Directed by Michael Watkins
Written by Tom Gammill and Max Pross
Harold Krenshaw runs into Monk at work on an investigation in a parking lot, from where Sally Larkin (Dina Meyer) was abducted. Harold touts his new psychiatrist, a hypnotherapist. Harold seems genuinely happy, able to appreciate a double rainbow, while Monk is indifferent. It gets to Monk though, and he decides to give the hypnotherapist a call.
Dr. Lawrence Climan (Richard Schiff) regresses Monk to when he was 9-years-old. The next day, as he goes about his work, Monk is acting very childish, obnoxiously so. In the park, he dares Natalie to climb a tree. In a corporate office, even as he figures out that Aaron Larkin (Henry Czerny) is having an affair with a married woman, Monk talks about "cooties."
Dr. Bell says that Monk will eventually snap out of it, and that Monk should be allowed to participate in investigations, like the Larkin investigation.
But that quickly proves to be quite unworkable. To escape the cabin where Aaron chained her up, Sally kills him with a 2-by-4. Monk comes up with the asinine theory that Aaron's pants fell off and he killed himself with the 2-by-4 because of the embarrassment.
Stottlemeyer now thinks Monk is completely incapable of contributing anything of value to the investigation, and dismisses as worthless Monk's assertions that Sally's lying about everything. Monk also makes the infantile assertion that a girl is scientifically incapable of beating up a boy. Monk's immaturity culminates with Monk eating a piece of gum off Sally's shoe (earning $5 from a wager with Disher). He suddenly declares he knows what happened, but everybody writes him off that it's going to be another of his childish summations. Offended, Monk declares he's running away to France.
But as the day goes on, Monk is steadily hit with the reality that he's not a 9-year-old. On the playground, the other kids won't play with him, and mothers won't let them anyway. Not too long, he sees that Krenshaw's hypnosis has made him so care-free, he no longer cares about wearing clothes and walks around nude in public. Ultimately, the hypnosis wears off when Monk acknowledges he's not really a kid and it's time for Hoppy to go home.
Later on, Sally spots Monk on his way to release Hoppy onto a pond. Sally decides to follow Monk and confront him, to ascertain that he's not a loose end. Their conversation leads him to a real summation, where he explains he solved the case. That the gum he ate off her shoe is material evidence in the crime, because it proves that Sally killed Aaron in their home shortly after a visit from Stottlemeyer, who was chewing some of Disher's homemade chewing gum. Sally then transported Aaron's corpse to the cabin where she was pretending to be chained up. With Aaron dead rather than divorced, his prenuptial agreement with Sally becomes inapplicable as Sally inherits his fortune.
Monk throws away the gum but then realizes he should have held on to it. Sally then fights Monk and almost uses an oar to kill Monk. The cops show up just in time to arrest Sally and for Monk to give Disher the crucial bit of evidence.
This episode contains examples of the following tropes:
- Big Secret: The alleged abductor doesn't want to admit he wasn't at home when his wife went missing, because his alibi is that he was with someone else's wife.
- Bludgeoned to Death: Aaron was killed when Sally strikes him on the head with a floorboard from the cabin. The critical thing is that she did not kill him in the cabin as he was holding her hostage, but rather in their home.
- Book Ends: Near the beginning of the episode, Monk is rather indifferent to the double rainbow, despite Natalie's prodding. At the end of the episode, he's likewise indifferent about a bird nest out his window, though he does take a look after Natalie gives up trying to get him to see it.
- Bungled Hypnotism:
- Obviously so for Monk, but later on in the episode we see that Harold has also had some unpleasant unintended consequences as a result of hypnotherapy.
- As mentioned by Dr. Bell, this wasn't the first time this had happened with Dr. Climan's therapy: the former had had to undo the latter's damage for many years beforehand.
- Crying Wolf: Kid!Monk has so many irrelevant outbursts during Sally's interrogation that when he makes a real discovery— Sally stepping in the gum that Stottlemeyer spat out—Stottlemeyer refuses to listen.
- Driven to Suicide: In-Universe, Played for Laughs. While under the effect of hypnotherapy, Monk gives an immature summation claiming that the victim bludgeoned himself with the board because he was exceptionally embarrassed that his captive saw his butt-crack. In other words, he "died of embarrassment".
- Explain, Explain... Oh, Crap!: Monk starts off happily explaining that he spent the last five hours chewing on the same gum Stottlemeyer spat out at Sally’s former residence, which caught onto Sally’s heeled shoe. Upon realizing he’s been chewing on someone else’s gum, his fears and compulsions return and he’s disgusted.
- Inheritance Murder: Sally signed a prenup and so can't cash out on her pending divorce with her Fiction 500 husband. So she bumps him off before it goes through so she'll get everything.
- Just in Time: Stottlemeyer and uniformed officers arrive not a moment too soon to save Monk from a clobbering by Sally.
- Manchild: Monk spends most of the episode acting like a large kid as a result of some hypnotherapy. He becomes a bigger nuisance to Stottlemeyer and Disher due to him doing things like coming up with a ridiculous theory of what happened with Sally and her alleged abductor, making fart sounds, and wrapping himself up with tape. He does snap out of it once he solves the case for real.
- Morally Ambiguous Doctorate: Downplayed. Dr. Climan seems to have good intentions with his hypnotherapy and wanting to help people. However, if Monk and Harold's behavior or Dr. Bell's testimony are any indication, he isn't very good at what he does.
- Naked People Are Funny: Harold becomes a subject of this when the hypnotherapy erases his inhibitions and makes him unafraid to wear his birthday suit in public. He's arrested for indecent exposure.
- Noodle Incident: Dr. Bell tells Monk's friends that he has had to clean up a few of Climans' "messes" before...
- O.O.C. Is Serious Business: Inverted. Sally only knows Monk as an overgrown child who is potentially intelligent, but not smart. So she's very used to the idea of Adrian Monk being a little boy in a grown man's body the next time she meets him. When she sees Monk's not the same Manchild from before, she coldly acknowledges "You're different...", realizing she's dealing with a detective now.
- Pygmalion Snap Back: After realizing he's been chewing a piece of gum he licked off a shoe for almost six hours, Monk starts to revert to his old self. By the time Stottlemeyer rescues him, Monk is fully back to his old self, with all his fears and compulsions.
- Rule of Symbolism: Monk's frog Hoppy. When he first catches him, it represents him rediscovering his childhood (if via hypnosis). Later, after gradually snapping out of it, he releases Hoppy in the same pond he came from.
- The Summation: Monk gives two of them in the episode:
- One while he is in his childlike state. He thinks that Aaron Larkin kept food away from his wife, but in his excitement and jumping around, his pants fell down and Sally saw his underwear and laughed at him. So, in shame, he whacked himself with a floor plank and killed himself. This summation features Sally and Aaron hamming it up and acting like little kids, and naturally no-one buys it.
- The second summation comes up once Monk is back to normal. In reality, Sally wanted to kill her husband so she wouldn't lose money in a divorce via their pre-nup. So she faked her own kidnapping (even shackling her foot for three days and starving herself to make it look good). Then, she ripped a plank out of the floor, took a rug from the cabin, and killed Aaron with the plank while he was looking over the rug. She then rolled the rug up with him in it and brought it to the cabin to make it look like she killed him there and broke free.
- Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: A grown man visiting a playground of children and worried mothers? Yeah, that's bound to empty a playground really quickly.
- We Need a Distraction: During the murder, Sally laid a rug from the cabin in the floor and Aaron's mansion. As he looked down in confusion wondering where the hell this rug came from, Sally delivered the fatal blow.
