona was always tough on him. She had to be, especially in the beginning, or else his phobias would have forever paralyzed him. And there is one last very surprising turn to Sharona's story at the end.
Monk: Mr. Monk and the Three Pies (2004)
Mr. Monk has sibling rivalry
A man buys a string of tickets at a local fair in Tewkesbury where the prize is a cherry pie, but another person, an older woman, actually wins the raffle. The man follows her to her car and tries to steal the pie from her, but she resists. He ends up bludgeoning her to death by ramming her head against her steering wheel, then drives the car to an unknown location, taking the pie with him. This unknown location must have been inside of San Francisco, because Stottlemeyer and Disher are investigating and think the crime was a carjacking gone bad. While Monk looks over the crime scene, Sharona gets a call and says the caller claims to be Monk's brother, Ambrose, and needs to see Monk right away and that it is a matter of life and death.
Monk doesn't want to speak to his brother Ambrose because he never called or wrote him after Trudy's death, but he does eventually come around and go to Tewkesbury to see Ambrose. Ambrose still lives in the family home that Monk and Ambrose grew up in. Ambrose has agoraphobia and won't leave the house. But he thinks that something nefarious has happened to the wife. Ambrose says that, two nights ago, he heard next door neighbor van Ranken and his wife arguing, then what sounded like gunshots. Three hours later, van Ranken drove his truck away and was gone all night. The next morning, Ambrose called the house looking for the wife, and van Ranken said she had flown to Argentina. Suspiciously, he denied leaving the previous night, saying his truck has been parked in the same place all summer.
To humor Ambrose, Monk says he will look into the disappearance. But as he looks into things he begins to think something happened too. Also note that Van Rankin is the same guy who killed the old woman over a cherry pie, but Monk does not figure that out until later.
John Turturro is fabulous as Ambrose Monk. It's odd that Monk openly derides Ambrose for saying that he can't leave the house since Monk's disabilities look equally odd to anybody else. You'd think he'd have some empathy - these two have both been damaged by a bad childhood. Also, Ambrose sets the table for their dad who abandoned them in the 1960s and he has been saving all of the mail so their father can read it when he returns. Monk ridicules this too, saying that their father is never coming back and that he doesn't use his detective skills to go looking for him because he is afraid he might actually find him.
The Man Who Wasn't There (2001)
Who is in charge of jurisprudence in this town?
I get that the cinematography is wonderful and noirishly stylish, but the basics of the story just don't hold up.
A man commits a murder - actually it's self-defense - nobody sees him at the scene but his fingerprints are all over the murder weapon as he makes no attempt to hide what he did. He leaves the scene in a bit of a daze. He expects to be picked up in days if not hours after the crime, and then two officers show up at the barber shop where he works. But they appear only to tell him that it is his wife who has been picked up and charged with the crime.
He and his wife's brother mortgage their business to hire an expensive attorney. The expensive attorney says that it will be a challenge to save her from either life in prison or the chair. And yet, nobody saw her at the scene of the crime, her prints can't be on the murder weapon because her husband's prints are on it, and she was passed out drunk all evening at the house. The only thing they have is that she cooked the books at the store where she worked for the victim. Embezzlement? Yes Murder? No.
So the husband confesses in the presence of the wife and the attorney that he did it. But the attorney says nobody will believe him because of the lack of evidence. Yet there is a complete lack of evidence that his wife did it and yet THAT is an airtight case? I can't take this seriously. Maybe I'm not supposed to.
If this is supposed to be a stylish looking film with great cinematography and attention to detail on the Cold War era interiors and settings, then it succeeded. If it is the story of a man's bleak existence in which everything he tried to do to break out of that existence blew up in his face, well that succeeded too. I just think that the legal aspect of the story - which is a big part of the thing - is not the least bit credible.
Monk: Mr. Monk and the 12th Man (2003)
Mr. Monk and the killing spree
SFPD thinks they have a serial killer on their hands when eleven people of completely different walks of life are killed by different methods. Even Monk is stumped by all of this, until he realizes that such diversity in a group of people is usually found in a jury. It checks out that these folks were on a jury. It was a civil case against a homeowner, and the jury found against him and for the plaintiff. But the insurance company paid the claim so it's not like the homeowner would have reason to hold a grudge. The surviving twelfth juror looks like a suspect - he had a human finger in his freezer! But Monk doesn't think that he's "the guy" because he had no motive to turn against his fellow jurors. What goes on here? Watch and find out.
In a subplot, Sharona is dating Kenny, the deputy mayor, who is considered a possible candidate for mayor the following year. Everybody is playing up to her because of this association, hoping to get in good with the deputy mayor. Disher, though, is just jealous and shows resentment. It turns out though that Kenny is not exactly the answer to her maiden's prayer.
On the humorous side, Monk frustrates his dry cleaner, Mrs. Ling, with his crazy demands and exacting standards, making her no longer want Monk as a customer.
Monk: Mr. Monk and the Missing Granny (2004)
Mr. Monk and the missing murder
This is one of the very few Monks with no murder whatsoever.
An older woman is kidnapped from her home. She lives with her granddaughter and neither has any money. The kidnappers call and demand that every homeless person in the mission district be fed a free turkey dinner. After that is done, the woman is released unharmed. And they fed her pizza during her captivity. What on earth goes on here? Actually, the police don't really care because the woman is home and nothing was extorted.
The woman's granddaughter, however, wants answers, so she goes to Monk and asks him to investigate. She can't afford to pay him, but she knows of a loophole in the law that would allow him to get reinstated by the police department. The granddaughter is a law student with a famous person as a professor, though she doesn't seem to be on the road to being a good lawyer herself.
This episode didn't seem to have much effort put into it. The villains return the kidnapped old woman unharmed, but try to kill Monk by knocking library bookcases over on him? This makes no sense. Plus I've never been a fan of the long-faced comedy of Rachel Dratch who plays the granddaughter.
Monk: Mr. Monk and the Paperboy (2004)
Mr. Monk and the red herring
The paperboys are delivering papers to Monk's apartment building. The assistant puts a paper on Monk's doorstep. The other paperboy asks if the paper was centered on Monk's doormat - he's obviously met Monk. The assistant says he is not sure and goes to check. There he encounters a guy trying to steal the paper off Monk's doorstep. There is a fight and the assistant is killed. Why was a paperboy killed over a newspaper?
Separately, annoying neighbor Kevin Dorfmann has a new girlfriend. And she's a beautiful girlfriend at that. She works at an all night market nearby, and according to Kevin he's been asking her out for months with her stock answer being "drop dead". Suddenly she showed up at his house last night with eyeglasses she thought to be his and practically attacked him. Monk doesn't see anything strange about this because he barely notices if a woman is beautiful or not - His heart still belongs to his dead wife. Meanwhile, Monk and company are scouring this paper to see if there is anything in it that some criminal might not want Monk to see. It turns out that there is - but that is not related to this particular case.
This episode had lots of great comic bits. First, after the paperboy is killed, Monk's apartment is invaded by SFPD investigating the killing. They are leaving half eaten donuts on his mantle, asking to use his bathroom - he claims he doesn't have one, and a police dog with hay fever is lounging on his couch. Then there is the case in France that Monk solves that has nothing to do with this one. There is also a running gag about Sharona being physically stronger than Monk and him resenting it.
Monk: Mr. Monk Meets the Playboy (2003)
Mr. Monk and the locked room
Dexter Larson (Gary Cole) is a Hugh Hefner-like playboy with the mansion full of scantily clad women to match. He gets a visit from the CFO of his magazine who says that the financials say that the mansion has to go, and the magazine must sell it. Larson asks the CFO to keep the situation secret until Monday so he can enjoy the mansion without the press bothering him just one more weekend.
The next day Larson calls the CFO to ask him one more time not to sell the mansion. The CFO is locked in his private gym lifting weights at the time. The CFO refuses to reconsider. Suddenly the weight he is lifting comes down on his neck, like it is controlled by an outside force and kills him.
This looks like an accident, so the SFPD is not involved. So the CFO's secretary goes to Monk and Sharona and asks them to investigate her dead boss's death. She suspects Larson because she knows about the financial problems with the magazine and the mansion. So the CFO was not as tight-lipped as he promised. Complications ensue.
The pace of this episode was rather slow I thought. Plus it didn't delve so much into Monk's discomfort with nudity and sex as I would have thought. Instead it deals with a secret of Sharona's from years ago. There was one mystery Monk didn't investigate - How is it that Gary Cole looked the same age in 2003 as he looked in 1984 when he starred in "Fatal Vision"?. At first I thought the actor playing Larson might have been a younger relative of Cole's - but nope, it was him.
Monk: Mr. Monk Goes to the Asylum (2002)
Mr. Monk and the gaslighting
Monk is in the kitchen making dinner and he needs his blender. He calls Sharona to ask her where his blender is and she tells him that he doesn't have a blender and is actually in the wrong house. She knows this from the caller ID. Monk turns around and sees the terrified actual homeowner behind several policemen.
Next scene is Monk being taken to a mental institution for two days of observation. He is told he is lucky that the homeowners decided not to prosecute - the home he was in belonged to Trudy before they were married. But, of course, Monk is not that lucky plus he stumbles into a murder. Complications ensue.
Dr Lancaster is one of the worst villains in the whole series. Not only did he murder another doctor just to get his job, he murdered and framed a patient. Then there is the gaslighting of his patients. Psychiatrists are in charge of a very vulnerable group of people and to abuse that position and make them believe they are sicker than they are is pure evil.
Sharona was amazing in this episode and believed in Monk and came to his rescue, all thanks to Benji's invisible ink!
Monk: Mr. Monk Goes to the Ballgame (2003)
Mr. Monk and the fifteen pizzas
A CEO and his young wife are on their way home, directed from their onboard GPS when they inexplicably end up in a parking lot, far from their home. A shadowy figure steps forward and shoots into the car, killing them both. The homicide investigative team assumes that the husband must be the target because of all of his controversial stands in business and problems with the regulators. Monk sees it differently though, he thinks that because the wife, Erin, was shot four times and the CEO only once that the wife was the target.
More investigation shows that Erin was having an affair with a ball player, Scott Gregario, ever since they met in an art class they were both taking. Scott couldn't be "the guy" though, because he was playing the night of the killing. Complications ensue.
In a separate subplot, Sharona's son Benjie is having trouble hitting the ball in his kid's softball league. Stottlemeyer is coaching the opposite team, and Sharona suspects that Stottlemeyer's son may be too old to be on the team. When the umpire walks out of the game because Stottlemeyer is heckling him, Monk is urged to step in as a temporary umpire. But he seems more interested in straightening the kids' ballcaps and keeping home swept clean than actually umpiring.
Monk: Mr. Monk and the End: Part 1 (2009)
An example of the right way to do a series finale
There had always been two concrete quests in Adrian Monk's attempt to claw himself back to normalcy - to get his badge back and to solve his wife's murder. The previous episode dealt with the lesser of these two quests - his badge. The two part finale deals with the solving of Trudy's murder.
I don't want to delve into details much at all, but there is an irony here that, like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, the solution to Monk's problem had been right in front of him all along. Interesting analogy now that I think of it - Like Dorothy, Monk was on his quest supported by three true friends.
There's a good more action in this one than you'll see in a typical episode of Monk. And it shows how each of the central characters wind up their own stories. I'm particularly glad that they gave Disher some dignity in this finale for a change and gave him a suitable next chapter to his story rather than having him doing something goofy like going on tour with some rock band.
As for the details - I'm afraid you'll have to watch and find out. If you are a fan you will not be disappointed.
Monk: Mr. Monk Goes to the Carnival (2002)
Mr. Monk faces his fears
A policeman goes to a carnival to meet an informant who is going to give him some crucial information. The informant says that he will only tell him what he knows on the ferris wheel, supposedly so that they will be far from anybody who could hear what's being said. On the ground the ferris wheel operator hears the informant yelling for help. When the pair reach the ground, the operator stops the ride, and the cop gets off. But the informant is dead of a stab wound to the chest. The cop says he didn't hurt the guy. Stottlemeyer, being a long time friend of the accused cop, asks Monk to find out what really happened. Complications ensue.
At the same time, Monk is facing a hearing for reinstatement to the SFPD. Stottlemeyer's opinion is key to the outcome. The irony can't be lost on Monk that the same guy who is key to him getting his badge back is asking him to help get the badge back of a cop who may not be guilty of this particular crime but does have definite anger management problems.
Monk: Mr. Monk and the Badge (2009)
Be careful what you ask for
Monk comes into Stottlemeyer's office where Stottlemeyer makes a bit of a mess of telling Monk that he got his badge back. At first it sounds like he's being fired as a private consultant. When that misunderstanding finally gets straightened out, of course Monk is happy. But then comes the reality of the situation.
As a police detective versus a private consultant Monk is an employee, not his own boss. He no longer works for or with Stottlemeyer and Disher solving the cases that he wants to solve. Natalie, of course, has to find her own employment since Monk no longer needs an assistant or a nurse. That means they could drift apart as people do who don't see each other on a daily basis.
Monk's first task is working the phone lines where he encounters how technology has jumped ahead in the past twelve years. He doesn't understand how to even answer these modern phones. And then there is the computer. How many gigabytes of RAM? Monk has no idea what that even means!
And then Monk encounters a situation that might mean that a fellow cop is possibly "dirty". Unlike when he was a paid consultant and not part of the "thin blue line" this puts him on the outs with his now "fellow" cops when he raises the possibility of such a thing without absolute proof. Complications ensue.
This episode was really great at showing that sometimes you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone. Although I liked this episode a great deal, I found it odd that Monk getting his badge back was handled off-screen without Monk being an active part of that process when, up to this point, there had been hearings involved of which Monk had full knowledge and even some input.
Monk: Mr. Monk and the Candidate (2002)
A good introduction to the characters
This pilot was very well written. The scene opens as you look through a door into a room full of both uniformed and plain clothes policemen looking stage right. Then you see what they are looking at - Adrian Monk surveying a murder scene, a woman dead on the floor.
But he's distracted. He just can't let go of the fact that his stove might be on or that its pilot light has gone out. His nurse, Sharona Fleming, has to take him aside and tell him to knock it off about the stove, that the department already thinks he's crazy and he needs to focus and be brilliant. From the beginning Sharona knew how to use both the carrot and the stick to deal with Monk. This case is in Santa Clara, but soon Monk gets the word that San Francisco, wants to bring him in on the case of the attempted shooting of a mayoral candidate during a rally. As for the SFPD, they are not so welcoming, as he lost his badge from that department for psychiatric reasons three years before.
The characters change over time. In the beginning Captain Stottlemeyer is pretty hostile towards Monk, claiming that Monk was insubordinate before his nervous breakdown. Lieutenant Disher starts out being a serious enough cop. In my opinion they went too far with making him the comic relief. After all, Disher had to pass a civil service exam and have the confidence of his colleagues to become a lieutenant in the first place.
As for the title character, Monk was always OCD, but the murder of his wife and his inability to solve that crime drove his obsessions to become paralyzing and caused him to lose his badge, and getting reinstated becomes a series long crusade for him.
Monk: Mr. Monk and the Lady Next Door (2009)
Mr. Monk burns a bridge
At the Guinness World Book Museum, a man is caught by a night watchman towing a wagon. There is an altercation, and the watchman falls to the floor below, impaled on a swordfish exhibit.
Separately, Monk meets a nice older lady at a crosswalk. They are both going to the police station - Monk is there to get his check, the lady - Marge Johnson - is there to complain about her neighbor playing his drums at all times of the day and night. Apparently she is a regular there with this complaint. Marge and Monk quickly strike up a friendship. Marge's son died as a child, and Monk's mother wasn't very supportive of him even when she was alive, so they eacj fill a void for the other. She knits him a scarf, helps him rearrange his furniture, and even has him eating his food without separating it.
Later in the episode, Monk comes to believe that Marge is just faking her interest in him to help perpetrate a stunning robbery and he really lashes out at her. Are his suspicions justified? How does the robbery connect to the museum murder? Watch and find out.
Monk is a guy who has been many times burned. You see that in "Mr. Monk Makes a Friend" where Hal fakes a friendship with Monk for a week just to retrieve a key piece of evidence from the mail to hide a murder he has committed, and you see it in the episode where he returns to his alma mater only to realize that his fellow students only tolerated him because he was with Trudy at the time and she was the one that everybody loved.
Monk: Mr. Monk on Wheels (2009)
Mr. Monk and the karma chips
A man uses bolt cutters to steal a bike and as he rides away his wheels get caught in a pothole and he crashes to the ground. Natalie and Monk are nearby, and Natalie rushes over to help the guy and get him back on his way, not knowing he is a thief. Seconds after the thief takes off again, the owner of the bike comes down the path saying his bike has been stolen.
Natalie feels responsible - and a bit stupid - for letting the bike thief get away, so she convinces Monk to help her track down the bike. Monk quickly determines who the suspect is, out of a city full of petty thieves, and goes to the guy's house to retrieve the bike. But the thief apparently sees this as a higher stakes operation than Monk thinks that it is, and shoots Monk in the leg before making his getaway! But the bike is nowhere to be found.
At this point Monk's behavior turns ugly and punitive towards Natalie. She is losing sleep, nourishment, and even hydration catering to the now wheelchair bound Monk who will not forgive her for putting him through this over a bicycle. But this case becomes very odd when the bicycle thief is found shot dead in a cemetery.
Season 7 Monk feels like a man who was in denial about the fact that he is getting better, and doesn't need as much support as he did before, but is trying to desperately cling to his special needs accommodation like a child. Season 7 Monk needed some tough love, and Natalie and Dr. Bell tolerated too much.
Monk: Mr. Monk Gets Hypnotized (2008)
Mr. Monk finds his inner child
A woman goes to a jeweler to try and sell some expensive pieces. The jeweler tells her she could do much better by going to one of the auction houses. She insinuates that she doesn't want the publicity that would come with that, and says that she is afraid of her husband following her. The woman has been going through a bitter divorce with her husband, real-estate mogul Aaron Larkin. Seconds later, the store owners hear a scream and a car alarm blaring. They rush outside and see Sally's car abandoned, and no sign of her except a torn piece of clothing.
Separately, Monk runs into Harold Krenshaw who seems to have a whole new attitude and attributes it to the hypnotist he's been seeing. Monk is jealous and tells Natalie that he's tired of years of endless talk and wants to finally be better. In spite of promises to Natalie that he'll talk to Dr. Bell first, he calls the hypnotist and makes an appointment. The hypnotist ultimately has to regress Monk to early childhood to find a point in his life where he is carefree. Of course, an emotionally six-year-old Monk is no good at a crime scene. And at first he's baffling Stottlemeyer, Natalie, and Disher with his antics. Complications ensue, especially when the missing woman turns up alive but starved and bruised, and her husband is the one that is dead.
I know this isn't a realistic portrayal of hypnotism, but it was still a lot of fun. Especially after Monk is first hypnotized and he is behaving with the candor of a child, asking women in their 50s how old they are.
Monk: Mr. Monk's 100th Case (2008)
Will has no grace
TV news magazine host James Novak follows the Homicide Squad around as they investigate what appears to be the work of a serial killer. The documentary is part live and part dramatized. For example, there is a dramatization of the fourth murder. But the focus of the show is the life and career of Adrian Monk who is shown solving his 100th case on this show.
Monk's friends and colleagues are gathered at Novak's house to watch the show. And as the documentary runs, Monk has second thoughts about having fingered the correct perpetrator. He still believes that the he got the right guy for the first three killings, but the fourth victim perhaps not.
It turns out that Novak himself is the killer of the fourth victim. He had been following the police around as they worked to solve the case and so he knew about clues that the police hold back from the public so that they can tell a phony confession from a legitimate one. Novak used that to set things up in such a way that the killing of his mistress would look just like another serial killing.
But there is a plot hole in that the killer of the first three victims, when caught, would likely have proof that he did not kill a fourth victim. So Novak got lucky when the killer committed suicide in a hotel room. Also, why would Monk have the big reveal in Novak's living room, where he has a gun in easy reach and a house full of potential hostages?
There are some holes in the Monk mini-biography in the documentary. For example, Adrian's brother Ambrose talks about Adrian coming back to the ancestral home and just sitting in a chair after Trudy was killed. But in the episode where Ambrose is introduced, Monk says that he and Ambrose are estranged because Ambrose never called or wrote after Trudy's death.
There's also a funny scene where three of the people Monk put in jail for murder, in some of the actual past Monk episodes, sit around and compare murder plots.
Monk: Mr. Monk Paints His Masterpiece (2008)
Mr. Monk gets a swelled head
The owner of a junk yard has booby traps set up all over his property. One night a silent gunman enters the property and is slowly coming toward the owner who warns him to "come no closer". He comes closer, trips a wire, and gets cut in two with a shotgun blast. When the police are investigating the scene, Monk notices some art supplies for sale at the junk yard and buys some canvases and paint. This was because Monk was advised by Dr. Kroger that he might enjoy taking up a hobby.
But Monk has a hard time being creative, since part of his compulsions is to see things only as they are or as he thinks they should be. Thus he obsesses about circles, bananas and their lack of flatness, and individual lines. Then one day a Russian comes to Monk, claiming to be an art collector. He says that he sees genius in Monk's paintings and offers to buy all he can paint for thousands of dollars per painting. This gives Monk a swelled head, and he loses all interest in investigating crimes and begins dressing ridiculously in a bright red beret and frock. His fellow art students at the community college don't know what to say because, after all, someone was willing to pay big money for what they see as junk. Monk even tries to pay Dr. Kroger with one of his sketches and is incredulous that he wants actual currency instead. What goes on here? Watch and find out.
The funniest bit of the episode is a "portrait" of Natalie that Monk paints that is smartly not shown to the audience, so you can just use your imagination as to what it might look like. The Russian calls the portrait "pig woman". Natalie thinks it is a portrait of Stottlemeyer until Monk advises her otherwise, and Natalie is beyond embarrassed that the thing even exists.
Monk: Mr. Monk Falls in Love (2008)
Mr. Monk behaves completely out of character
Disher is out on a date, and he and the date jump into the back of a cab that happens to have the murdered body of a cabby in the front seat. Investigation finds the victim was murdered with a hatpin to the neck and that there was a charm bracelet found in the cab. The initials on the charm bracelet are LZ, and there are some other charms on the bracelet that indicate different aspects of the owner.
This leads the police to Leyla Zlatavich, who works helping people who have recently emigrated from her home country. Monk apparently falls in love with this woman at first sight. From that point forward he loses all objectivity and says she could not be "the guy" - the perpetrator - in spite of a large amount of evidence that she is. Complications ensue.
I have two problems with this episode. First, that Monk could just suddenly forget Trudy's memory AND his duty as a consultant for the police over what is apparently an almost completely physical attraction to a murder suspect. It is played as a crush rather than a possible love affair, still it is completely out of character.
The second problem is the use of a totally fictitious foreign country as the home of the suspect. I guess they didn't name a real country because the writers didn't want to get sucked into a geography lesson, so they just made it a fictitious and perpetually war-torn place in what would seem to be Eastern Europe given the Russian sounding accents. This worked in some of the films of the 30s and 40s, but not here.
There are a couple of good scenes though, and if you thought that in eight seasons you would never see Monk in a woman's apartment in a bathrobe, missing his pants, and voluntarily taking off his wedding ring, you would be wrong.
Monk: Mr. Monk Takes a Punch (2008)
Mr. Monk forms an unlikely alliance
Someone puts an explosive device inside of a punching bag. Someone other than the object of the murder attempt - boxer Ray Regis - is killed. DNA is obtained at the scene indicating that a well known hit man was responsible. This means he will try to strike again.
Monk investigates and determines that Regis threw his championship fight five years before after betting against himself so that his trainer's terminally ill daughter could afford experimental treatment in Europe. But Monk decides to tell no one other than Regis about what he knows. For that, he gets a friend. Regis returns the favor by helping Monk train for a state fitness test he must pass in order to continue working as a paid consultant for the SFPD. Meanwhile, that assassin is still out there.
This episode was disappointing. Although I like Monk developing a true friendship for a change, this script seemed completely off. Monk sleepwalks through his role of crime solver, and other than in the final scene, it is Stottlemeyer who is making all of the breaks in the case. Disher is being portrayed as a bigger fool that normal, and Monk seems to be trying to outdo him as far as acting ridiculous and goofy - like he's the fighter's sidekick rather than a great detective with very burdensome OCD.
Monk: Mr. Monk and the Three Julies (2008)
Mr. Monk faces life imitating art
Captain Stottlemeyer is showing off his new car when a call comes in that Julie Teeger has been murdered. Natalie rushes to the scene to find that the victim is a woman in her 30s, killed with a kitchen knife. While the police are still working that crime scene, yet another Julie Teeger is reported dead. She's a student who was killed by a hit and run while she was riding a bike. But the thing is, Monk determines whoever hit her backed over to finish the job. This is also murder.
So Natalie's daughter, also named Julie Teeger, is put in protective custody when it is learned she is the only Julie Teeger alive for a thousand miles. A suspect is located - a man with a history of mental illness and violence who has had a troubled relationship with his mother, also named Julie Teeger. Is this person "the guy"? Watch and find out.
I'm not sure I like Julie very much after this episode. She can be very sweet, kind, and understanding of Monk's weirdness. Here, however, she is terrible to her mom and thinks having to delay her driver's license test because a homicidal maniac could be hunting her just because of her name is an unendurable experience. Then, at the end, she makes the remark that she gets what she wants from her mom if she pushes hard enough, in this case a car. Maybe this is just to cast her as more of a typical rash and rebellious teen.
Good comic bits include Natalie driving off panicked in Stottlemeyer's new car every time she thinks her daughter is in danger, each time leaving it in a more wrecked condition. Also Randy impersonating the suspect's elderly mother is comedy gold.
Monk: Mr. Monk Goes to the Bank (2008)
An oddly structured episode...
... with the first scene consisting of a couple of cops ticketing a car late at night outside a bank and mentioning that this bank was just robbed yesterday. Inside the bank we see Stottlemeyer, Disher, Natalie, and Monk - in a guard's uniform - trapped inside the vault where the safe deposit boxes are.
Then the show backs up to the day of the robbery, with Stottlemeyer and Disher chipping in since the robbery detail is shorthanded. Monk shows up not because he is part of the investigation, but because Trudy's bracelet is in his safe deposit box here. Unfortunately, his was one of the boxes that was robbed and her bracelet is gone. Monk sees some clues that makes him think that "the Russian" - as the bank employees describe the robber - had a "man on the inside". So he takes a job as a security guard at the bank to figure out who that inside man might be. Complications ensue.
There are some great bits of comic business here, including Monk, as the security guard, evening out people's deposits with his own money so that people deposit and withdraw money in ten's of dollars. Also, Randy becomes obsessed with the human statue street performer operating outside of the bank to the point he tries to imitate him. It seems that Randy is Monk to the street performer's Harold Crenshaw in this case.