Mr. Monk and the Three Pies

Oddly, cherry pies are at the center of a murder. We meet Ambrose, Adrian's brother, who is agoraphobic. He is estranged from Monk but he has a suspicion that the guy across the street has murdered his wife. What transpires are two people with serious psychological problems coming together.

A man buys all the lottery tickets of a cherry pie but one in a fair. The old lady that bough only one ticket wins the lottery, receiving the pie. The man asks for the pie, kills her and hijacks her car. Later, the police find the car with the dead body and Monk does not participate of the investigation since Sharona receives a call from Monk's estranged brother Ambrose. Sharona forces Monk to visit his agoraphobic brother and he tells them that he suspects that his neighbor, Pat van Ranken, killed his wife. He says that he heard and argument and four shots a couple of days ago and has not seen his wife since then. Van Ranken says that his wife travelled to Argentina. Ambrose also says that she borrowed a flour sack from him, and Monk and Sharona use this argument to visit Van Ranken. The neighbor returns the flour to them. Soon Monk suspects that the neighbor killed his wife indeed and is looking for the cherry pies she made for the fair to find the missing bullet shell that may have fallen in one of the pies.

"Mr. Monk and the Three Pies" is a weird episode of this series. For the viewers that like Monk's OCD, it is probably delightful to know his accumulative agoraphobic brother Ambrose Monk. The criminal's motives to kill are not very intelligent. My vote is seven.

Title (Brazil): "Monk e as Tortas" ("Monk and the Pies")

John Turtorro steals the episode where he plays Ambrose, Monk's estranged brother. Here we are kept guessing until the very end, with a self-referential observation by Randy about Monk's summation not going as expected at the end. I wonder if Michael McKean's character in Better Call Saul was modelled on Ambrose by any chance? Here the central food is pies, yes pies!

I must admit, I fast forward Randy Newman's opening theme "It's a jungle out there". No respect to Randy of course, but I prefer the original theme by Jeff Beal which was performed in season 1.

A man buys a string of tickets at a local fair in Tewkesbury where the prize is a cherry pie, but another person, an older woman, actually wins the raffle. The man follows her to her car and tries to steal the pie from her, but she resists. He ends up bludgeoning her to death by ramming her head against her steering wheel, then drives the car to an unknown location, taking the pie with him. This unknown location must have been inside of San Francisco, because Stottlemeyer and Disher are investigating and think the crime was a carjacking gone bad. While Monk looks over the crime scene, Sharona gets a call and says the caller claims to be Monk's brother, Ambrose, and needs to see Monk right away and that it is a matter of life and death.

Monk doesn't want to speak to his brother Ambrose because he never called or wrote him after Trudy's death, but he does eventually come around and go to Tewkesbury to see Ambrose. Ambrose still lives in the family home that Monk and Ambrose grew up in. Ambrose has agoraphobia and won't leave the house. But he thinks that something nefarious has happened to the wife. Ambrose says that, two nights ago, he heard next door neighbor van Ranken and his wife arguing, then what sounded like gunshots. Three hours later, van Ranken drove his truck away and was gone all night. The next morning, Ambrose called the house looking for the wife, and van Ranken said she had flown to Argentina. Suspiciously, he denied leaving the previous night, saying his truck has been parked in the same place all summer.

To humor Ambrose, Monk says he will look into the disappearance. But as he looks into things he begins to think something happened too. Also note that Van Rankin is the same guy who killed the old woman over a cherry pie, but Monk does not figure that out until later.

John Turturro is fabulous as Ambrose Monk. It's odd that Monk openly derides Ambrose for saying that he can't leave the house since Monk's disabilities look equally odd to anybody else. You'd think he'd have some empathy - these two have both been damaged by a bad childhood. Also, Ambrose sets the table for their dad who abandoned them in the 1960s and he has been saving all of the mail so their father can read it when he returns. Monk ridicules this too, saying that their father is never coming back and that he doesn't use his detective skills to go looking for him because he is afraid he might actually find him.

John Turturo guest stars as, and wins an Emmy for playing, Monk's brother, Ambrose, in a powerful, masterful, and, ultimately, heart-breaking, bravura performance. Sure, there's the usual, somewhat silly mystery that needs to be solved, but the real meat of this episode is the tension that exists between the two brothers. Usually, when a character in a series "suddenly" has a new sibling, (The Cosby Show, I'm looking at you...) the reasoning for never being mentioned is silly. Not so here. The reason is simple, and very understandable. Ambrose's quirks make Monk look downright normal, and the secrets he's carrying are a heavy burden, indeed. My two favorite, stand-out scenes are when Sharona asks Ambrose what it is that Monk has, that he doesn't. And when Monk confronts him about the reason Adrian has denied his existence for the last several years. Bot scenes broke my heart. Watch this. He'll break your heart, too.