Nightmare Fuel / Monk

• "Mr. Monk Goes to the Circus": The elephant crushing its trainer's head while Monk is trying to show Sharona that elephants are harmless. Somehow, not actually seeing it makes it worse.
• "Mr. Monk Bumps His Head":
  • Monk quietly giving his summation while thickly swarmed with bees, apparently having ignored the sheriff's warning that the bees can smell fear.
  • Not to mention the fact that Cora Little pretty much abducted Monk and was totally fine lying to him about them being married for the rest of their lives.
• "Mr. Monk Is On The Air": The Reveal of how Max Hudson killed his wife. He was housesitting and dogsitting for his neighbor and spent a month training an innocent Jack Russell Terrier to sneak into the house on hearing a catchphrase on the radio, turn on the fireplace gas, and close the bedroom door while his wife was sleeping. It doesn't help that the dog is happily barking the whole time while recreating it to give the detectives their proof. His owner is pretty horrified and agrees to cooperate to deliver the proof.
• "Mr. Monk and the Three Julies":
  • Natalie's worries when she hears on the police radio that a "Julie Teeger" was victimized in a 187. She asks for Monk on clarification on the police code before stealing the car to get to the murder site. This happens not once, but twice. She's shocked but relieved on seeing that the other two Julies are not her daughter.
  • Monk checks upstairs for Matthew Teeger's mother and discovers her sitting in a chair gently rocking in the wind. The tension is palpable the entire time Monk is trying to get an answer...and then he builds up the courage to touch the chair and discovers that "she" is only a stuffed body with a ghastly expression. It's a shoutout to Psycho. Monk then demands an emergency therapy session late at night to cope with the horror.
  • Later, just before a commercial break, Captain Stottlemeyer comes to Natalie's house and (while trying to sound casual) starts telling them to pack up for a move to a safe room at the police station, but Natalie immediately realizes he's hiding something. He comes clean.
    Stottlemeyer: All right. I thought it was a fairly common name, I thought there'd be a hundred others. We checked Nevada, Oregon, went as far east as Colorado-
    Natalie: And?
    Stottlemeyer: -and she's the only Julie Teeger within a thousand miles.
    Julie: (visibly shaken) ...You mean the only one left.
  • What makes this especially spooky is that minutes before, Julie had been driving her mother crazy with her lack of concern about the situation, convinced all the restrictions were overkill, and for most of the scene, Natalie, Stottlemeyer, and Disher are the only people in view. Then the camera cuts to show that Julie is standing in the doorway, horrified at the confirmation of how deeply in danger she is.
• "Mr. Monk and the Magician": Monk confronts Torini, who insists on doing a disappearing act with Monk as the subject. After making him disappear, he pretends something weird happened and he can't bring him back. Monk ends up tied to a chair in a basement, completely at the mercy of a man who already killed his upstairs neighbor. Torini plans to kill Monk and then incinerate his body to destroy the evidence, and it's only thanks to his Lovely Assistant having an attack of conscience that he's delayed enough for the police to catch up.
• "Mr. Monk Buys a House": Monk and Natalie get held hostage by "Honest" Jake Phillips.
• "Mr. Monk Goes to the Dentist": Monk gets tortured by a sadistic dentist who is Genre Savvy enough to compare it to living through Marathon Man. Thankfully, Randy, Stottlemeyer, and Natalie get there before any major damage is done, but the whole thing probably increased Monk's phobia of dentists.
• "Mr. Monk's 100th Case":
  • When they play the tape of the 911 call for the murder of Cassandre Rank, you might feel chills running through your spine. Then there is the series of rapid black-and-white photos zooming in on the body of victim #2, Barbara McFarland.
  • Also, it's less tear-jerker and more shivery watching the segment about Trudy's death.
    James Novak: Then, in a flash...[a photo of Trudy turns into a negative of itself] she was gone. [photos of downtown San Francisco during the holiday season are shown, as well as a photo of Trudy with a balloon] Two weeks before Christmas, 1997, Trudy Monk was downtown running some errands. [an image of a parking garage appears] She returned to her car at a parking garage on Somerset Avenue. [a loud explosion plays as a flash of light turns the image into a negative]
    Newscaster: Our top story tonight, the wife of a highly decorated San Francisco detective was killed this morning, the victim of an apparent car bombing. Trudy Monk, a 35 year old freelance journalist, died a short time later at St. Jude's Hospital. Her husband, Adrian Monk, was by her side. The police are pursuing several leads, but have made no arrests.
    [Crime scene photos of the charred and mangled remains of Trudy's car are displayed]
    James Novak: The case is still open. It has been Adrian Monk's obsession for eleven years. [photos of Trudy mixed with photos flash across the screen, culminating in a photo of the car in flames accompanied with the sound of an explosion]
• "Mr. Monk and the Blackout": The murder of Alby Drake. Imagine being chained to a tree, and a bulldozer turns on, and then begins ramming the tree. You try to unchain yourself, but you drop the key. You then realize the man in the bulldozer is Winston Brenner, your former best friend. You then hug the tree you're tied to in desperation, and when the tree finally snaps, you fall dozens of feet high into a building, and when the tree hits it it explodes. Luckily, the coroner determined that Drake died on impact; it could have been even nastier had he survived the fall and instead died of electrocution or crush injuries.
• "Mr. Monk and the Girl Who Cried Wolf": Sharona's "hallucinations," with her constantly encountering a stabbed man covered in blood who tells her that her (dead) father is concerned about her. While it turns out to be faked to make her doubt her sanity, it's still freaky to watch.
• One rather horrifying aspect behind a number of the victims of the week^note for example, Miles Holling ("Mr. Monk and the Very, Very Old Man"), the eponymous character in "Mr. Monk and the Paperboy", Kevin Dorfman ("Mr. Monk and the Magician"), the guitar player in "Mr. Monk and the Really, Really, Dead Guy" is that they are completely innocent people. They were going about their everyday lives when they were killed unexpectedly because they had something the killer wanted, or because he was trying to hide something, or because they knew too much, or because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
• Some victims also happened to be killed by people they trusted, such as friends or family. In particular, there are an astonishing amount of cases that involve people being murdered by their own spouses. Often, the murder victim doesn't have any reason to believe that their spouse would be willing to kill them (whether for money, to get them out of the way of an affair, just because they were sick of them, etc.) until they suddenly find themselves being strangled, stabbed, or thrown from a building by the very same person they thought they could trust with their life.
• "Mr. Monk Goes to Jail":
  • Monk is called in to investigate a particularly strange murder—a death-row inmate is poisoned forty-five minutes before his scheduled execution. While at the jailhouse, Monk runs into his Arch-Enemy Dale "the Whale" Biederbeck, who's in prison because of Monk's actions (he was guilty of organizing a murder in "Mr. Monk Meets Dale the Whale"). Dale is a suspect in the current crime (the inmate owed him $1200, which to the uber-rich Dale is pocket change), and as a result, he can't have a window installed in his cell wall. For most of the scene, Dale is Affably Evil (or at least pretending to be), cheerfully making jokes about his predicament and generally being polite, if condescending. Then he starts talking about that window, and the entire facade drops in seconds. Seeing Dale (who's played to terrifying perfection by Tim Curry) go from smiling and pleasant to a shrieking, near-insane monster so quickly is horrifying:
    Dale the Whale: Here's my problem! As you can see, I have, ah...become accustomed to a certain standard of living in here. And until this case is solved, things are going to be very difficult for me! For example—they were supposed to install a window, right there, in that wall. So I could watch the sun set.
    His voice becomes slow and more serious
    Dale the Whale: I assume the sun still sets every evening?...
    (A long pause...and then Dale utterly snaps)
    Dale the Whale: ADRIAN MONK! I want my window. GET ME MY WINDOW!
  • From the same episode, the real murderer—Sylvia Fairborne, the prison's librarian—tries to set Monk up to be killed by a particularly violent inmate named Spider. When that backfires (Monk and Spider actually end up befriending each other), Fairborne goes with a much simpler plan: she pays off a gang of Neo-Nazis in the prison to have him shanked. The last five minutes of the episode see Monk surrounded by skinheads who are out for his blood.
    Adrian Monk: (after trying to call for help, only to find the phone cord cut)...the line's dead.
    Neo-Nazi: So are you.
  • Her concoction to poison Ray Kaspo counts too. She gave him enough poison to kill five people.
• "Mr. Monk Goes to the Hospital". After Monk starts getting too close to the truth, Dr. Scott injures him and admits him to the hospital under a false name. He then paralyzes Monk's vocal cords and sets up an IV drip with tetracycline, to which Monk is allergic, to make his death look like a hospital error. At this point, Natalie comes back from her date, feeling guilty about leaving her boss. However, she's unaware that he's in danger and the panicking Monk can't tell her. Only when the nurse casually calls Monk by the false name does Natalie finally realize something's wrong. She races back barely in time to stop the drip.
• The climax in Mr. Monk on the Road. Monk has just put together the pieces to realize that a friendly family in the camping ground with them have been spree-killing people across the United States. Natalie runs to alert the campground director, only to find him high on the killers' marijuana brownies. She returns to see the group's muscle about to ram the motor home over a cliff while Ambrose stands frozen at the door. Natalie races toward the scene, desperately screaming at Ambrose to run — but just like the last time, Ambrose' agoraphobia is too strong. He only lives because Monk scores a last-second shot on the killer.
• "Mr. Monk and the Twelfth Man":
  • One particularly terrifying death happens early on. The killer drives up to a toll booth, asking one of the workers if he is Frank Pulaski. Once Pulaski confirms his identity, the killer demands change. When Frank complies, the killer suddenly handcuffs his wrist, drops a rope attached to the other end out the window, and floors the gas. Frank and his partner Tommy, panicking, desperately try to figure a way to free the trapped hand — and then the rope gets taut and Frank is yanked out of sight, screaming. According to Stottlemeyer, Frank was dragged nearly a mile behind the killer's speeding car and what was left was not a pleasant sight.
  • In a way, the episode is much scarier when you realize the killer has the second highest body count of the series with 12 murders, one of which includes his own wife.^note The highest is Frank De Palma from Mr. Monk is Someone Else, who was had at least 17 murders he was suspected of, but no proof could be found.
• "Mr. Monk Goes To The Asylum:" Dr. Lancaster's Gaslighting of Monk when he starts noticing holes in the official story of Dr. Gould's murder is terrifying. Before Sharona managed to find evidence backing him up, it's pretty clear Lancaster was winning, and was close to breaking Monk completely. Even worse, Dr. Lancaster was previously an extremely friendly person who actually seemed like he might be able to help Monk, and the shift from helpful doctor to cold blooded killer is very jarring.
• "Mr. Monk is On the Run":
  • We find out that Adrian has been suffering from recurring nightmares of Trudy's death ever since it happened—nightmares that we get to see in all their horror. What makes them even worse is that he envisions himself standing outside of Trudy's car, screaming for her to run, as she happily turns the key in the ignition, not knowing that there's a bomb wired to it. Monk tells his psychiatrist that he's tried every single night to run to Trudy in the dream, but he's paralyzed and cannot do it—he's been Forced to Watch the love of his life die in a fiery explosion for years. Later in the episode, the dream plays out in reality, with Monk standing and watching the governor of California and his wife happily waving to a parade crowd as their car, which has also been rigged with a bomb, inches closer and closer to the detonation point. Thankfully, Adrian is able to overcome his paralysis and save the day, but if he hadn't, the governor, his wife, and countless people around them would have been killed.
  • The build-up to the climax is also terrifying. Sheriff Rollins, a Dirty Cop, is in on the plan to kill the governor, and he's rigged up defenses to keep anyone from helping. Stottlemeyer and Disher desperately try to rush the car and divert the crowd, while Natalie scrambles up a lightpost in an attempt to disable the detonator. But Rollins—not caring that hundreds of people are gathered and would be killed or injured by the explosion—instead orders them arrested, claiming that they're criminals. Hearing the three of them screaming for the crowd to leave and being ignored is nerve-wracking.
  • The Big Bad of the episode is none other than Dale "the Whale" Biederbeck, who orchestrated the whole plan to kill the governor, and he's somehow gotten even worse during his time in prison. In his previous episodes, Dale was Faux Affably Evil, but now he's straight-up sadistic. When Natalie arrives to interrogate him, he mocks her dead husband and declares that he knows everything about her and her family just because she's associated with Monk. Keep in mind that the last time Dale and Monk met, Sharona was his assistant—Natalie didn't even know Biederbeck existed, but he already has every bit of information available on her at his disposal. Furthermore, as bad as Dale was then, he never threatened Sharona's loved ones, but that single standard is gone now. It's heavily implied that being in jail for so long is gradually driving Dale insane, given that he endlessly repeats words and generally seems more unhinged than his earlier appearances.
• "Mr. Monk and the TV Star" may have one of the most graphic crime scenes in the series, with the victim having been stabbed to death and her blood everywhere on the floor around her. When we see the "how he did it" flashback, we watch her get the knife violently rammed into her stomach and then her throat slit. Extremely violent stuff for a cable television show.