A baby step in the right direction this week for Monk with "Mr Monk and the blackout."
Whereas the first two new epsiodes of this season reduced the characters to shrill charactures of themselves, this episode took a large step toward correcting that. There weren't any scenes that made you out and out cringe for these characters and that is good news. Instead, we got a nice story about Monk and his trying to make the first steps toward dating again. The scene with Monk calling Michele with a whole stack of notecards for any potential converstation spread out before him was absolutely priceless. Also, Monk's making her walk up 52 flights of stairs when the elevator wasn't exactly even with the floor was a nice touch as well.
Sure, the mystery itself was fairly obvious--I called before the first major commerical break that the killer was trying to prevent the TV show from being seen and the second attack only confirmed it. But the element of why worked pretty well, though it becomes fairly obvious fairly quickly. But as I've said before, the joy of Monk isn't necessarily the deep mysteries--it's all about the characters. And when the characters work--like they all did here, then it's not as big a deal that we guess the mystery's solution long before Monk does.
Hopefully the show is back on track now. I can't declare it there yet since last week was a repeat. But this one was definitely a good step in the right direction.
posted by Michael Hickerson at 7/12/2004 01:32:00 PM |
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