Adrian Monk
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| Adrian Monk | |
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| First appearance | Mr. Monk and the Candidate |
| Portrayed by | Tony Shalhoub |
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| Gender | Male |
| Age | 48 (or 49) |
| Occupation | SFPD Private Consultant |
| Title | Mr. |
| Family | Jack Monk (Father) Jack Monk Jr. (half-brother) Mother (Name Unknown-Deceased) Ambrose Monk (Brother) Trudy Monk (Wife-Deceased) |
Adrian Monk is the protagonist of the television series Monk, portrayed by Tony Shalhoub. A legendary former homicide detective in the San Francisco Police Department, his obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), severely intensified by the death of his wife (murdered by a car bomb), interfered with his job and resulted in his current suspension from the department.
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[edit] Character history
Monk is believed to be born in or around the year 1959, as the 2004 episode "Mr. Monk Takes Manhattan" declared him to be 45. In the first episode of season four Monk informs another detective that he went to the University of California, Berkeley. This is elaborated upon in the season five episode "Mr. Monk and the Class Reunion", where it is stated that he graduated in 1981. In the episode "Mr. Monk and Little Monk" it is revealed that he was in 8th grade in April of 1972. This date would further suggest that he was born in or around 1959. In the 2004 episode "Mr. Monk and the Paperboy" it is revealed that his birthday is the 9th though it is not said which month.
Monk is still mourning his wife Trudy, who was killed by a car bomb in 1997. He has not yet fully solved the case, although he has discovered that the car bomb was built by Warrick Tennyson for a six-fingered male. Monk has devoted the past nine years of his life to finding the man who killed his wife, and to consulting with San Francisco police detectives on various cases. Viewers are led in one episode to believe that she faked her own death, but that possibility turned out to be a con set up to gain access to a storage locker in the possession of one of Trudy's former co-workers. At the end of that episode, the impostor Trudy is caught in a gunfight and mortally wounded. The impostor dies in Monk's arms. In the sixth-season finale, he finally catches up with the six-fingered man, Frank Nunn, who claims to be yet another pawn with no idea why Trudy was killed. This turns out to be part of a larger plot to have Nunn set up another bombing and then frame Monk for killing him; he is shot before Monk can have him arrested or convince him to surrender the name of his employer in Trudy's murder. Once Monk is cleared in Nunn's death, the police find correspondence from Nunn dating back to that era. No name is discovered, but there was a reference to the person responsible, referred to as "The Judge".
Monk has 312 phobias, including germs, heights, frogs, crowds, milk, lady bugs, nudity and glaciers. Besides dealing with his OCD, Monk's assistants also appear to have a hands-on role in organizing his consultancy work.
His former assistant, Sharona Fleming (Bitty Schram), quit after several years of loyal service to her boss to go back to New Jersey and remarry her ex-husband. He suffered depression following her departure, but eventually began to get over her upon the arrival of her replacement, Natalie Teeger (Traylor Howard).
While his obsessive attention to minute detail cripples him socially, including making him somewhat self-centered to the needs of his phobias (In the episode "Mr. Monk Can't See a Thing" he once was indignant that firemen rushing to a call of a house fire took that as a priority over checking his 32 smoke detectors), it makes him a gifted detective and profiler. He has an uncanny ability to reconstruct entire crimes based on little more than scraps of detail that seem unimportant to his colleagues—if his colleagues notice them at all. Although he may appear defenseless, he has on more than one occasion been able to physically stand up for himself against his enemies, when provoked into a fight. Also, despite his phobia induced self-centeredness, he has on many occasions courageously saved the lives of his friends, in the process often summoning up the strength to overcome a particular phobia (at least temporarily) that would normally freeze him into inaction. In the pilot Mr. Monk and the Candidate he fought his horror of the filthy sewers and follows an assassin who had killed twice down through the slimy effluence and rescues his Practical Nurse and assistant Sharona from him. Another example is season two's Mr. Monk and the Captain's Wife when he jumped onto a moving garbage truck and starting dumping foul smelling garbage bags onto the street to recover valuable evidence in a murder case.
Though it is stated in the pilot that his obsessive-compulsive disorder was intensified as a result of his wife's murder, he still shows signs of it in flashbacks showing him with Trudy or before he met her, even as a child. His parents were very strict and over-protective, an influence that is strongly suggested to be a contribution to his disorder. Ultimately, it appears that Monk had his symptoms mostly under control for much of his life, but lost control of his OCD after Trudy's death.
[edit] Family
Monk has a brother, Ambrose (played by John Turturro), who has only left his house three times in the past 10 years because of his extreme agoraphobia. (In "Mr. Monk and the Three Pies, " an episode in which the house caught fire, Monk mentions that Ambrose had not left the house in 32 years.) Monk and Ambrose were estranged after Trudy's death because Ambrose never called Adrian after her death. Adrian didn't understand why until Ambrose admits that he believed he (Ambrose) caused Trudy's death, because she was getting cough medicine for Ambrose and was in the store's garage when she was killed. After this admission, the brothers started to bond again, with a visit to Trudy's grave.
Their father, Jack Monk, originally from New Hope, Pennsylvania, abandoned the family when Monk was eight years old. Adrian and Ambrose never hear from him until the episode "Mr. Monk Goes Home Again", when he leaves a note on Ambrose's door to say he is proud of Ambrose for leaving the house. The chaos and emotional instability brought about by their father's sudden absence created in them a pathological need for order and self-control. Ambrose still believes in their father's return, to the point of setting an extra plate at the dinner table and keeping his mail in a filing cabinet in case he comes back.
Monk's mother died in 1994; the cause has not been explicitly revealed, though in "Mr. Monk and the Big Game", as he talks to Natalie in front of the school's trophy case, it is implied that his mother died of cancer.
Jack Monk returned to San Francisco in 2006, when he was arrested for running a red light and resisting arrest. He was bailed out by Adrian, who did not forgive him for leaving at first, but after solving a murder involving Jack's boss, they bonded again. Adrian's father even teaches Adrian how to ride a bike -- something he was not there to do when Adrian was a child. The senior Mr. Monk was played by Dan Hedaya.
Monk has a half-brother, Jack Jr. His father has only ever mentioned Jack Jr.; Adrian has never met him. The half-brother lives in his father's basement.
[edit] Monk's phobias
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This article or section is missing citations or needs footnotes. Using inline citations helps guard against copyright violations and factual inaccuracies. (April 2008) |
Monk has several phobias. In the sixth season episode "Mr. Monk and the Daredevil" Adrian reveals that he has 312 fears. Only 38 have been documented/shown throughout the series.
According to Monk in the second season episode "Mr. Monk and the Very Very Old Man", his top fears in order of priority are:
- Germs (mysophobia)
- Needles (trypanophobia)
- Milk (galactophobia)
- Death (necrophobia)
- Snakes (ophidiophobia)
- Risk (risactophobia), as ordered in Mr. Monk, Private Eye "Risk is number 6"
- Mushrooms
- Heights (acrophobia)
- Crowds
- Elevators
- Disorder
- Dark (nyctophobia), only when he doesn't know when it will end
- Enclosed spaces (claustrophobia)
- Dirt (mysophobia)
- Spiders (arachnophobia)
- Driving
- Bullies
- Fire (pyrophobia)
- Puppets
- Tap Water (aquaphobia)
- Noises (ligyrophobia)
- Touching (aphephobia)
- Feet
- Flying (aviatophobia)
- Beautiful women (caligynephobia), shown in "Mr. Monk and the Blackout"
- Imperfection (atelophobia)
- Dogs (cynophobia)
- Cats (ailurophobia)
- Rabbits
- Monkeys
- Bridges (gephyrophobia)
- Public speaking (Glossophobia) - Despite this he has been seen to talk in public, such as during the episode "Mr. Monk Goes to a Wedding"
- Flies (entomophobia)
- Slime
- Rivers (potamophobia)
- Tunnels
- Caves
- Monk has called his fear of dentists (dentophobia) one of his fears that are so far above his other fears that they are in a class of their own, outside of his "top ten" fears.
His other fears include:
- Airplanes (Aerophobia)
- Beards
- Bees (Apiphobia)
- He "may be developing" a fear of blankets
- Boats
- Bullfrogs
- Clouds
- Clowns (Coulrophobia)
- Chickens
- Childbirth (Tokophobia)
- Children (Pedophobia), except for Tommy, the toddler he almost adopted in "Mr. Monk and the Kid", Benjy, Sharona's son and Julie, Natalie's daughter.
- Drowning (Aquaphobia)
- Earthquakes
- Frogs (ranidaphobia)[1]
- Ferris Wheels
- Garbage
- Glaciers
- Hailstones[1]
- Harpoons
- Illnesses
- Lepers
- Lightning
- Mice (Musophobia)
- Nudity (Gymnophobia) (In the episode "Mr. Monk and the Naked Man", he is shown to partly get over his fear of nudity, having traced its roots to the memory of his own birth.
- Opossums[1]
- Pillows (In the episode "Mr. Monk vs. the Cobra", Natalie hit Monk with a death pillow. He later told Dr. Kroger, about his fear of pillows.)
- Reproduction (Genophobia) and the female reproductive system
- Rodeos
- Sand
- Tigers
- Smells (Olfactophobia)
- Sidewalk cracks
- Soccer riots[1]
- Wind
- Food on his plate touching (sauces, beans, etc.)
- Sitting in the back of any automobile
- Dryer Lint
- Crooked Paintings "Mr. Monk and Little Monk"
Monk tries to overcome these fears with Natalie and Julie's help, after learning that Harold Krenshaw might have overcome his fear of heights in "Mr. Monk and the Daredevil":
- Germs
- Ladybugs (Entomophobia)
- Heights (acrophobia)
- Harmonicas
In the episode "Mr. Monk Takes a Vacation", Adrian shows a fear of bodily fluids such as semen, blood, and saliva after the security guard shines an ultraviolet light in Adrian's hotel room. While he may be directly afraid of these things, it could be well due to the germs from the persons who left those traces that he was reacting to more than the traces themselves.
[edit] References
- ^ a b c d "Mr. Monk is At Your Service"
[edit] External links
- Adrian Monk at the Internet Movie Database
- Adrian Monk at the TVIV
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