My wife and I had watched Monk from the beginning, and it’s been a bit of a love/hate deal. I really enjoy the show, but I can’t take too much of it at once. They have a tendency to overplay Monk’s “Monkness”, and the cringeworthy scenes get to be too much. Because of this we tend to put watching Monk on the back burner of our DVR list.
As a result, we now have a backlog of 10 episodes, including the two-part finale. It’ll be ages before we get through all these, but I know that if we wait that long, somewhere along the line someone is going to spoil the ending for me.
So I was wondering if there was a slow reveal as they approached the finale, or if the end stand on it’s own. Basically, can we skip ahead, watch the two-parter and see the rest of them later, or do we need to suck it up and watch them in order?
The only thing that you’d miss by watching the finale first is understanding what’s happening to the other main characters. That’s mostly covered in other episodes. But basically, everyone ends up in a good place.
With regards to Trudy it stands on it’s own. There’s a plot thread about Sharona and the deputy guy, and a plot thread about Monk’s quest to get his badge back, and a plot about the Chief’s girlfriend, that you might be spoiled for, but these are fairly minor things. You definitely won’t be spoiled for Trudy’s murder mystery.
A great finale, and it pretty much stands on its own . . . with one exception, an object that had been mentioned now and then throughout the series:
Trudy had died just before Christmas. She had put a small green box under the tree, telling Monk not to open it until Christmas. But she died before Christmas, and he kept that box, unopened, all these years. In the finale he opens the box, and the content is an important element of the plot.
The Monk episodes have always been pretty much standalone stories. Once or twice a season (usually near the end) they would have an episode that reminds you that Monk is searching for his wife’s killer. There are a few stories with references to prior episodes (such as the ones with Sarah Silverman), but even then it didn’t matter if you had seen the older episodes. This is one show in which spoiler alerts aren’t really necessary (IMO) since you know that Monk will catch the bad guy at the end of the series. The specific details of why Trudy was murdered weren’t that surprising and really quite mundane in terms of murder mysteries. Monk has always been about the quirkiness of Adrian and his relationships with the other characters. If the show had been about clever mystery plots it would have been cancelled long ago.