"What are you looking at? My eyes are up here!"

-Varla Davis

Monk Season 3
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Season 2				Season 4

Mr. Monk and the Girl Who Cried Wolf is the sixth episode of the third season of Monk.

SynopsisEdit

Sharona believes she is losing her sanity after she begins to suffer hallucinations.

PlotEdit

Sharona Fleming drops Adrian Monk at the entrance to a parking garage, then parks her Volvo inside. Suddenly, she gets the shock of her life when she is approached by a staggering, blood-soaked man with a knife in his chest and a screwdriver sticking out of his right ear, who is saying, "Douglas is worried about you." By the time Sharona has dragged Monk down there, there is no evidence that the man ever existed.

The police are unable to find any evidence that suggests anything out of the ordinary - except Sharona's behavior. Captain Stottlemeyer encourages Monk to give Sharona a few days off to relax: clearly she's overworked.

A few days later, Sharona attends her evening creative writing course, where she eagerly awaits a grade on a paper she wrote. Strangely, her professor, Meredith Preminger, claims Sharona never handed the paper in. Confused, Sharona leaves and heads for home. On the way, she stops for gas - and again comes face to face with the blood-soaked man from the parking garage! Sharona is so thoroughly caught up in the sheer terror of this encounter, that she forgets to get the license plate details of the man's black Ford F-150 pickup truck.

Desperate and looking for answers, Sharona takes a big step and decides to pay a visit to Dr. Kroger. She confesses that her own father, Douglas Fleming, had a mental breakdown shortly before his death, and she is worried that it runs in their family - though she is equally sure that if she is cracking up, the stress of working for Monk is the trigger.

After her session she goes to freshen up in the ladies room - and sees the blood soaked man again! She runs to get Monk, and when they return, again there's no sign of anything amiss. That's the last straw: Sharona decides she needs more time off and suggests Varla Davis, a nurse from her writing class, to help Monk in her absence. She also calls her ex-husband, Trevor, to take custody of Benjy, fearing that she's now a danger to her son.

That evening, Sharona's professor, Mrs. Preminger, sits down to dinner with her husband. As they talk, Mr. Preminger says the soup tastes funny. As he begins to gasp for breath, his wife calmly informs him that it has been spiked with carbolic acid, which will kill him in a few seconds with symptoms virtually indistinguishable from a natural heart seizure. No sooner has she finished speaking than her husband goes face forward into his bowl. She gets up from the table and starts to clear the dishes away, and a man steps out of the hallway - the man Sharona has been seeing - and the two embrace as lovers.

The next day, Monk meets Varla, whose no-nonsense attitude is too much for him. Faced with her abrasive ways, Monk becomes determined to prove that there is something or someone behind all these incidents befalling Sharona. He decides to start at the beginning and drags Varla back to the parking garage, where they discover a clue that identifies the blood-soaked man as a security guard from the school where Mrs. Preminger teaches. Things become stranger when they learn that Meredith Preminger cancelled her class due to her husband's untimely death. When they share the details of his death with Sharona, she soon realizes what is going on.

Here's What HappenedEdit

Sharona's paper - the one Mrs. Preminger claimed she never turned in - was a murder mystery about a woman who poisons her husband with carbolic acid. Mrs. Preminger wanted to kill her husband, and Sharona unwittingly handed her a blueprint for the perfect murder. But Mrs. Preminger had to discredit Sharona, in case she recognized the similarities between the story and the real murder. First, Mrs. Preminger denied that Sharona had ever turned in the original story, and then she and her lover arranged the series of "hallucinations." Even if Sharona didn't actually believe she was going crazy, her credibility would be wrecked.

Monk and company confront Mrs. Preminger at her home, where she is holding a wake for her husband. She denies it, knowing that the police don't have enough proof to order an autopsy on her husband's remains. It appears that she has won, but then Varla remembers that Mrs. Preminger taught her students to hand-write their rough drafts before finishing a typed version. In a pile of scrap paper that Sharona has saved, they find the original draft of the murder mystery, in Sharona's handwriting. That is enough to confront Mrs. Preminger. As Stottlemeyer and Disher march back to the house, Varla immediately hands off her assistant duties to Sharona, now that they all know she is perfectly sane - or as sane as any person working for Monk can be.

Background Information and NotesEdit

• First appearance of Harold Krenshaw.
• Second (and final) appearance of Trevor Howe, Sharona's ex-husband. David Lee Russek replaces Frank John Hughes.