Salzmank

Oh, I don’t think it’s a McGuffin—that’s something that’s irrelevant in itself, such as the tune in The Lady Vanishes. (We don’t really care what it means, we just care that it exists because it drives the plot.) That’s not the Monk gimmick, a murder-mystery trick that usually solves the question of why someone would kill an inoffensive person. Unless, of course, we’re thinking of mystery plotting in general as a McGuffin in Monk, a view I can understand but with which I can’t agree. (I like Monk’s mystery elements more than its soap opera.)

Weird topic, but I’ve been wondering where the Monk writers got their favorite mystery gimmick: That gimmick pops up in so many Monk episodes, it’s kinda funny. I’ve long suspected it came from the Sherlock Holmes story “The Six Napoleons,” and it probably does, but I think a closer relative is the Murder, She Wrote ep “If It’s Thursday, It Must Be Beverly” (S4:E7). That's remarkably close to the Monk gimmick. Do other shows do this, though?

While I still think the show is exceedingly goofy (my favorite episode is the MonTOCK one because I know the area, yet I can’t hack that horribly-acted hypnosis part), I’ve got to admit on second watch (because of the “new evidence” gimmick) I like it more than my “pretty awful” characterization would suggest. It does have a refreshing skepticism that most shows of its ilk lack, though the best paranormal-skeptical show on TV in my opinion is, of all things, the William Shatner/History Channel UnXplained. Still, it’s lightyears better than just about everything on Travel Channel. My favorite eps so far have been Montauk MonTOCK (with the most hyper, lunatic sidekick of them all), which is even better with the “new evidence” that basically debunks everything; Bigfoot because of that inadvertent mystery; Mothman because of good pacing and local color despite focusing on what you accurately called “the lamest cryptid ever”; and Salem because of that intriguing high school mystery.

To be honest, I miss the travel shows that Travel Channel used to have on—especially Samantha Brown, who’s now on PBS. I like paranormal stuff, but I’m not a big fan of the shows the channel has on now, so I’d take the genuinely travel-related shows back in a heartbeat. I would have expected that Travel Channel and History Channel were owned by the same company—they’ve both moved away from the programming their names would suggest—but apparently not. Travel’s Discovery, Inc., and History’s Hearst and Disney. Huh.

For the police station? Yeah, she was a cop.

Spoilers for “Mr. Monk and the Secret Santa.” Apropos of Monk killers we find sympathetic, someone at the Monk subreddit posted that he/she found the killer in “…and the Secret Santa” sympathetic—and I think I agree. Thing is, I’m not sure why I feel that way. Plot-wise, this person shouldn’t be sympathetic; she risked (not a great risk, but still) poisoning Stottlemeyer and succeeded in poisoning her ex-lover. But she just seems likable somehow. Maybe that’s because she has such a good rapport with the four leads? (Unfortunately, that makes the solution kinda obvious—though it still has some clever points of interest.)

Exactly!

What’s weird about it too is that the writers seem to be making a nice, coherent, non-patronizing point about sympathy for the blind—then shoot themselves in the foot by making her a killer who was faking blindness, and then try to double down on the sympathy anyway by having Stottlemeyer defend her! Makes zero sense. As for Willie, woman claims she didn’t intend to frame him, which is bogus: she claimed to identify his voice and his voice alone as the one threatening the victim, among other things. Heh, not sure why some random TV episode is making me so mad—but it really is an awful piece of television. Luckily no other Monk I’ve seen is quite this bad.

Great joke-writing—funny and fitting with the character. I think “Sleeping Suspect” is my favorite episode. Humor, character, and mystery are top-notch. The ketchup-bottle clue is one of the most audacious and boggling things the show has ever done. Astonishingly, though, writer Karl Schaefer never wrote for the show again. Makes no sense: he had a great grasp on the characters and on how mystery-plots work.

Yes! And (SPOILER) Stottlemeyer actually says he’ll speak to the DA about letting her off easy–after she killed a guy for reasons we’re not sure of, faked her blindness, and tried to frame Willie Nelson for her crime. WHAT?! 😠 I don’t usually go along with the “not in my head canon” thing, but I’m tempted to do so after this episode. It’s the pits. I can see what they were going for, but, yeah, he probably would have played it too broadly-comic and missed the sympathy in Shalhoub’s performance. Without that sympathy, the comedy would have just turned into “laugh at the OCD guy,” which, well, isn’t funny at all.

Hate to say it because I like Willie Nelson, but “Mr. Monk and the Red-Headed Stranger,” which I watched last night, is an awful episode. The drama’s strained, the comedy is long, pointless and unfunny, Sharona’s unsympathetic (and oblivious), Disher has nothing to do, many script elements feel shoehorned in, and the solution stinks both on mystery and character grounds. Actually, Stottlemeyer’s action after Monk reveals the solution stinks even more. Gah, just an all-around bad episode.

Touché!

I think I made a Top 10 list for this show a few years ago here, but I’m surprised I haven’t yet done a Top 5 as I did for two other mystery shows I really like, Monk and Columbo. So (no particular order, and keep in mind I prefer the mystery elements to the soap-operatics)… “Wicked Wedding Night” (S1:E2): The pilot has some great stuff in it, but this is the first episode with the team in place and the first great mystery. If the murderer’s identity isn’t too shocking, the clues (an absence of fingerprints, a room-switch, and—bravura!—the Caribbean sun) are exceptional, and the Christiesque twist is as surprising as it should be. While Poole’s quest for a cup of tea may come off as too silly by half, it builds to a good conclusion, and most of the humor works. “Predicting Murder” (S1:E3): Shame about the weak title, because this is great. The first killer’s method and motive are clever, if a bit anticlimactic, but the second murder has one of Thorogood’s finest solutions, an ingenious Fremanesque-Sayersian ‘disposal of the body’ trick. More than anything, it’s just a well-written script: everyone get something to do and say throughout the episode, so it’s not just suspect interviews, and Nicholas Dunham (Nicholas Farrell) is a highly effective Moriarty-figure. “Stab in the Dark” (S3:E1): After a Christiesque episode and a Sayersian episode, here we have a Carrian episode! While the scenario is literally borrowed from the master—an impossible murder at a séance, with all the suspects holding hands except for one outside the room, comes from Carr’s “The Black Minute”—Thorogood here finds a new way to work the locked-room trick, supplies ample clues, and provides a highly effective double-bluff solution. While I don’t like Humphrey Goodman as much as Richard Poole, he’s perfectly likable here, and the entire cast get things to do. “Missing a Body?” (S1:E4): The first non-Thorogood-penned episode has a really clever take on the hoary vanishing corpse trope. Characterization is good: Poole is at his best here, mooning over the chief suspect and snippily denying that he’s infatuated with her. The solution isn’t some massive SURPRISE, but it’s quietly effective. “Murder from Above” (S7:E1): Yes, the set-up is similar to “Wicked Wedding Night”’s—but this is one of Thorogood’s finest impossible crime solutions. It’s simple and brilliant. Honorable mentions: “Arriving in Paradise,” “An Unhelpful Aid,” “A Deadly Curse,” “Death of a Detective,” “Murder on the Honoré Express,” “Murder on the Airwaves.” “The Impossible Murder” and “The Man with the Golden Gun” would make the list if their solutions weren’t so obviously nicked from John Dickson Carr’s He Who Whispers and “The Proverbial Murder,” respectively. “Switcharoo” would make the list if it had any clues. OK, there’s mine. If anyone’s interested in posting a Top 5 (or 10, or 15, or whatever), you’re more than welcome!

Watched “Mr. Monk and the Dog” and “Mr. Monk Goes Camping” the other day. The second episode’s pretty weak on every front (Monk giving the Wilhelm scream is just the low point), but the first is excellent on comedy, drama, and mystery grounds. Monk’s love for the dog seems so genuine that it had me sad about the pets I’d lost. One Stottlemeyer-Disher exchange has some of the funniest lines in any Monk episode: While the solution is far from the most shocking twist ever (in usual Monk fashion, you learn the killer’s identity about halfway through), the murderer’s desire to kill Shelby the dog—but not Monk—is a pretty clever clue as to motive, as is the joke about Shelby being “fat.” (The best mystery clues, as this show often proves, are hidden in or as jokes.) I’m not sure this episode would make my Top 5, but it’d definitely make my Top 10.

Anyone else really enjoy P&T’s trick on the Aug. 3 episode? (I just watched it last night.) I should have suspected something was up, but they’ve done “tricks for one person only” before (the knife-throwing routine, for example). The Fool Us subreddit seems to think it’s more complicated than that because of a major Fool Us rule, but I can’t imagine that rule applies to P&T themselves. Even if this method isn’t how they did it, though, I rather like it; it feels like a Mametesque con. Whatever way, the reveal brought a smile to my face, and the people I was watching with were shocked! 😄 As for the other acts, I admired Hans Klok’s speed but am not a fan of those stage illusions and wasn’t particularly impressed by Michael Bourdada or Vincenzo Ravina (and it’s not some anti-Canadian thing on my part, really! 😉), but I did like Hedné. Was trying to figure out what Penn meant by ‘the trick we saw was not the one you did’… In some ways, that could apply to all magic tricks, but did it have a special significance here? Good episode all around; this season’s been really high-quality.

Sure, but must that fish out of water solve every crime? Especially when it gets into the touchy race stuff we’ve been going back and forth about? That’s all I’m saying. As for the coziness… Well, this is a show that revealed the apparent romantic lead and main supporting character as the murderer in the pilot and killed off its main character. To my mind it’s closer to Golden Age mystery novels (or Jonathan Creek) than to Father Brown or Midsomer, let alone stuff like M.C. Beaton. I have no complaints with formula per se, but I also like stretching that formula as much as possible. That’s given us some of the most interesting television episodes, in my opinion.

I agree cluing has suffered a lot lately; “Switcharoo” (the hotel room one with the bathtub suicide) was particularly disappointing in this regard because it was a Thorogood-penned ep with a pretty solid central gimmick—but it had basically no clues. While “intuitive leaps” are just a part of the genre (logic in detective stories tends to be inductive, not deductive, ironically enough), though, I wouldn’t say magically knowing the answer is a theme of the show. Early episodes were very well-clued, far better than most TV mysteries: “Wicked Wedding Night” and “Predicting a Murder,” in particular, have great clues. Even the pilot has that delightful, maddening clue about the book, which Thorogood handles skillfully. Nor do I think a genius DI is a necessarily a DiP element. Sure, have the inspector solve most cases, but—hey—Sherlock Holmes had a few failures (“The Yellow Face,” “A Scandal in Bohemia”), and Ellery Queen made some disastrous mistakes (Ten Days’ Wonder). Even Agatha Christie’s Capt. Hastings, the stupidest of all Watsons, pretty much got to figure things out in Curtain. Letting one of the sarges or officers solve the thing just seems like a fun and welcome twist to formula.

Re: the race angle with this show, I’d be on-board with a non-white (and/or female) DI, but mostly I just want the writers to give the non-white characters something to do. In the last few seasons, Ruby and J.P. have done some action-y stuff and a tiny bit of detective work, but none of the black characters has ever solved a case, to my recollection. (Even in that hilarious episode with Shirley Henderson, Richard solves it, not Dwayne and Fidel. Talk about a missed opportunity.) Madeleine hasn’t had anything to do except roll her eyes. That’s just weird. On both racial-fairness and plotting grounds, why shouldn’t Madeleine (or Florence, now that she’s coming back) get to solve a case that baffles Neville? Why has no black character ever solved the mystery in nine seasons?! I really don’t understand it.

This will seem really odd, and I’m not sure if anyone here will be remotely interested, but I had a dream last night about Fool Us (which is odd because I haven’t watched it in weeks—I was away earlier this week, and last week was the special). In the dream the show was taking my place in my high school auditorium, and one of the contestants was Gene Wilder! Wilder was playing Willy Wonka again and dressed up in that costume, and he had a supposedly Wonka-made machine on the stage that supposedly ‘let’ him do the magic. He did multiple tricks, but the only one I can remember involved shooting a tin can (or something like that) with a gun, which made it light on fire. One trick seemed to go wrong, but really it was part of the act. At one point Wilder/Wonka climbed a staircase and opened his mouth, and the music started into “Pure Imagination,” just for him to burst out with “Edelweiss”! Unfortunately I don’t think Dream-Penn-and-Teller ever got to give comments or anything, though I remember Teller speaking during one part of the trick, and I thought, Oh, that’s what he sounds like! After a while (it was a long trick, and a much longer act than PT:FU would actually have), I realized in-dream that Wilder was dead, and that’s what woke me up. Really can’t explain it. Such a weird dream even by my standards.

Me four! 😉

Well, they all wear tight clothes when they’re promoted to No. 2, yes, but, well, just look at these: Hair styles and clothes (complete with belts) nearly identical.

Right; I actually forgot about that. Fair point.

Well, the show did start by building up to a Poole-Camille relationship… As for Catherine, I’m kind of surprised we didn’t have a Mooney-Catherine relationship. Maybe the writers expected O’Hanlan would eventually leave the show and of course wanted Bourgine to stay.

Looks like it:

Oof. That’s weird—probably an even weirder cast change decision than killing off Poole. I don’t think I really like it. I don’t especially miss Florence, and I’m shocked to say I like Ruby, who I thought would be annoying but who’s added a fun, ‘quirky,’ Dwayne-esque vibe. While I don’t particularly love Madeleine, the character and actress needed more time to develop. More than anything, though, Thorogood was trying to bring back the original Poole-Camille dynamic with Parker-Madeleine, even to the point of having Maddy dressed like Camille, so this change makes little sense to me. Oh well. This has never been a character-based show, and we don’t know if the actresses for Ruby and Madeleine made this decision themselves, but... Gah. All of that to one side, though, I’m just happy the show is coming back for another season.