Beauty in Presentation - Mr. Monk and the Kid (S3E16) & the Finale (S8E15-16)

"You can't clean nature with nature!"
- Adrian Monk after touching a tree and being offered a leaf to clean his hand in place of a paper wipe.

There's always been something about detective fiction that brings me back. When I was but a lad I used to buy volumes of different comic book series and get massive chills from the descriptions of how a person was murdered as well as the motives of the murderers. I especially still remember some of those cases from Detective Conan. It's not just because I've reread it now, but the original impact I had from cases like Death Island, Koshien, Symphony Serial Murders, Moonlight Sonata, 12 million hostages, basically all Heiji Hattori cases and then some have affected me in a way where I just yearn to see more suspensful cases with nice character writing. For that very reason the Hercule Poirot TV-series is also my favorite live action TV-series in general. Thus I'm even somewhat familiar with the tropes that are being used in these television series and sometimes I happen to drop a series (usually a movie) that has no redeeming qualities just because my expectations about basic writing methods are so high.

In my younger years, back when I still used to watch basic television at all, I recall watching certain series at certain times: at night we often had airs of Smackdown and some anime such as DBZ or Neon Genesis Evangelion and Digimon, along with some Bruce Willis movies, and at noon it was often Hercule Poirot, Murder She Wrote, or today's subject, Monk.

Monk was created by a duo of Andy Breckman & David Hoberman. The series is nowadays known to be somewhat of a semi classic murder mystery-comedy series starring Tony Shalhoub as an ex-officer known as Adrian Monk ("Mr. Monk"), and it ran from 2002 to 2009 - it has even won numerous Emmy Awards, Golden Globes' and Screen Actors Guild Awards, so its success is etched in history. In general for what it is I can see why Monk succeeded in bringing in the views for many years as a cozy murder mystery television series.

Onto the meat and bones of the show however, our main character Adrian Monk is known to be a great private detective with an uncanny eye for detail - they often say that there is absolutely nothing that misses his sight, be it a thing that has moved in a room or how a person's ear looks or even how someone looked and what they wore 30 years ago (though his fame isn't consistent as sometimes people in other countries know of him, sometimes no one in the room does). Adrian does most of his private work for and with the police, under Cpt. Leland Stottlemeyer (who has aggression and marriage problems and who appreciates Monk quite a bit) who is also one of the main cast and also probably my favourite character in the series (not that there's all that many to pick from, though). Aside from Stottlemeyer, the another main police officer that we always see is the comedic Randy Disher, the clown of the cops who can act well at times.

But things don't always go the way they should as Adrian himself isn't even close to being a normal person even as far as great detectives go as he literally has countless phobias and fears that hinder him from moving forward physically and mentally. Adrian spends much of his time at appointments with his favorite psychiatrist, Dr. Kroger (who is a very funny character himself as well), talking about the past, present and the future and how to start living "more" normally once again. You see, the biggest trauma Adrian has for the entire duration of the series is that couple years prior to the start of the show, Adrian lost his wife, Trudy Monk, in an explosion where Monk was sent a bomb that took her wife's life (they reveal more on that in season 3 and after that in the finale).

The nitty and gritty of Monk as a TV series though of course takes place within the crime scenes. Monk is an episodic series that doesn't have a fleeting timeline (as years do go by for the cast of characters of Monk at the same rate as our 'real life' progresses) but it certainly feels like it does have a fleeting timeline as the status quo always stays the same once an episode ends and the next starts, even after bigger events in the series. There are cases when a character changes (probably also due to the actor/actress resigning), and every time a similar character/s takes the old ones spot.

Adrian for the first few seasons has a sidekick named Sharona who has a son that also tackles along albeit rarely. Sharona is Adrian's housekeeper who takes care of everything for him, but most important of all is that Sharona keeps desinfection wipes with her at all times, so that every time Adrian has to touch a person - to shake their hand or for whatever else reason - Adrian wipes his hand clean as he has a deep fear of anything that might be dirty. In the later seasons Adrian gets yet another female assistant who's like Sharona in ways.

The first thing that comes to my mind right now is Ace Attorney franchise. In Ace Attorney there's our main character Phoenix Wright with her young female sidekick Maya. In the 4th game of the series there's another attorney as a main character with a young female sidekick. In the Ace Attorney spinoff series, Miles Edgeworth Investigations I and II, Edgeworth also has a young female sidekick on his side. It's always the same status quo to try to keep the characters interesting to the target audience. It is kind of cheap writing, yes, but it does work.

Anyway, Mr. Monk and the Kid is the final, 16th episode of season 3 of the Mr. Monk mystery crime and detective fiction TV Series. A less than two-year-old boy named Tommy finds a severed finger in the park, but no one knows from where the boy found it on the scene, and there is also no sign of a culprit or victim. After a short while Adrian arrives on the scene with Tommy and tries to retrace where the child could've moved. Unsurprisingly though (as it's the beginning of the episode) Monk finds nothing to trace the finger back to, but in his endeavor he begins a journey of a short parenthood.
After the DNA on the finger is analyzed and the victim pointed out to be a certain 25-year-old violinist, it doesn't take long for Monk to visit the victim's house and come to the conclusion that there is a man - the victim's brother with the help of their mother - pretending to be the victim.

However the point of the episode is to show something else than a murder case where a guy's finger has been cut. As Monk is on the case we learn that the young boy named Tommy was temporarily taken from his foster parents and needs someone to take custody of him before his new adoptive parents will. The whims of fate lead Adrian to being this temporary parent of Tommy, and with the boy he learns of things like taking care of dirty diapers (Adrian has extreme fear towards microbes and dirt), and Tommy partly even makes Adrian progress as a person as he learns to truly love the boy as a parent. The series however has to return back to the original status quo and Monk has to give up on the custody of Tommy, but only after Tommy has helped him solve the case of the mysterious finger and said quite a heartfelt goodbye,

The cases in Monk are frankly not as greatly presented as they could or should be, it's obviously supposed to be one of the quicker productions due to being a long-running series, and it's supposed to pull in fans with its crazy characters and ideas rather than budget. However this episode three seasons in is perhaps the first one to actually impress me with the directing and extra editing they created in comparison to the norm. The story of the case is told in narration by Adrian and read to Tommy in the form of a fairy tale in a book, but it also a meta-level storytelling. The story talks about a "young prince named Tommy" in the "Kingdom of San Francisco". The story is fully animated and quite impressively edited to Monk's narration and flipping of the book's pages. It's something that emotionally hits the heartstrings and is proof of how effort and creative presentation can truly make a story better. Things like good voice acting, colors, animation, frames, framing, directing, acting, taking chances and doing new things can create a product that helps a series get to the top and stand out from the norm.

 

 And on that note I want to talk about the finale of Monk. It is no lie to say this series didn't progress its storyline at all; for many seasons the series never went anywhere until season 3, and after that only after the final season, season 8 especially episodes 15 and 16, Mr. Monk and the End (parts 1 and 2), we finally got to the truth of what happened to Monk's wife and so on. I never had that big of expectations of Monk ever, not in my childhood nor when I watched the show back in 2019 until the end, but the final season had quite a lot of good things to it. First of all, the entire season was focused on letting Adrian move on from the past. It is never explicitly stated but you can see him conquer his phobias one after another, and it's honestly quite impressive to see - after all these years the fans are finally getting the feel of 'this truly is the final season', which is emotional. Even I feel it as emotional storytelling and I have no real attachment to the series. I however want to praise how this series ended up on. The writers knew how to have a climax to the series that's suspensful but also true to the nature of Monk as a series for all these years. My only gripes with the end are that the real big bad guys were out far too quickly as the series never focused on them, however, that also means that it never dragged its feet with them and they managed to leave an impression that was never tarnished.