Monk butts heads with an inept private investigator who somehow keeps getting one over on him. Has Monk finally met his match, or is the PI hiding something?
This episode includes examples of the following tropes:
- Actor Allusion: Marty Eels is not the first private detective Jason Alexander has played.
- Always Someone Better: Marty Eels, the new golden boy private detective, seems to find clues faster than Monk, can see clues from yards away, and acts as a human lie detector. Dr. Kroger even claims this is part of the human condition. It turns out he's faking it and using information his mom overheard to "solve" the case.
- Bat Deduction: Marty's general detecting style. Unlike Monk, Marty doesn't bother waiting until he has more information to make inferences about any evidence he finds (his biggest example being his claim that a car seat was adjusted for someone 5'11"). It's one of the reasons Monk thinks he's cheating.
- Bunny-Ears Lawyer: Marty smells a dog's mouth, eats dirt, and uses a divining rod during the investigation, but he also appears to get results (and he's still not as quirky as Monk), so everybody lets it slide. This gets subverted when it turns out he faked solving the case.
- Chekhov's Gun: When the group visit Marty's office to see if he has an alibi for the murders (due to being skeptical that a mediocre private eye could suddenly become such a good detective overnight), he's finishing up a phone call with his mother, who he mentions works as a quality control operator. It turns out that this is how she had access to information he needed to solve the case.
- Contrived Coincidence: Monk figures out Marty's secret when he's put on hold while calling a car rental service and the quality control operator happens to confess to him that she can hear him talking with Natalie.
- Epic Fail: Marty was hired by a man to tail his wife and photograph her in bed with her lover. When Marty took the photos barging into the room, the woman was in bed with a man... who was in fact her husband. His client. It ends up providing Marty an alibi for the jewelry store robbery, as he was being checked for a possible concussion from the client hitting him.
- Fake Ultimate Hero: Marty Eels is not as competent a detective as he claimed he was. It was all his mother's idea, and she was just feeding him information.
- GPS Evidence: Marty is able to figure out where the body was dumped by identifying the species of mosquito and realising it's only present in a certain area. Though considering his whole act turns out to be a sham, it's questionable how reliable this is.
- I Have Your Wife: Subverted. The beginning of the episode shows a jewelry store manager being blackmailed by armed men who threaten to kill Peggy if he doesn't do as he's told. Peggy turns out to be his dog. Later played straight with Marty's mother.
- Jerkass: Marty acts like a jerk towards Monk and Natalie, bragging that he's the better detective.
- Karma Houdini: Marty and his mother are guilty of multiple crimes—including fraud, obstruction of justice, and destruction of evidence—and yet not only are they not charged with anything, but Marty even gets himself a cushy job at a community college after the fact. That said, they at least sufferer a Trauma Conga Line when Mrs. Eels was abducted and nearly drowned for interfering with the criminals' plan, so they don't escape completely unscathed.
- Living Lie Detector: Marty Eels. Randy even calls him a human lie detector, despite Monk trying to point out (correctly, as it turns out) that what he's doing is impossible without an actual polygraph machine.
- My Beloved Smother: Marty's mother is the controlling type. She nags her son, insults his abilities, and forces him to use information she overheard at her job to pretend to solve the case and become famous.
- Pet the Dog:
- Natalie and Julie attempt to make Monk feel better by faking a case for him to solve. Obviously, he catches on, and he's not enthusiastic about what he perceives as pity.
- Monk lets Marty take the credit for finding his mother at the end of the episode—at least while in front of her.
