The Tease of Things I Don't Need

Mr. Monk & the Ghosts In the Machine

When one publishes an item online it's always a possibility someone will come across it years after one posted it and send an email if there's a mail link available. It can be a little disorienting when it happens, especially if one's all but forgotten about it. The worldwide web is littered with such artifacts. This has happened to me several times, as when an economics student putting together his master's thesis came across a piece I'd written on comic book production numbers - a little back-calculation I was able to indulge in because a friendly acquaintance gave me the order number Diamond had given him for the first issue of their comic, which I could use as a reference number against Diamond's ranking system... it's no less boring now than it was then. Still, it caught this graduate student's data-hungry attention and before I knew it I was answering various question and became one of the citations in his thesis, referenced by name alongside major players in the comics industry. (He got his degree, btw.)

Something of the sort happened again just a couple days ago when someone apparently came across a piece I'd quickly written back in 2002 concerning the then recently-debuted series Monk. The email was just a couple lines from some fan of the show who wanted to say something about a recent change in the series.

I've only ever been a casual viewer of the show, which is really all the show will realistically bear unless one simply has no life or has become too attached to the career of one of the actors or the fictional lives of one or more of the characters... which probably feeds back into the point about having no life of one's own. (Not that I can be so haughty about such things. I can tell you in reasonably solid detail what happened in each of the first hundred issues or so of the original runs of Fantastic Four, Avengers, etc. So, if you enjoy something there's no need to justify it to the likes of me.)

When I saw the new season of Monk begin (or at least a new run of shows after a mid-season break, judging from how USA lists these recent episodes as being part of an ongoing third season) and Adrian Monk's nurse/girl friday/aid de camp Sharona (I don't have the patience for setting up images nor linking to individual character sketches, so you can go here to see who the main players are) was gone I figured the writers felt they'd gone as far as they could with her character without taking it the route of a Sharona/Monk romance, which I still think - as I did back in 2002 - would have been a bad decision.

That said, competent writers could have kept her in the mix, as she wasn't what I saw as the show's problem.

The show's biggest problem remains the weakness of the mysteries themselves. Generally, the audience is spoon fed all the clues and nothing but the clues. I'm still not sure if they're clueless, so to speak, or giving the audience sub-par intellectual material is part of the feelgood formula. Perhaps they're afraid that if they gave the audience mysteries where Adrian solved it before they did that they'd begin to resent him? Hey, maybe they know what they're doing and my approach would kill the show.

They did a little better in the first post-Sharona episode, where they threw us a red herring (though, in almost clever but ultimately typical dumb-it-down form, they telegraphed it by naming the episode "Mr. Monk and the Red Herring") by temporarily suggesting that the fish might be some long-lived and valuable breed. We quickly found out it wasn't the fish, but any attempt to logically mislead the audience even momentarily was a big step for this series.

By the end of the episode it was revealed that the writers had forgotten a thing or two, though. Why did the museum worker - who had substituted a fake moon rock (the actual object being sought) and no one was the wiser - have to hide the rock in the aquarium kit? No one knew anything was stolen, yet we're told and shown during the explanatory flashbacks there was some person-by-person search going on for people who were leaving. There's no museum that would survive for long if it did that as a matter of routine, so it must have been in response to a theft... but no one knew there was a theft. Argh.

The following week's episode, with the Bruce Lee-esque mystery, had a similarly silly moment (at least) when the guy who'd been behind the opening scene murder brought a substitute hairbrush to the martial arts star's museum rather than just taking the hairs on it - maybe replacing them with some others, but leaving the brush. Still, that wasn't so bad as we can always note that he wasn't a particularly good criminal. However, there's no way that I could believe that a dead star with that sort of cult fame would've just been lying in state at a funeral home without guards to protect the body from the fanatical fans and ghoulish souvenir hunters. That was just weak, weak writing.

It was still nice to see Harry Groener, who's played (among an impressive list of TV and movie appearances, I was surprised to see, over the past 25 years) Mayor Richard Wilkins III - an evil Mr. Rogers of a character - on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, (side note: These UK fan sites for Buffy & Angel are much better than the US-based ones I've seen) show up as the week's special guest star killed off before the first commercial.

The characters remain nearly the only reason for watching the show, so I do feel for the fans who will miss Sharona. I wonder how long new Monk-mate Natalie will last, especially since they ended her first episode on a note that suggested more of a connection between her and Adrian (feeling the loss of a spouse) and how she found Monk to, oddly enough, have rare and admirable character traits she hadn't seen since her husband's death.

What was most interesting about allof this for me was that until receioving that brief note I hadn't realized I'd been giving any of this much thought. But it was waiting in there when I reached into the mental file. It pops out like spring-loaded joke snakes or diarrhea. I'll leave it to you to decide which is more apt.

Okay... that had better be all from me for tonight. Break's over.