Mourning for Monk...

Yes, it's over - Monk is over. We've spent the weekend in mourning, wearing black, a lot of sackcloth and ashes, crying and gnashing of teeth. We said goodbye to Adrian Monk Friday night with the last episode after seven years of waiting the whole week for that 10pm pizza slot on USA tv to be filled with our favorite obsessive-compulsive crime stopper. How could we get so attached to a fantasy guy, an actor, the whole ensemble and the sometimes silly, sometimes stupid plots? Tony Shaloub just played it so well, as did the other cast members.

Now to the final episode however, the final resolution, the denouement, the fin, how it all played out, after he spent all those years looking for his wife's killer while solving all of San Francisco's major crimes with a stroke of OCD genius! How could it all unravel so uniquely and simply, when on Christmas he finally decides to open a present his wife Trudy gave him that last Christmas before she died by car bomb! The video that revealed she had had an affair with a lawyer before she married Monk, had a child she thought had died. Wow, we with Monk never saw that coming, and with such emotion on his part. Oh yeah, he was also being poisoned by Trudy's killer while finding all this out, and everyone was looking for the cause to make an antidote before he kicked off. But how that fatal poison was introduced by a lackey who later gets killed before he can reveal what it is, that was a little out of left field.

So Monk is dying. And certain people were introduced in those last two episodes that should have given us a clue - but we were speculating all along. First, Natalie gets this new boyfriend we've never seen before, so we can't assume she and Monk are going to get together after years of her being his loyal assistant. Then they have to get a court order from a judge who turns out to be too big of a star to be just incidental to the whole plot. There's a murder at a birthing center of the head doctor - and the midwife who delivered Trudy goes missing.

But after seeing the video, Monk and Natalie learn that the cheating lawyer is actually this judge now getting ready to ascend to the California Supreme Court. They go to his confirmation hearing and accuse him right there. Monk is taken to the brig and then the hospital after attacking the judge. Natalie starts to come down with the same symptoms Monk has and realizes the poison is in his hand wipes she just used! Where did that come from? And who was the six-fingered man who supposedly set the bomb for Trudy? Never resolved or brought up again and a flaw we hadn't expected.

But Monk escapes the hospital before they can get him the antidote to chase down the judge himself, because he remembers the last time they went for the court order, he saw a sundial under a tree. No sun! So the midwife must be buried under it - of course! As Chief Leland Stottlemeyer and Det. Randy Discher arrive and Monk is about to shoot the judge, he is ordered to put the gun down. But the judge grabs it and before he shoots himself, says "Take care of her!" The daughter he and Trudy had is alive? He had killed the midwife and doctor to protect his rep and the daughter's identity before his big promotion!

So Monk finds Trudy's daughter, they wind up spending lots of time together, because the poison antidote is created from the wipes and he recovers. But he also recovers his own life again, stops being that big OCD we grew to love, and the episode ends with slices of past episodes. He and Natalie are back on the case with the newly married Captain while Discher takes a police chief job in NJ so he can marry Sharona, Monk's former assistant, and they live happily ever after - no Monk funeral to attend, no Natalie being his long lost daughter, no pristine past for Trudy, no more Monk on Friday nights! Now what? We're supposed to get a real life? Sorry, I like this mourning gig better. I might even obsess about it.