English teacher Beth Landow takes a tumble from the clock tower at Trudy's old high school. After finding evidence it wasn't suicide, Monk becomes suspicious of the school's science teacher Derek Philby — but how could he have murdered Beth when he was proctoring an exam at the time?
This episode contains examples of the following tropes:
- Agony of the Feet: Sharona stomps the class bully's foot for throwing a chalk eraser at Monk.
- Batman Gambit: Monk gets Derek Philby to incriminate himself by telling him that Beth Landow's eyeglasses were never found at the crime scene, and warns him that the police will be coming by with a search warrant to look over the campus and find them. Philby goes to the gear room in the clock tower to grab the eyeglasses that night, but when he exits the clock tower, he is promptly busted. Monk reveals he'd in fact already found them, and planted them where he found them because he knew that Philby would look for them.
- Blackmail Backfire: The groundskeeper Iverson witnesses Derek placing Beth across the hands of the clock, and tries to squeeze money out of Derek to cover his debts. Does not particularly work out for him.
- Blind Without 'Em: Beth Landow could not see without her glasses. Monk uses the trope phrase to describe her.
- Bludgeoned to Death: It's shown that Beth was actually killed when Derek struck her on the back of the head with a wooden plank.
- Clock Tower: Beth Landow falls off a clock tower. Monk knows that she was murdered by a coworker, but can't work out how he could have done it when he was across the school with many witnesses at the time she fell. He bludgeoned her to death with a plank, then put her on one of the hands, knowing that she would fall when a certain amount of time had passed.
- Fake Alibi: Derek seemingly couldn't have killed Beth because he was proctoring the SATs at the time Beth fell, on the other side of the school. The trick is that Derek had bashed her over the head, draped her body on the minute hand of the clock, and left her so that when the hand tilted far enough, she would fall off on her own.
- Gas Leak Cover Up: Derek Philby gets rid of the school's groundskeeper by staging a gas explosion in his house: he makes a pinhole in the gas line so that fumes will come into the house, glues a match to the bottom of a door with the ends facing down, and puts a piece of flint on the floor. The matches strike the flint when the door opens, blowing up the house. Monk determines that said explosion was staged because the weather was unusually warm on the night it happened (meaning the victim should not have had any reason to be trying to manually light the pilot light for the fireplace), and the air conditioning unit was on.
- I Never Said It Was Poison:
- Monk gets suspicious of Derek when Derek asks did she say anything in her suicide note, despite Monk not saying if she left one, and Monk points out that suicides coming with suicide notes is actually pretty rare.
- Monk gets Derek to trap himself by planting the glasses in the clock tower gear box. Only the murderer would have known to look there.
- Living Lie Detector: Sharona claims she has the ability to tell when a man is lying, given her ex-husband used to lie about not cheating on her.
- Meaningful Echo: During the investigation, Derek Philby tells Monk he can't prove anything and quotes a Latin phrase—"quod erat demonstrandum" meaning "thus it is demonstrated"—to him. After getting Philby to implicate himself, Monk quotes the same Latin phrase back at him.
- Never Suicide: It appears that Beth Landow jumped off the roof of a clocktower. In reality, she was already dead.
- Out-of-Character Alert: Monk figures out that the purported suicide note wasn't written by Beth Landow because of the mistakes that she, as an English teacher, would never have made.
- Returning to the Scene: Monk gets Derek Philby to implicate himself by making him afraid that the police will search and find Beth's glasses. He returns to retrieve them, unaware that Monk had already found them, had re-planted them, and had set up an ambush.
- Seen It All: Stottlemeyer points out to Monk that he's seen suicide notes written in so many ways that the discrepancies note in this suicide note don't stand out to him.
- Smug Snake: The class bully who believes that because his dad is the school's gym teacher, no teacher would dare touch him or so much as give him a "D".
- Tuckerization: Beth Landow's name comes from Andy Breckman's wife, Beth Landau.
- Wham Line: Monk tells Derek Philby why Beth was so dead-set on him telling his wife about their affair after learning about a doctor's appointment she had.Monk: Did you know Beth Landow was pregnant when she died?
- You Can Run, but You Can't Hide: While employed as a substitute teacher at Trudy's old high school, Monk becomes the butt of an arrogant student's jokes. Sharona tells the kid off and stomps on his foot. The boy's dad comes after Monk and threatens him, prompting this exchange:Patterson: You can run, but you can't hide.
Monk: Oh, yeah. I can hide. Don't think I can't hide. He thinks I can't hide.
Sharona: He doesn't know who he's messing with. Nobody hides like you.
