Mr. Monk And The Unfinished Book

One of Monk’s most Monk-like episodes in all of Monk occurs in Season 2, Episode 7: “Mr. Monk and the Sleeping Suspect.” Adrian Monk, Tony Shalhoub’s impersonation of Eeyore if the donkey had severe OCD, has taken to visiting Brian Babbage, a comatose man and his prime murder suspect, for an unofficial therapy session. Monk’s actual therapist is away on vacation, and the private detective desperately needs someone to talk to. “He’s a good listener,” Monk tells his bewildered assistant, Sharona Fleming.

Monk sits by Babbage’s hospital bed and spills his many woes while doing what he does best: puttering around and noticing things. Monk notices Babbage’s watch is a couple minutes fast—an unacceptable misalignment in his world—and as he fixes the watch, he notices a bit of glue stuck to the face. “What were you gluing?” Monk wonders aloud. Suddenly, a distant clatter causes Monk to whirl around and knock over a flowerpot, spilling dirt on the floor. Such disorder, the viewer knows, is unacceptable to Monk, who promptly fetches a vacuum to clean it up. Trusty wet wipe in hand, Monk unplugs a white cord from an outlet to plug in the vacuum and starts sucking up the dirt. The noise of the vacuum is almost loud enough to obscure the fact that Monk has just unplugged Babbage from life support. The man flatlines, but Monk plugs him back in and manages to restart his heart with CPR. Monk has, per his modus operandi, both wrecked and saved the day. The scene then cuts to a disgruntled outsider, a nurse, who, like many, disapproves of the Monkness of it all.

Monk’s improbable theory—that a man who was literally comatose while the murder happened was, in fact, the murderer—turns out to be right, of course. Brian Babbage had mailed bombs to his siblings so that he alone would inherit their late father’s riches. The glue was the clue: The smear on Babbage’s watch was evidence of how he glued the bombs inside blue mailboxes so that the packages would drop down and ship months later, after the adhesive degraded. And it turns out that Babbage’s near-death experience—his second one, really—actually restarted his heart, allowing the police to confirm his guilt and arrest him.