Fridge / Monk

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

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Fridge Brilliance

• The finale reveal that Trudy had had a child, and Monk reconnecting with her, and it filling a missing part of his life, and in a way completing him. I realized in rewatches that this had been led up to from way back. Besides having both of his assistants having kids, He and Trudy talking of having kids in a flashback and him wishing he'd said yes, Mr. Monk and The Kid, And Natalie having also lost a spouse, and her saying that Life goes on, while Monk's didn't, was because her life HAD to go on, as she had a child to raise. All these show that a thing missing in his life was a child that was always out there. It being Trudy's child he saw her as his own, just as he would have if she had been with Trudy when they first met.
• For the series as a whole: Monk’s devotion to Trudy is seemingly far beyond even that of a person who deeply loves their partner. But we’ve seen Monk show obsessive tendencies towards people in the past, and not always in negative ways (Maria Cordova, for example). It’s possible that these same tendencies contribute in some part to his devotion. Once he loved her, he really loved her.
• At first the reveal of Trudy's killer and his motive seemed to come out of nowhere, but in hindsight the point was that in the end Rickover was really no different from all the other guys Monk imprisoned. He was just a petty individual who killed for petty reasons.
• Monk did get a better payback on Colmes : he costed him 20 000 dollars when he destroyed his micro when he cleaned the tie.
• Monk's phobia of milk seems silly when you hear it, but it makes sense knowing that he's a germophobic and he most likely relates milking a cow to a cow peeing out milk or the whole process of milking very unsanitary. Or because of how easy it is for even ultra pasteurized milk to go bad.
  • Or because in "Mr. Monk and the Naked Man", we learn Monk's memory is so good that his bias towards naked people stemmed from the memory of his own birth. Who can say his fear of milk doesn't stem from, say, the memory of his mother nursing him?
• In "Mr. Monk and the Girl who Cried Wolf" it seems at first to make completely no sense that Sharona would arrange a frankly obnoxious Sassy Black Woman to take care of Monk having apparently told her nothing about his needs, even though it should be clear to anyone who spent two seconds in her company that she was not suited to the job. However, it's probable that all the nurses whom Sharona had worked with or been friends with who'd be far more qualified already knew Monk's flaws and wouldn't take him on. Meanwhile, Varla is so self-absorbed that she never cared enough to learn about the patient in advance (and probably isn't even a friend, just someone Sharona met in her writing class) and Sharona would have to hold back information from her so she'd actually take Monk on as a client.
  • Considering Sharona wasn't in the best state of mind during the episode, it probably didn't help her decision along with the above, she was so desperate she would have set Adrien up with anyone that would take him for fear of suffering the same dementia her father had.
• In "Mr. Monk Goes Home Again", Paul Gilstrap is dressed up as Frankenstein's Monster for Halloween. This becomes surprisingly fitting when you consider that in the book, the monster committed premeditated murder as well. Ironically, Frankenstein's monster managed to kill his creator's wife, whilst Gilstrap failed to even kill his own wife.
• In "Mr. Monk and the Actor," Monk has to talk David Ruskin (who is dressed as him) out of shooting a man he thinks is Trudy's killer. In "Mr. Monk and the End," Stottlemeyer and Disher have to talk Monk out of doing this to the man who ordered Trudy's death.
• In "Mr. Monk and the Bully", Monk ultimately complains that he's getting the shorter end of the stick than his bully Roderick Brody. But if he opens his eyes, on three levels, things turned out for the better.
  • For one, Monk saved his bully's kindly wife, comparable to saving Trudy, from her evil twin.
  • It's better that Monk never got revenge on Roderick Brody by wrongfully convicting him because even he admit he felt like a ghoul for celebrating Roderick's wrongful conviction. Besides, if he had gone through with it, then a killer (the evil twin sister) would be walking free and enjoying the wealth she upended from her sister and brother-in-law.
  • And if that doesn't satisfy, then think about this: Roderick paid Monk to solve an infidelity case that never really happened, and Monk's actions may have prevented Roderick and his innocent wife from dying.
• In "Mr. Monk and the Garbage Strike", it's notably the first episode where Monk is willing to look the other way and claim suicide. And he grows unhinged towards the end when he claims Alice Cooper committed the murder. The garbage strike isn't just causing Monk discomfort, it's polluting him morally and mentally.
• In "Mr. Monk and the Magician", Karl Torini mocks Kevin's Motor Mouth tendencies after his death. The mockery could just count as petty meanness, but it may just be him mocking the fact that Kevin's mouth was the reason Torini had him killed: with how talkative he was, Torni afraid he'd let something slip and reveal inconsistencies that could tie him to his illegal side business as a heroin smuggler for the Triads.
• In "Mr. Monk and the Miracle", it takes a while to get why Monk is less than willing to accept the gravy sauce from the three homeless men: "Bums make their own gravy."
• In "Mr. Monk is on the Air", Monk beats up Max Hudson when the latter insults Trudy's memory. Now in real life, Max would be in a position to sue Monk for assault. But why didn't he do it? Because Max is guilty of murdering his wife. A guy who killed his wife would probably want to stay as far away from a court room as possible. So in other words, Max's own guilt kept him from getting back at Monk for beating him up.
• Fridge-Heartwarming: In "Mr. Monk in Group Therapy", Harold reveals that he sees Monk as a friend, even if he's not good at showing it. It's possible that in "Mr. Monk fights City Hall", Harold might've convinced the council to name the playground after Trudy (even though she died in a hospital) in order to give Monk a consolation for losing the parking garage.
• In "Mr. Monk and the Red-headed Stranger", Stottelmeyer tells Monk his suspects come down to two people: (A) the blind woman with no motive or (B) the Red-headed stranger. Monk chooses (C), even though he doesn't know what "C" is yet. In a sense, there was a "C": the the not-so-blind woman who did have a motive.
• It may seem curious as to why, over the course of eight seasons, Monk has never encountered a case that involved either the murder of a child or a rape. But it makes sense why he didn't on two levels. On an in-universe level, the SFPD may have felt that Monk, as brilliant as he is, would find either scenario too disturbing and be unable to do his usual excellent job of solving the crime (the novel Mr. Monk and the Dirty Cop suggests that there are certain cases Monk never gets assigned due to him not being a specialist). And on a real world level, the show is a dramedy and the creators may have felt that trying to find humor in such cases would have been in poor taste.
• On the DVD boxes, the side art on the final season's box is flipped upside down. Which is entirely the point considering the changes Monk finally goes through.
• Monk mentions a number of times that he and Trudy talked about having children and that she wanted a baby. It's revealed in the finale that she had a child when she was younger and was told the child only lived for nine minutes. So it makes sense that she'd want to try again in order to have the life she was denied with her first child.
• Although he's a little mean-spirited in "Mr. Monk on Wheels", Monk's actions towards Natalie have a touch of brilliance when one realizes his motivation for holding a grudge against her: asymmetry. And no, we're not just talking about how one leg is in a cast while the other isn't. This is also about the imbalance of karma. Granted Monk doesn't quite believe in it, one could argue he's upset at how unfair the scenario is. It was Natalie's idea to visit the guy who shot Monk, and it was Monk who paid for it. This does not justify what he did, but it might explain the scope of why he resents her.
  • Later, when he has his Heel Realization, one could also say this is where Monk realizes his grudge is the imbalance, pushing Natalie to run herself ragged to a state worse that a broken leg.
• Many of the killers' plans have been criticized as being preposterous and unlikely to work in real life. While the show often exaggerates for dramatic and comedic effect, countless real criminals have been caught in part because they overestimated their own intelligence and concocted schemes that they thought were foolproof but turned out not to be.
• No wonder Stottlemeyer snapped while living with Monk in "Mr. Monk and the Very, Very Old Man": beyond the simple fact that he's living with Adrian Monk, Monk (unintentionally) keeps him up all night cleaning multiple nights in a row, making him horrendously sleep-deprived.
• Throughout the series, Sharona and Natalie have to juggle their responsibilities to Monk with their responsibilities to their children. While Monk is frequently whiny and demands far too much from both of them, every time Benjy/Julie has to be picked up from school or has an event or need that will take Sharona/Natalie away from Monk, there's never any question of them missing those events and Monk lets them leave whenever they need to attend to their children (an unusual situation for American employment, and especially notable with just how needy Monk is). We've seen that Monk had a very difficult relationship with his own emotionally-distant mother; apart from genuinely caring about Benjy and Julie, he's fascinated by Sharona's and Natalie's examples of affectionate, loving motherhood and won't stand in the way of their care for their children.
• Why didn't Wendy Mass sue the grocery store in "Mr. Monk and the Red-Headed Stranger" after she fell and was injured? A lawsuit would have required a medical examination to determine the extent of her injuries from the fall, and would have made it very difficult for her to hide the fact that she had regained partial vision from the second blow to the head.

Fridge Horror

• Some people found it satisfying that the clue to Trudy's murder was inside the last Christmas present Trudy gave him before her death, but it's actually quite disturbing when you think about it. If Monk had watched that video years ago, not only would he have solved the murder much sooner, but he would in fact have prevented Rickover from being able to hire Joey Kazarinski to kill Dr. Malcolm Nash.
  • Why didn't someone tell him to open the box earlier?
  • If they had, Monk would have told them the same thing he tells everyone else: That it's Trudy's final secret and that it should die with her.
• Here's a small one: at the end of "Mr. Monk Takes His Medicine", Sharona tosses the bottle of Monk's new prescription medicine Dioxynl into a dumpster. What's to prevent a junkie from crawling around and discovering it?
  • And that you can't just chuck psych meds- if you plan on going off of psych meds, there's a slow reduction in dosage you have to go through. Going off of them cold turkey can cause severe withdrawal symptoms, and in some severe occasions death.
• The murderer of the week in "Mr. Monk Goes Home Again," Paul Gilstrap, becomes one when you realize that his scheme to kill his wife involved poisoning her through a candy bar tainted with tetrachlorodrine, and to cover up his involvement, he tampered with numerous other candy bars with the intention that other victims would die and his wife's death would look like the work of an anonymous serial killer. But imagine the potential that some of these would-be-victims could have been, especially since this episode takes place on Halloween, aka the day of the year where the most likely people eating those candy bars would have been children. He could have ended up inadvertently killing a bunch of kids while using the anonymous serial killer scheme to cover up his involvement in his wife's death had the scheme gone off without a hitch.
  • What could make this worse is that we don't even know why he wants to kill his wife. Sure, most of the time on Monk, people kill their spouse so they can be with a lover/have their spouse's money without needing a divorce. But then again, Ambrose points out that Paul can afford $400 shoes. For all we know in this case, Paul may just be killing his wife and dragging whoever else eats those candy bars down with her purely out of spite.
  • Paul couldn't even stop his plan without killing someone to cover it up.
• From "Mr. Monk Gets Jury Duty": Juror #12's entire scheme to free Miguel Escobar would've caused a mistrial to be declared in the Robert Perry case. Considering that even during the first trial, Monk was clearly the only juror who cared about finding the truth, it's very likely that Perry was wrongly convicted in the end.
• From "Mr. Monk and the Secret Santa": When Stottlemeyer opens the bottle of port, Randy comments how much he likes port, clearly hoping Stottlemeyer will give it to him. Alice's plan came incredibly close to taking out Randy instead of the intended target.
• At the end of "Mr. Monk and the Actor", Monk tells Dr. Kroger that Ruskin is in England playing Hamlet, because he thought Monk's character was too dark and depressing. Given Ruskin's method acting always seems to result in Becoming the Mask, how long till he attempts or actually commits suicide thanks to getting too far into one of his roles?
  • Hamlet is also well-known for being emotionally tough on its lead actor if they get too into it—see Daniel Day-Lewis's Creator Breakdown, for example. Even Ruskin could see that Monk's life was far worse than the situation he'd be putting himself in by taking on Hamlet.
• In "Mr. Monk Buys a House", we find out that Dr. Kroger died of a heart attack. Stress is a major risk factor for heart trouble, and having clients like Monk and Krenshaw was definitely stressful. Who's to say the strain didn't kill him early?
• In "Mr. Monk Goes to a Wedding," Lieutenant Bristol comments that he's "glad he's on our team" after Monk makes a particularly impressive deduction. What if Monk wasn't on their team? Any villain with Monk in their pocket could probably get away with any crime they cared to commit.
• In "Mr. Monk Gets Married," Dalton Padron's scheme is ultimately only foiled because he happened to choose Randy Disher's mother as his unwitting accomplice, which gets Monk in on the case. If he'd chosen pretty much anybody else to stage a sham marriage with, he would most likely have been able to pull off his plan. It's unclear whether or not he would have killed anybody besides his partner in his quest to get the gold, but if he had planned to, there would have been no one to stop him.
• In “Mr. Monk and the Twelfth Man”, Monk is after someone who murdered TWELVE people. You would think such a premise belongs on a gritty crime drama like the “Law and Order” franchise, but here it is on a comedic detective show.
• In "Mr. Monk and the Employee of the Month", Monk's old friend Joe Christie gets reinstated to the department. He calls dibs on being Monk's partner when Monk wins his badge back. When Monk is briefly reinstated during the final season, Christie is nowhere to be seen. Was he transferred, was he unable to take up the position thanks to bureaucratic matters, or was he killed in action in the interim?
  • It could very well have been a much more benign explanation of Monk having not being back long enough to be given a partner again, since he was only assigned to desk duty during that time.
• In "Mr. Monk and the Miracle," the pharmacist pulled off his scam by tampering with his patients' medicine. He's lucky none of them died without their medicine. And how many degenerative conditions were made worse from a delay in proper treatment?
• In “Mr. Monk and the Employee of the Month”: Monk is able to clear up Joe Christie’s accusation after less than one minute of looking at the case file. But he refused to do that when it happened. He didn’t trust this guy, his former partner, enough to even open his file. And it cost Christie several years of his life and career. Because Monk couldn’t bring himself to spare one minute for him.

Fridge Logic

• How was the killer in "Mr. Monk and the Miracle" not found out? Only one person noticed him standing around painting on people's front doors? How was wife his able to watch that fountain round the clock for any customers who might come by? Wouldn't people notice that they didn't feel better after drinking from the fountain until they took their medicine? Also not one person or doctor noticed that it was only the customers of that pharmacy whose prescriptions weren't working?
  • These all have potential explanations. Yes, only one person noticed, or at the very least, only one person noticed who got far enough away to alert his buddies. He had his wife watch, sure, but he also probably assumed that everyone he painted on the door of would go to the fountain and would just casually bring it up in conversation to see if they mention going to it. It's less that people didn't feel better until they took their medication, and more that they didn't feel better until the next morning, at which point there are plenty of things one could've done the previous day that would've helped, and "supposedly magical fountain water" stands out above "medication that hasn't worked yet". As for the last point, maybe it didn't get mentioned just under the assumption patients who didn't try the fountain would quietly change pharmacies or not bring it up.
• In "Mr. Monk and the Critic," the men's room attendant is attacked by the Critic and is taken to the ER. We never hear about him for the rest of the episode. As a result, we don't know if he survives.