Headscratchers / Monk

As a Headscratchers subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.

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Test Everything...

• On the note of the finale, here's one BIG thing. The police flat out say to TEST EVERYTHING Monk had bought at the store before he was poisoned, then LATER say they basically only tested the thing he'd put in his mouth. Huge plot hole, right there.
  • The police do lie when it come to matters like this. There are many occasions where the cops will swear they kept the lookout 24/7 while in reality they went to the bathroom or a smoking break just long enough for the perp to slip.
  • And to be fair, when people hear "poison", food and beverage are usually what they're thinking of.
  • There's a reason Clean Food, Poisoned Fork is a trope.

Romantic Retcon

• It really bugs me that in the series finale they retconned Monk's personal history. "Mr. Monk and the Class Reunion" was about how Monk met Trudy in college and it was a nice sweet episode, but the series finale pretty much erased that with the idea that they met only 15 years prior to Trudy's death. Monk is 50 in the last season, so he must have been 23 when he met Trudy. It doesn't add up.
  • Yes. Because NOBODY has EVER been in college at age 23...
    • Especially given that I doubt that Monk stopped at one bachelor's...though they would have called him Dr. if he'd had a doctorate, so I'm guessing multiple Master's degrees.
    • The one thing Monk isn't afraid of is learning and studying. To know all the stuff he knows when it comes to investigating crimes, I guarantee he took a lot of extra courses and probably has several degrees.
    • His disorders could have made attending classes difficult, causing him to spend much longer in college than he would have otherwise.
    • He clearly graduated in 1981. You realize that "Mr. Monk and the Class Reunion" aired and is set at Monk's 25th college reunion in 2006, clearly meaning that Monk graduated in 1981. Well one of his reunions, a Bachelor class could be separate to a Masters, especially if he did a few Masters
    • In an early episode He said that Trudy fell in love with him when he was a detective. That was why he couldn't stop being a detective (though privately now) which was retconned later into them meeting and falling in love in college.
  • Ambrose stated in his first appearance that Monk started dating at 26. It's really not unbelievable that he'd be in college for a long time. Very intelligent people with poor social skills often struggle in school.

Monk Failed a Spot Check?

• In the house of Adrian Monk, how does that umbrella ever end up with wrong way round and how do those suits end up out of order? You know, in the season 1 title card?
  • Sharona hung up the umbrella when Monk was out of the room. He didn't notice until later.
    • He's Monk; how could he not notice?
    • Sharona hung up the umbrella when Monk was out of the room. He didn't enter until later.
  • We also have to chalk this up to Rule Of Establishing Character Moments or whatever this falls under. The title card is there to establish Monk's key personality details; in this case, his obsessive need to have everything arranged just so. This wouldn't be possible to establish if everything was already just so, so in order to establish this something has to be out of place for Monk to arrange back into order.

Homicidal Overconfidence

• Why do the killers seem to taunt Monk with the fact that they did it so often? The point of all their ingenious plans to give themselves a perfect alibi should be to keep them from falling under any sort of suspicion, not to allow them to basically say 'yes, I did it, but you can't prove how'. I realize that probably the entire point of these scenarios is that the killer is so arrogant that they never even consider the possibility of their own failing, but it's still stupid.
  • Sometimes there's no question as to whether or not they did it. Take the episode with the chessmaster, for example. His wife came to Monk and Natalie and said that her husband was going to kill her. Hours later, her husband has killed her through a poisoned wine bottle. Besides which, Monk is pretty well-known within San Francisco. Even when they swear they didn't do it, Monk figures them out. There's no point in lying.
    • For the same reason the coolest, most convincing Magnificent Bastard will always break down and confess in police procedurals or detective programs in the final minutes: because the 40 minutes is up.

OSHA Hasn't Seen the Bank

• In "Mr. Monk Goes to the Bank," Monk, Natalie, Stottlemeyer and Disher are locked into a bank vault and slowly suffocating. That CAN'T HAPPEN; bank vaults have air-locks in them should something like that ever happen, as well as a means of getting food and water inside should it take awhile to get someone out. Once this troper realized how unrealistic that episode was, she started questioning whether ANY of them made sense.
  • At one point, Natalie's standing in front of an air vent and saying, "There's no air. They shut it off." All the employees of the bank were deliberately trying to suffocate them, so they would have sabotaged any such safeguards.
    • Why, exactly, is there apparently a "Suffocate anyone in the vault" button?!
    • Fire hazard, you don't shoot pressurized water on dollar bills.
    • Why wouldn't you have a "Suffocate anyone in the vault" button? I know if I ever owned a bank, that'd be the first button installed (almost like what's used on Vault 713 at Gringotts).
    • The "button" in question is presumably the on/off switch for a fan in the ventilation duct.
  • That, and one of the employees specifically states that he shut the air off.
  • Also, according to the Rule of Cool, this vault lacks some other general safety features seen in vaults, like phones and panic alarms.

One Way to Get Out of Jury Duty...

• I had this problem in "Mr. Monk Gets Jury Duty," where he was on a jury. One, as a suspended detective Monk cannot sit on a jury; and two, his actions in solving another crime whilst on that jury would have caused a mistrial. Why didn't he get Dr. Kroger to write the judge a letter explaining it all?
  • Natalie notices that, too; she assures him in the beginning that he won't get chosen because he's a detective. As for the second part, there was no indication the initial case wasn't declared a mistrial. We never see a verdict or anything for that case.
    • The judge in question was a total Jerkass, and basically put Monk on the jury in a fit of pique. Me, I'd like to know why the defense didn't raise holy hell about that. Maybe the (innocent) defendant had heard of Monk, and whispered to his lawyer not to object to the illegal pick because he (correctly) assumed Monk would prove him innocent?
    • More likely the attorney had crossed paths with Monk before, and believed his client to be innocent, so he had zero reason to protest. That sounds more likely than a random dude who have never been to trial should know about Monk.
• Since Monk has OCD, it would be highly unlikely for him to be selected on a jury. Plus, Monk is a contractor for the police department and since he technically works in the criminal justice system, that would have made him exempt from jury duty. This is one case where the writers were willing to overlook any loopholes because they wanted Monk to serve jury duty and had what they thought was a great script for it, based on the plot to 12 Angry Men. On TV, the protagonist serving jury duty is a classic device, not just for comedy, but also for drama, and can be turned into an entertaining episode.
  • It's surprising that none of the bailiffs or the judge seem to recognize Monk. Given how often he participates in criminal cases, the judge and bailiffs at least should be familiar with him enough to give special instructions to the jury.
  • Realistically, Monk could ask and he'd likely be allowed to leave. Although that's still dependent on him asking. And there are some rare instances where some judge decides not to exempt someone. Just because it's a big country and every once in a while there are people who don't understand these kinds of issues or some other silly thing.

DN-Error

• In the episode "Mr. Monk and The Wrong Man" DNA testing shows that the blood on the victims' fingernails does not belong to the guy who was put away. But that evidence does not an acquittal make! They must have had other evidence, right?
  • A moonbat did it?
  • Maybe the case rested on that physical evidence.
  • It's an acquittal if the jury believes it's good enough for an acquittal. And most juries tend to regard DNA evidence as nigh-unquestionable unless it's explained away somehow. Clearly the prosecution failed to do so.
  • First it was revision so less scrupulous inspection and second the witness said no one listened to her testimony so yes all they had is one guy entered and kill people and never mentioned two murderers.
  • In real life, Max Barton wouldn't be immediately released. What would happen is that he would be granted a new trial with the DNA evidence excluded. Considering all the other evidence Monk outlined that led him to Barton, Barton would still be convicted.

Get Your Shots

• In the episode "Mr. Monk Gets Fired" Monk identifies the dismembered body as the body of Larysa Zereyva, a woman born before 1978 in one of the Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia or Lithuania), because the corpse has a smallpox vaccination scar and they stopped vaccinating in the Baltic states in 1978. In Poland the routine vaccination of babies continued until 1980, as my own scar bears witness. I could not find any data on it, but I guess in a few other countries the vaccination programme lasted longer than in the USA.
  • Couldn't find the data either, but since smallpox was proclaimed eradicated only in 1980, and USSR (which the present Baltic states were part of at the time) was one of the proponents of the Smallpox Eradication Programme, it's likely that they continued there until at least 1980 as well.
  • If the vaccine wasn't administered before the age of 2, the timeline works.

Mr. Monk's Brother and the Gun Manual

• How does Ambrose write a manual for a gun? Either he has never fired it (just the person I want writing my manuals) or he has a shooting range in his house (seeing as how he is obsessed with keeping everything how it was, unlikely.)
  • He was probably just given all of the relevant information and asked to put it in the form of a manual. And possibly to translate it. After all, that's how it's probably done in real life - they would use experts in the field of writing things like manuals and instruction guides, rather than experts in, say, guns.
  • As someone who has written manuals they provide you with the information from whoever designed and how it works and you put it in Captain Dummy Talk. I'd say at least half the time I didn't have the actual product available, just rough instructions, pictures, and sometimes videos. It's cheaper to mail (or e-mail nowadays) the information than it is to ship something like a vacuum cleaner.
  • Agreeing with the troper immediately above me. I've written manuals for software without having used it — sometimes before it even exists. With the right specs, a little research, and someone doing the actual QA going over it later, it's easy.
  • Sometime he is just translating those too.

Gambling on Monk's Abilities

• How is it in "Mr. Monk Goes to Vegas" that everyone was opposed to Monk gambling? He's got virtually perfect eidetic memory. He could be earning hundreds of thousands on blackjack tables. What is especially mind boggling is that Natalie was the most avid supporter of the "don't gamble" idea. She was complaining an episode or two before that Monk doesn't pay her enough money, how is that supposed to make sense?
  • Because Natalie was an ex-gambling addict and so, she knew better. The problem wasn't the fact that Monk could cheat his way onto millions, but the fact that (if I recall correctly) his OCD causes him to display traits of a life-time gambling addict while he was still only trying to pay-up Randy's pathetically low (in comparison to the money Monk could make) debt of $30,000.
    • That and I'm sure Monk has numerous tells.
    • Which would be relevant if Monk was playing poker...
    • It's even mentioned in Mr. Monk in Outer Space that Monk is not a good person about hiding his feelings in his body language.
  • Well, Monk does have a little something called Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Maybe they feel combining gambling with his OCD is a bad idea?
    • This does make sense. The ideal number to get in Blackjack is 21, an odd number. Monk hates odd numbers.
    • There's also the fact that getting caught counting cards in a casino is a good way to get kicked out. Which in a way, happens.
  • Eidetic memory means jack shit when Monk decides to play roulette and other game because of how quick he gets obsessed, and also he is obviously counting cards so casino can tell him to just not play blackjack.

Search Stumbling Block

• In "Mr. Monk and the Red Herring" how come the security guards were searching people if they weren't supposed to realize the moon rock was missing? And the bad guy worked there, so he shouldn't have been surprised about the guards if it was a routine thing.
  • It slipped his mind maybe? Or perhaps the people in charge had changed their minds?
  • What museum do you go to that frisks you as you leave?
  • Perhaps there was another unrelated theft that the writers just forgot to mention to the audience which is why everyone was being searched?

Coroner Failed a Spot Check?

• For that matter, medical examiners in San Francisco must really suck if they've examined a woman supposedly bitten to death by a dog but don't notice anything weird about the lack of dog saliva or scratch marks or fur.
  • The guy did kidnap her dog for a while, he probably took fur and saliva from it then.
  • It never says he did. It only said he made that mold out of the dog's jaws.
  • Dogs do shed and slobber.

Threatening an Officer

• In the last-season episode where Monk impersonates an assassin, why was he not detained for implicitly threatening a police officer? If any other officer had gone too deep, Stottlemeyer would most likely have decked them right there, or the FBI agent (and Disher, if he was there) would have called for backup if he resisted. But Stottlemeyer sees the best detective on the west coast, a man with (usually) severe psychological problems, and most importantly his best friend walk into a dangerous and situation where he'll almost definitely have to kill in cold blood or be killed himself, against police orders, and just lets him go because he's ticked. And what really bugs me, since Stottlemeyer's not the most competent choice for authority by a long shot (both where Monk is concerned and in general since his divorce), is that the others let Monk go, and nobody (not even the frickin' FBI agent) calls him (Stottlemeyer) on it!

Mr. Monk Is Unrecognizable

• Speaking of that episode, there are a lot of times Monk has been in the news (enough for at least a few of the cases he takes to be brought to him because of it.). How does that plot even work?
  • Well, the guy Monk was impersonating was an alleged hit man (keep in mind the FBI agent states clearly that they've linked this hit man to 17 murders, but they have no solid evidence against him), and he tried to keep his stuff undercover. Monk is a well-known detective, so it must have been easy for the mobster to just say "Hey, we look the same, but we're different people. Imagine that." Monk might've just done the same, like he tried to in that episode when he was recognized. The other mobsters might've done a search on this "Adrian Monk" and figured, "Hey, what a coincidence." Then again, why they couldn't show that...or why they wouldn't be even more suspicious that he was acting different around the time they discovered he has a doppelganger...well...
  • That episode took place in Los Angeles; the show only ever implies he's a local celebrity in San Francisco. Also, Monk's not exactly caught on camera all that often, so most people probably don't know what Monk looks like.
  • Monk did come close to blowing his cover right before the aforementioned incident, because Harold Krenshaw just so happened to stumble upon Monk and the mobsters talking at the beach, which necessitated Monk to threaten him while in-character as 'Frank de Palma' to keep himself from being outed as an imposter. And Monk actually was pretty much in control of himself the whole time: notice how when Jimmy Barlow took him to Greenblatt's house for the hit that Monk immediately broke character as soon as he was inside and out of earshot from Jimmy.

Lightning vs 'Lectrocution

• In the one where Monk has to hide out in the woods because he sees a Chinese mob killing, the woman who lives nearby drops a radio into her husband's bath to kill him, then tries to make it look like he was struck by lightning. After The Summation, the deputy says "we'll do an autopsy on your husband. They'll be able to tell us if the cause of death is lightning or electrocution". But if you die from being hit by lightning, then you die due to electrocution, surely?
  • True. But there is a technical distinction. The word "electrocution" is actually a portmanteau for "electric execution" and properly refers to a deliberate execution by electric shock. Doctors and forensic techs use distinctions like this in order to provide greater clarity. Since a lightning bolt is several thousand times more powerful than anything human beings are capable of generating, an autopsy would easily reveal the difference.
  • What bothers me about this is that lightning is superheated, which means that they really should have known just by looking at the corpse the first time that he hadn't been struck by lightning. A radio doesn't use enough electricity to actually fry the hell out of a person the way lightning does.
    • It's not so much that Martin was hit by the bolt itself, the story was that the bolt stuck the metal boat, and that in turn fried him through completing the circuit. Like the troper above says, I assume that being in a metal boat that's been hit by lightning would have way more voltage than being in a bathtub with a radio.

Does Disher Have Uncles?

• In "Mr. Monk Gets Cabin Fever" Disher says that he doesn't have any uncles. In "Mr. Monk Visits a Farm" or whatever it's called, which I'm pretty sure takes place later, Disher's uncle is killed. Had Randy had a falling out with his uncle prior to "Mr. Monk Gets Cabin Fever", or something?
  • I noticed that, too. I just figured that maybe one of his Aunts got married, but if the Uncle's last name in "Visits a Farm" was Disher, that's highly unlikely. More than probable it's just one of those little snafu's they didn't catch.
  • It's possible that the events of "Visits a Farm" took place before "Cabin Fever" In-Universe, and the episodes were just the wrong way around, if you know what I mean.
    • I disagree. "Mr. Monk Visits a Farm" could not take place before "Mr. Monk Gets Cabin Fever" because in "Cabin Fever," Natalie is accusing Monk of having bad karma for causing deaths to happen everywhere he goes, yet by the time episodes that aired immediately before "Visits a Farm" came around, she was perfectly content with Monk finding bodies everywhere he went. I figure maybe he was lying to the girl he was talking to just to impress her.
    • Also in “Mr. Monk Gets Cabin Fever,” Natalie was brand new and still discovering Monk’s quirks, whereas she was basically a pro by the time of “Mr. Monk Visits a Farm.”

(Dis)order in the Court

• How biased was the judge in Mr. Monk Takes The Stand? I would have overruled the "undefeated" lawyer for badgering the witness and intentionally causing disorder ("Does this piece fit with this piece? How about this piece? This piece?!"), as well as bringing in "evidence" through the front door of the trial instead of following proper procedures, regardless of whether I had been following Monk's show for several years or were allowed to tell him off specifically for using such a stupidly blatant Chewbacca Defense.
  • This troper was thinking the exact same thing. Whatever happened to "Badgering the Witness"?
  • It wasn't just the judge's fault, there's plenty more blame to go around. For instance: the prosecutor. Why didn't the prosecutor object to the obvious badgering by the "undefeated" lawyer? For that matter, why didn't Monk receive any sort of preparation before he took the stand? You'd think with Monk's rather fragile mental state some pre-trial preparation would have been a top priority. And while we're on the subject, why would Monk have that much trouble in the first place? As a former police officer and now independent investigator who contracts with the police department, he must've been called to testify in court many times in the past. Are we to believe that in all that time he's never met an aggressive, badgering attorney before?
    • He was prepped (we see part of it onscreen), it just didn't go very well for Monk because of how aggressive Harrison Powell is during cross-examinations. I think he's only been called to testify once since the show started, and therefore since Trudy died, but more importantly he hasn't gone up against an "undefeated" guy.
    • It probably doesn't need to happen that often. Keep in mind, most people confess after Monk explains why it was only possible that they did it, and a lot of those that don't have left behind some kind of incontrovertible evidence that convinces the captain to begin with.

Dilworth Didn't Think It Through

• The evil paramedic Angeline Dilworth in "Mr. Monk and the Voodoo Curse". How are you going to hide that the person you brought in for swallowing a (possibly) poisonous substance just got decapitated, that there is blood on your scalpel and what not.
  • How about mailing it to her in the first place? It worked on the other ones because they were already dead and she didn't need to worry about screwing them up, but Natalie was supposed to be decapitated. How on earth was that supposed to be ensured? Natalie getting sent to the hospital was pretty much entirely chance.
  • I was wondering why not just let it be assumed (or even show up at the reverend's office and offer her condolences, then drop an offhand "well, at least...") that it broke the curse, and she just happened to be poisoned by drinking an unguent instead of waiting for instructions? (aside from being totally insane, of course.)
  • She wasn't necessarily going to kill Natalie before she got her in the ambulance. She overheard Monk talking about his superstitious assistant and set her up to distract him. If it worked long enough for her to get away with the crime, then it wouldn't have mattered much. But when she had her there and Natalie figured her out, she figured she might as well kill her. The real question is, what are the odds that that particular ambulance showed up to Monk's house? How many hospitals must there be in San Francisco?
    • A police safe house. Same question though. And what is the driver doing in all this?
    • I figured she just sent the doll as a distraction, and when Natalie fell into her lap, tried to kill her because, as Monk pointed out, she's nuts.

Ambrose and the Cough Medicine

• Wasn't Trudy getting cough medicine for Ambrose something Monk didn't know? That flashback doesn't make sense.
  • The solution to that one is simple: Ambrose didn't know that Adrian knew.

Unnecessary Spanking

• In Mr. Monk and the Naked Man, why was the doctor hitting just-birthed Monk if he was already crying?
  • Sometimes when babies are born, doctors need to spank the babies to make them breathe.
    • Yes, but if they couldn't breathe, there wouldn't be any air in the lungs that they could use to cry. If Monk was crying, he was breathing.
  • Maybe he was whimpering initially and the doctor spanked him to get him to breathe more deeply?

Only Felt This Way Twice

• Stottlemeyer tells TK he's never felt 'this way', which I'm assuming he meant love/attraction-wise. I think it's great he finally got a love interest who wasn't a murderer. I firmly believe a person can be in love, split, and then, fall in love with another person. But it bugs the ever-loving crap out of me when a character disregards their previous partner in such a way. He knew Karen since childhood, had two children with her, was on the verge of a nervous breakdown when there was a possibility she'd die in "Mr. Monk and the Captain's Wife", and in "Mr. Monk and the Captain's Marriage" was willing to forgive her for having a (fictional) affair because he so badly wanted to make the marriage work, and was married to her for two decades. At one point, he was in love with her and did feel 'this way'.
  • Knowing someone since childhood is different from a whirlwind romance. Just because he married both of them doesn't mean his feelings for them were exactly the same.
    • I don't think his feelings for both could or should be exactly the same. But he was in love with Karen; she was a for a long time a huge part of his world. For him to simply disregard all that bugged me.
    • Stottlemeyer loved his wife, but they'd been having problems for years—going all the way back to the very first episode. Spend that long unhappy, it's going to sour your view of the relationship.
    • Leland didn't really love his wife by the end of their marriage. The only reason they lasted as long as they did was because they met/married young and had small children. She never respected him or his career choices, even though it paid for her lifestyle and her documentaries, and the few times she visited him at the station, he got stressed to the point he literally had to have Randy stand guard for him and distract her while he rearranged his entire office (he wasn't even allowed to keep his gun and other manly/cop stuff around even his own office when she was around).
  • That, and "I've never felt this way before" sounds more romantic than "I've only felt this way when I was around my first wife, who I am currently divorced to due to complications that strained our marriage. Let's just hope second time's the charm, eh?"
  • "I've never felt this way before" isn't synonymous with "I instantaneously love you more than anyone I've ever met." It's not that he feels his brief time with TK is the best relationship he's ever been in, he just finds the nature of it new and exciting.

When Did Monk Develop OCD?

• The pilot tells us that Monk developed OCD after Trudy was murdered. So why does he always show obvious symptoms in flashbacks of before the murder, back to and including his grade school years?
  • All series deviate someway after the pilot. They didn't think they would have time to show it so they just kinda made it self-explanatory.
  • Monk has always had OCD from birth, and managed to control it to some extent as a kid. When he met Trudy her influence helped him to control his OCD even better appearing to most people to have beaten it and any new acquaintances wouldn't have noticed. With the trauma of Trudy's death though, the OCD came roaring back (having taken several levels in badass) to its current overpowering level.
    • The pilot says the extremity of Monk's case is related to his trauma.
    • Monk has OCD and has many phobias. He also demonstrates a variety of symptoms common to people with Asperger Syndrome (outdated diagnosis but appropriate to the show's timeline) and other variants of Autism (currently the official status for both is Autism Spectrum Disorder). All his behaviors together stretch believability to its limits. Monk is not autistic. But his mother was clearly portrayed as high-functioning autistic and she raised her children as if they were also autistic. She was apparently the only parental influence on her children. These are huge environmental factors. Not unexpectedly, her children developed atypical behaviors. Monk's oddities were not crippling, until Trudy was murdered. We see and are told about Monk's behavior before; basically he was odd but not debilitated. All this add some degree of credibility. However, much of the show is wrong, wrongly, wrongfully, wrong wrongness. Much like anything else on TV. People need to relax a bit and enjoy the show, within the confines of knowing it is inaccurate and requires an appropriate level of suspension of disbelief. I have ASD. There are very few characters I can relate to on TV. Fewer still that are successful (ultimately, Monk is successful from the very first episode). I love the show. What are some other characters I might choose to relate to? The Riddler, Dr. Jekyll, Norman Bates, Percy Wetmore, Charlie Brown, Walter Mitty, Gollum, Hannibal Lecter? How about have a little outrage against those characters instead? Ok, realistically there are some more positive examples. How about, uhm, Count von Count? *sigh*. BTW, OCD is not an illness and autism neither is a mental illness (look it up).

Stottlemeyer and the Hearing

• Early on when Monk was given the opportunity to return to active duty and Stottlemeyer spoke against him, were we supposed to side against Stottlemeyer? Based on Monk's prior and later behavior, it seems to me that his disorder does render him unable to fulfill many of the requirements of an active duty police officer. As brilliant as he is, if he can't deal with the daily responsibilities that other officers have to do, he shouldn't be doing the job.
  • I don't think it's that one character was right and one was wrong. It's Monk's show, so the viewer is supposed to be sympathetic towards him, but that doesn't necessarily mean that you shouldn't have also been sympathetic towards Stottlemeyer as well; he made the call he felt he had to make, and feels like he betrayed his friend, and has to live with it.
  • We're not supposed to side wholly against either of them. Both sides had their good points. Stottlemeyer had a duty to tell the truth at the hearing, which he did. On the other hand, Monk is rightly feeling betrayed that his own close friend personally torpedoed his chance to get back on the force. It does seem Monk felt that Stottlemeyer should have refused to testify at all because of their prior relationship, so that, if Monk does get rejected anyway, at least his best friend wasn't the one who had to break his heart. But the results of the hearing weren't shown until near the end of the episode and it's tough to show that both sides have their good points when you've only got 5-10 minutes left to show it.

Mr. Monk is White?

• A black guy gets upset at Monk for being "one of those white guys" or Mexican maids call him a "rich white man." Is he not conspicuously middle-eastern to everyone else's eyes?
  • Tony Shalhoub is Lebanese, but I think that Monk himself is supposed to be white. In fact, only a few of his roles (like Frank Haddad in The Siege have him play characters of Middle-Eastern descent).
  • This on top of the Double Standard of them assuming he's racist just because he's white. Of course, the maids were also the culprits, so it may have just been a ploy to get him to back off so they don't get caught.
  • A couple of instances had Monk posing as a Mexican laborer (in spite of not speaking very good Spanish) such as "Mr. Monk Visits a Farm" and "Mr. Monk on the Run - Part Two". Keep in mind that Monk did also pose as a Sicilian hitman. There are a lot of traits common across several continents which Monk happens to have. Besides, really he'd look equally out of place no matter where he went.
  • Honestly, Shalhoub is accurately described as "white-passing." Looking at him, he could be any number of ethnic backgrounds, from Italian to Greek to Arab to Jewish to Latino. On the show he's described as "Caucasian" several times, and his ethnicity is never specified (the surname Monk sounds Waspy, but it could just as well have been a changed or Anglicized name by immigrant ancestors).

Heiress Asks for Cash

• When Natalie becomes Monk's new assistant, she keeps bugging him that he doesn't give her enough money. But then in Mr. Monk Goes to a Wedding, we find out that she's from a rich family. That doesn't make any sense as to why she needed the money then.
  • Careful with that entitlement mentality. It is entirely reasonable for people to be paid based on their worth in performing their jobs regardless of their personal (or familial) wealth. The series makes it clear that's Monk's assistants are underpaid for the job they do which usually involves tasks far beyond their job description.
  • It seems to be because she doesn't get along with her family.
  • She also states right out in "Mr. Monk Goes to a Wedding" that they haven't offered her financial support, and she wouldn't accept it if they did. Natalie married Mitch against their wishes because she loved him (as opposed to someone of the Davenports' social class, like Paul Buchanan), and even after he died it appears they continued to express their dislike of him to her out of pure classism. Thus, she is distant from her family and has a very tense relationship with her parents. The only one in the family she seems to have a good relationship with is her brother, who is not the head of the family and probably can't influence them to give her money.

Go Directly to Jail...Why?

• Okay, the cult leader from "Mr. Monk Joins A Cult" is definitely a charlatan. But Monk clears his name of murder, and he didn't seem like he had committed any crimes. Why is he in jail in the 100th episode?
  • He's labeled as being in there for fraud; which probably happened shortly after the episode he was in, what with Monk exposing that Ralph Roberts wasn't the paragon of physical health he claimed to be. The discovery that he doesn't live by the philosophies he extols upon his disciples doesn't help^note an example: he claims "money begets envy. Envy is the root of all evil," yet he's worth a couple million dollars, owns parking lots, a TV station, and a karate school, plus seven houses and multiple offshore bank accounts. Everything else is obviously just a Noodle Incident and we are left to fill in the blanks.
  • It was established that his cult encouraged people to empty their bank accounts and give him everything they have under the false pretense that he had developed a philosophy that could guarantee perfect health. Tricking people so they'll do something which benefits you but harms them (in this case taking everything they've got) is pretty much textbook fraud.

Mr. Monk and the Bad Bonding Trip Idea

• In the episode where Monk's dad gets arrested - why do all of his friends/colleagues think that he should reunite and bond with his dad? The man has been missing for forty years, he abandoned their family when Monk was 8 years old! He shows no interest in staying in town to spend time with Adrian or Ambrose, and is overall an unpleasant and unapologetic person. It seems totally out of character for Adrian's friends to suggest he go on a road trip with his father, since they all know what he did and have seen the psychological ramifications of Jack's choices on both Adrian and Ambrose. Possibly Dr. Kroger would suggest it (so that Adrian can get over his own issues regarding his father), but the everyman would NOT side with the dad in this case, much less suggest someone as emotionally fragile as Mr. Monk go on what is obviously going to be a stressful and possibly traumatic trip.
  • Although it's definitely true the trip would obviously be stressful, Jack Monk, Sr. has to be in his seventies, and wouldn't live forever. Now Adrian has met the guy. Think of how dissatisfied he'd feel years down the track when he finally reads his father's obituary, knowing he never had a chance to personally forgive the man. In Real Life, people don't get the chance to forgive the people that have screwed them over - and it's a pretty priceless thing, not to get all sappy...

Gilstrap Didn't Think This Through

• In the Halloween episode "Mr. Monk Goes Home Again", Paul Gilstrap wants to kill his wife by poisoning a candy bar she is fond of, but he also poisons several other candy bars and puts them back into circulation so it looks like a serial killer committed the crime instead. The problem is that the poison he uses is a synthetic one from a lab that works in that it hasn't been released yet. If his plan had actually succeeded, wouldn't he be the only person connected to the crime anyway? Especially since the rest of the candy bars could have been traced back to the grocery store close to his house. Also how does Ambrose identify the poison as being in insecticides if it hadn't been released yet?
  • The poison could simply have had a chemical resemblance to other commonly-used insecticides. Ambrose thus simply assumed that it was an (already) commercially-available insecticide.
  • Yes, but the idea is that it would take a while for the police to have traced the crime back to him. It's never explained if he did plant a few poison bars at other stores.
    • Adding onto this, Gilstrap isn't the only person working in that lab. There's deniability there, that maybe some other person took the poison to kill with the candy bars. But of course, Paul was caught putting the poison back, so he had to abandon ship.

Accidental Deceased Fall Guy Gambit

• In "Mr. Monk's 100th Case," I do think that James Novak had a brilliant strategy for killing his girlfriend - strangle her and pass her death off as that of an active serial killer. However, wouldn't framing said killer only work if the guy were dead? It's bugging me a little bit, but I almost wonder if the original serial killer would have to be found and killed in order for him to be easier to frame for the fourth victim, as he would have been able to prove himself innocent of that murder if taken alive. It just makes me wonder whether Douglas Thurman really shot himself or he was shot by Novak before the SWAT team could break in, allowing a Deceased Fall-Guy Gambit to happen. Although yes it wouldn't make any sense if the guy hadn't left San Francisco and was still at the scene of his crime when Thurman was first sighted.
  • Even if he were taken alive, would people believe a serial killer?

Payment is Out of Balance

• So in "Mr. Monk and the Cobra" Monk says he pays Natalie exactly what he paid Sharona. He eventually decides to raise her pay to cover expenses, which would imply Natalie makes more than Sharona did. But then in Sharona's The Bus Came Back episode, she says how much Monk paid her and it's apparently more than what Natalie gets. Continuity error? I guess it's possible Monk just lied to Natalie, but given how terrible he generally is why bother? Is he really that cheap?
  • One possibility is that Monk actually paid Sharona a certain amount for being his assistant and a certain amount for being his nurse. Since Natalie wasn't his nurse, he considered that he was paying her the same amount for the work she was doing. Sharona earning more could also explain why Sharona was able to pay for all the expenses out of her own income while Natalie couldn't. It doesn't explain why Monk had to get rid of Trudy's office to cover Natalie's extra expenses, although maybe after Sharona left he ended up increasing his therapy schedule and hence didn't have as much spare income.
  • This troper always believed that Monk’s insurance was paying part of Sharona’s salary because she was originally a straight-up nurse, and Monk paid the rest. Then Monk pays Natalie the same amount he paid Sharona, but without insurance kicking in since she’s not a nurse, she ends up taking home less than Sharona did. This of course falls apart anyway when Monk admits in “Mr. Monk and Sharona” that he actually did pay Sharona more than Natalie because “Her kid...ate more!” but then the question itself becomes irrelevant.

Killer Forgot One (Car) Detail

• "Mr. Monk Gets Hypnotized" is a good episode, no doubt. The Faked Kidnapping MO Sally Larkin uses to kill her husband is very clever. Except for one glaring thing about geography: when Randy gets the call at Monk's apartment about Sally turning up alive, we find that the cabin she was hiding at is in Sonoma County, yet she disappears in San Francisco. Sonoma County is 70 miles north of San Francisco, way outside the SFPD jurisdiction. What isn't explained is: if Sally abandoned her car at the strip mall as part of the faked kidnapping, how did she go 70 miles overnight? She couldn't hitchhike because that would have blown her story open if the motorist remembered her and called the police. And we don't know if she somehow made it back to her house and stole one of her husband's cars, but then wouldn't he have realized one of his cars had been stolen?
  • She might have traveled by bus (Golden Gate Transit).

Get Thee to a Therapist

• In "Mr. Monk Takes a Punch," I can get that Stottlemeyer and Disher use lethal force on the Iceman because they have no choice. But why are they seen when the guy who had hired the Iceman is being arrested? Unless I'm wrong, I'm fairly certain the two would have been immediately placed on temporary administrative leave in real life so they could receive counseling.

Why Kill the Paperboy?

• This would probably ruin the plot, but in "Mr. Monk and the Paperboy," why go to the trouble of killing the paperboy? What we see is Jose and Nestor Alvarez driving the paper delivery truck through Monk's neighborhood. Jose stops the truck at the corner, and Nestor puts down the paper. But Jose tells him he needs to put it down on the doormat, so Nestor goes back, and has to grab a new paper because the original has been taken. This time, Nestor fails to center the paper, so when Nestor goes back, the thief is already stealing the paper. There's a struggle, and Nestor is killed. If Vicki Salinas and her boyfriend were so eager to keep Kevin Dorfman from seeing the winning lottery numbers on the paper and thought the papers were Kevin's, then why couldn't the guy just wait until the paper truck drove away?
  • He didn't think they'd have any reason to come back so didn't see any reason to wait for the truck to drive away.
  • It does say a lot about how many times murder wouldn't be necessary if someone was just patient.

No Warrant Should Be No Problem

• In "Mr. Monk and the Bully" why are they stuck waiting outside the house at the end for the warrant to come through so they can go inside and save the wife's life? They have Roderick in custody and it is his house. Given he would presumably be concerned for his wife's safety, couldn't they just have asked his permission to enter without a warrant?
  • At that point in time, Monk, Natalie, Stottlemeyer and Disher don't know how much danger Marilyn is in. They don't realize that the twin is actively trying to kill Marilyn at that moment in time until Marilyn temporarily overpowers the twin enough to yell for help, at which point there's no need for a warrant.

Sharona Holmes

• In "Mr. Monk and the Paperboy", Monk spends roughly the first half of the episode being his usual self; this includes him solving two cases just by reading a newspaper, and for the main case, finding various clues about it. When a separate but related killing happens, he arrives at the scene and makes various deductions. At one point, Sharona makes a single note - that the bottle used as the weapon has lipstick on it, so it was a woman drinking it and therefore the killer rather than the victim - and immediately it's treated as proof that Sharona is smarter than Monk (Stottlemeyer literally says as much). Pardon my language, but... what the fuck? That just makes no sense whatsoever. It was just a random way to continue the Running Gag of Sharona being physically stronger than Monk by doing something unrelated and shoehorned in. In-universe and out of universe, I see no reason for it to have happened. There wasn't even any reason Monk couldn't have noticed the lipstick himself - he's done crazier things, and he wasn't in any state of panic or distraction at the time.
  • It's later revealed that Adrian's been having trouble sleeping because of all the sex his neighbor, Kevin Dorfman, has been having with his new girlfriend. Because he was tired, he didn't realize the lottery clue until mere minutes before it was too late. Reasonable to say that he missed the lipstick clue due to being tired as well.

One Missed Message

• In "Mr. Monk and the Earthquake", Sharona is working with a man who is killed by his wife (Christine Rutherford) after an earthquake. She later meets an Australian man on the street and they appear to fall in love. As it turns out, the Australian dude just wanted to get to Sharona's phone because when the phone lines re-opened after the earthquake, Sharona would receive a message from the main murder victim in the story which proved that Christine (whom the Australian guy was working with) had murdered him. While the murder victim was trying to leave the message, he says something like "Christine, what are you doing?" because the wife was about to hit him over the head with a vase and blame it on the aftermath of the earthquake. In the flashback, it shows that the wife shortly afterward discovered her husband's message to Sharona and realized it would be a problem. The problem is, the victim was never on the phone with Sharona in the introduction scene where he was killed by the wife. He was just walking around observing the damage from the earthquake. Why would Sharona receive a message from him?

Mr. Monk Finds the Sierra Spring

• In "Mr. Monk Gets Cabin Fever" why was Monk willing to drink the water off the ground? Even if it was Sierra Springs, it was still ground water and a stream that two other people had been drinking out of which should have been enough to put Monk off. Putting that aside though, Natalie justified it being Sierra Springs by saying the bottling plant was "right over that hill". So there were presumably hundreds of bottles of clean, treated, non-on-the-ground water quite nearby which should have appealed to Monk much more. I know that the joke was that it was free but, while Monk being cheap is occasionally joked about, this is the man who'd buy several glasses of scotch he wasn't even going to drink just to make a bottle even. When it comes to his OCD, he is perfectly willing to spend what he needs to.

Mr. Monk's Assistant, the Fallen Toothpaste Princess

• Overall I found Natalie's past very interesting on how she grew up very rich, but then willingly gave that up and transitioned to a middle-class life. What was the reason behind it? Was it because she believed that her parent's money wasn't needed for her to live a happy life, or because she married Mitch and he wasn't from a high social class?
  • Everything we see about Natalie's relationship with her parents in "Mr. Monk Goes to a Wedding" gives us lots to speculate on. It's certainly a possibility that her parents weren’t happy with the fact that Mitch wasn’t from an elite social standing. As a result, Natalie realized that she no longer wanted to be affiliated with them and keep Mitch’s name. Other elements we learn of her past in other episodes give the impression that she believed money doesn’t always translate into happiness and that love is more important, and when she lost Mitch, that goes to show that no matter how well life is going, it can still knock you down. Basically, she knew she would live a happier and more fulfilling life in a middle-class life with just Mitch and Julie, and then eventually just Monk and Julie because, in a way, Monk really does become a father figure for Julie.
  • It's made apparent through Natalie's comments in the wedding episode that it was the rejection of Mitch that seemed to be the major breaking point in their relationship. They refused to see what Mitch gave to her emotionally. They didn't even seem to view him as a respectable individual, being an Air Force pilot and all. Instead, they simply saw the word "Commoner" stamped across him and figured he had taken their daughter for a fool. Compare that to how they wanted to set Natalie up with Paul Buchanan in "Mr. Monk Is At Your Service", no doubt because of his social standing and he was "available", with no consideration for how he terrorized Natalie and beat up her high school boyfriend.
  • The biggest acknowledgement of Natalie's relationship with her parents is that she never told Stottlemeyer, Randy, or Monk that she was a Davenport before the wedding. Even when Natalie was asking Randy and then asking Stottlemeyer to find her a date to go with her, it was only "Natalie's brother's wedding" and they didn't learn the name Davenport until Randy looked at the invitation. By this point in time, Natalie had been working for Monk for almost a year, and the episode does really give the impression that if it wasn't for the wedding itself and if they hadn't seen the invitation, Natalie never would have told any of them that she was a Davenport.
  • Keeping Mitch's last name was definitely a move that Natalie made that spoke volumes about her parents, but to a lesser extent, it's also possible Natalie felt it would be easier for her as a single mother to have the same last name as her school-aged child. (Sort of the same reasoning Sharona still kept Trevor's last name because of Benjy until he graduated school, and Karen probably kept Leland's last name because of the boys.)
    • Trevor's last name was Howe, not Fleming (Gail's last name is also Fleming, meaning it isn't Sharona's married name). Sharona kept her maiden name when she got married, and either gave Benjy her own name or changed his to Fleming when she left Trevor.
  • According to the novel Mr. Monk is Miserable, Natalie and Mitch eloped for several weeks in Europe and were really stressed about returning to the United States to be met by her parents who were furious at this "betrayal". However, we see that even though it's her brother's wedding, her mother has to micromanage every little aspect of it, to the point of disdainfully lifting her nose at the "slight" of having Randy, a police officer, being Natalie's "plus one", as if Natalie was purposefully spiting her family with a slight, and later shows a similar disdain towards Monk for the same reasons.
  • Curiously, Julie has a decent enough relationship with her grandparents, which is kinda odd seeing as how Natalie was low contact with them. Peggy and Bobby Davenport never accepted Mitch, clearly due to some combination of the status and because Natalie married young, and that obviously hurt Natalie a lot. But you'd think that if Natalie felt so strongly about it, she wouldn't want Julie "contaminated" by her grandparents' elitism and snobbery.

Mr. Monk Cracks the (Blue) Code

• After watching “Mr. Monk and the Badge”, I was left wondering how Monk, a man unafraid to call out lawbreakers regardless of their professions, could have been a cop in the first place. Corruption is commonplace in big-city police departments, and those who don’t go along with the “blue wall of silence” end up being ostracized - or worse.
  • Early in this episode, Monk was welcomed back with open arms, implying he had some friends on the force besides Stottlemeyer and Disher. But when he openly theorized that a murdered rookie cop was on the take, these “friends” treat him like dirt. If they knew Monk from “the old days” and were aware of his detective skills, why would they not give him the benefit of the doubt?
  • In “Mr. Monk Gets Jury Duty”, Monk said he preferred working alone as a cop. So the only friends he really had were Stottlemeyer and Disher. The other cops appreciated Monk’s detective skills, but apparently didn’t like him.

Mr. Monk Meets the Slayboy

• Dex Larson kills Elliot DeSouza because he told him he'd decided to shut down Sapphire, which was bleeding money. He asks him not to tell the others (claiming that he wants one last fun weekend), so once Elliot dies, Dex's decadent lifestyle is safe again. But if Sapphire was such a money drain, he had to have expected that it would only be a matter of time before someone else made the same decision. What was his plan, just keep murdering people until they either declare Sapphire inviolable or he gets caught?
  • It's possible he believed Sapphire could be made profitable again given more time, or it would hold up long enough for him to comfortably retire, or he just genuinely didn't care to think that far in advance.

Why would Murderuss kill Woody Mitchum?

• In "Mr. Monk and the Rapper", the rapper Murderuss is put under suspicion for murdering fellow rapper Xtra Large with a car bomb in the latter's limo. This is due to details like the blasting cap used for the bomb being stolen from a construction site close to his house, the watch used to set the bomb off being a particular type of pocket watch he uses. However, we find out that the killer, record producer Denny Hodges, wasn't trying to kill Large, but rather his business partner Woody Mitchum in order to have all the profits to himself. The bomb killed Large because Denny had forgotten to factor for Daylight Savings when timing the bomb, meaning it went off an hour later than it was supposed to, so the limo dropped off Mitchum and picked up Large.
  
  Here's my question: If Hodges was trying to kill Woody, why would he make the bomb so it looks like Murderuss did it? What motive would Murderuss have for killing the guy? He worked a different label.
  • Good point. Maybe he hoped it would be taken as an attack against Extra Large's label?
  • Most likely he just needed a scapegoat and Murderuss was the first person he figured he could do that for. And/or he could get a little extra victory by framing Murderuss for murder, discrediting his label, and thus getting his own label better business or publicity.

Fastest dresser in New York

• In "Mr. Monk Takes Manhattan" the murderer manages to get the drop on the ambassador and his bodyguards. Fine. But then once the whole plot is revealed, we're supposed to believe that he then managed to remove the coat from a corpse and then redress it in under a second? And this isn't the editing skipping over events, either; the audience is present for the murder, and there is no time between the gunshots and the murderer fleeing the scene.
  • Maybe Leight got the ambassador to make the switch, and his own paranoia led him to shoot them anyway?

Wil You Dismember Me?

• I never really understood the killer's motive in "Mr. Monk Gets Fired." The victim mentioned something about how she helped him hide some assets in his divorce case, so it's likely she was blackmailing him with this info, but it's never outright said, and anyway, that doesn't really justify dismembering her.
  • I didn't get blackmail vibes from her, but I guess Paul Harley figured you can never be too careful.
  • The dismemberment was simply to hide the body or at the very least, make the body unidentifiable. Unfortunately for him, a torso washed up on shore, which helped Monk identify the victim.

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