User:DReifGalaxyM31/Mr. Monk Meets His Dad

"Mr. Monk Meets His Dad" is the ninth episode of the fifth season of Monk, and the 70th episode overall. It is the show's second annual Christmas special and also introduces Monk's father for the first time.

Plot summary
Monk joins his truck-driving father on a road trip across America, and Adrian stumbles upon a bigger mystery.

Plot synopsis
In Midland, Texas, Ben Glazer, owner of the Tiger Bay Trucking Company, borrows one of his tractor trailer rigs and drives out to the ranch house of his partner, Kenneth Woods. When they meet, Kenneth is wearing a horrible tie, which he says was given to him by Jack Monk, Sr. (his secret Santa) at the company's Christmas party. Ben remarks that he thought Kenneth was going to fire Monk soon, but Kenneth claims that he didn't have the heart, with it being the holidays and all. Kenneth gets down to the point and shows Ben some papers from his office. He tells Ben that these papers are forged and accuses him of faking invoices for replacement parts for their trucks - buying old, used parts instead and pocketing the difference - which means, not only is Ben stealing from their company, but he's endangering the lives of the 72 drivers they have on the road. Kenneth even threatens to call up the company's Chicago office to cross-check the invoices.

Ben denies Kenneth's accusations, but Kenneth opens the hood of the truck and points out the worn out parts of the engine. He points out a loose gasket and warns that the engine will blow if it cracks... and that's when his necktie gets caught in the still-running engine, strangling him. Ben starts to cut him loose, then stops, realizing that fate has handed him an easy way out of his troubles. As Kenneth continues to choke, and tries to gain a foothold on the tire, Ben decides to help fate along by pulling the luckless Kenneth's feet out from under him.

A week later, in San Francisco, Natalie Teeger gets a call for Adrian Monk: Jack has been arrested after assaulting a cop during a traffic stop, and is asking for his son. 39 years after abandoning his family, the elder Monk wants two things: forgiveness, and Adrian's help in fixing his traffic ticket ("But, if you can only do one, I'll take B"). Jack explains that he quit his job as a textbook writer and became a trucker, and he'll be fired if he doesn't get to Phoenix on time. Monk is so disgusted that he can barely speak to his father, but, with Captain Stottlemeyer's urging, he not only agrees to fix the ticket, but also accepts Jack's invitation to accompany him on the rest of his run.

While they make their way to Phoenix, things are awkward at first between the two Monks. Jack says that he never planned to leave; but while he was driving home from picking up Chinese food, he opened a fortune cookie that said, "Stand by your man." Realizing how unhappy he was with his job and his family, he just kept on driving - for whatever good that explanation is.

Seeing Jack's license, "Jack Monk, Sr." Monk is stunned to learn that he has a half-brother, Jack, Jr., who (supposedly) is a successful orthopedic surgeon in Baltimore.

At the next stop, Monk breaks down and calls Natalie in the middle of her Christmas party, saying the whole trip is a flop: his father doesn't love him, they have nothing in common, and he wants to go home. Natalie urges him to stick it out, adding that no one at the Christmas party is quite sober enough to drive to Arizona to get him (Monk asks for Julie, but she protests that she doesn't have a driver's license, causing him to burst into tears and hang up).

Reluctantly rejoining his father on the road, Adrian looks at the itinerary for the route, and notices something strange about the route itinerary. Jack's route sends him from Midland to San Francisco directly, but after leaving San Francisco, the route zig-zags back and forth across the Southwestern United States: Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, Utah, etc. When Adrian asks what they're carrying in the back, Jack replies that they are carrying toys: last week, Ben Glazer announced that he had found religion and offered any driver $5,000 to deliver toys to a series of orphanages he was in as a child.

When Adrian suggests that they could save time by taking Route 401, a more direct freeway, Jack calls back to the home office and makes the suggestion, but Ben tells him to stick to the route given, because the shortcut is apparently blocked by road construction. But when they make their first stop (with Adrian playing the elf to his father's Santa Claus), the "toys" in the box prove to be a hastily-bought assortment of junk, and the kids are almost universally disappointed, with at least one orphan declaring her hatred of Santa Claus and the North Pole. Adrian insists that something has to be wrong for two reasons: A) the load they're carrying is rather tiny for such a big semi truck, and B) it turns out that Ben Glazer never went through this orphanage.

Angry, Jack says that Adrian is jeopardizing his job by investigatng his boss, and explodes that his family was always impossible, and Jack is glad he ran out on them. Hearing that, Adrian decides to walk home rather than spend another minute with his father.

The next morning, two hunters park their truck by the side of a road and prepare to set off into the woods, when they discover Kenneth Wood's body in the brush. When Jack checks into the home office, Ben's secretary informs him of this and mentions that the Midland police are questioning everyone. Later, at the next truck stop, Jack has a casual conversation with another trucker, who says that route 401 is wide-open and there is no construction anywhere on that route.

Realizing that Ben lied to him about the road conditions, Jack turns around and picks up Adrian on the roadside ("I knew you'd walk in a straight line. You always did"). As the two men eat a late-night Christmas dinner at a truck stop diner, they discuss the case. Adrian is sure that Ben is up to something, but until they can figure out what, and how to prove it, he thinks they should stick to the route and see what happens.

The two Monks spend another day and a half on the road, gradually getting closer - since Jack is, with the possible exception of Stottlemeyer, the one man on Earth who knows the full catalogue of Adrian's quirks.

On day #2, Adrian notices something interesting: that the truck is equipped with a GPS receiver, with an automatic memory that keeps track of the last 5,000 miles the truck drove. Monk looks at their latest trip odometer and realizes that they have driven nearly that many miles... and that is when he solves the case. He yells at Jack to pull over immediately. Unfortunately, their defective brake line chooses that very moment to fail, without either of them noticing. The truck starts to speed up.

Here's What Happened
Adrian reveals that Ben Glazer was driving their truck when he paid his fatal visit to Kenneth Woods, and he was when he dumped Woods's body, but now he had a problem: the truck's GPS would provve he had been to Kenneth's ranch that day. He had to erase it immediately, by putting 5,000 more miles on the truck, so he cooked up a story and sent Jack on the bogus toy run.

Jack is astounded by his son's abilities, but asks how they can prove it. Adrian says that as long as they keep the odometer under 5,000 miles, they have all the proof they need... and then notices that the truck has been slowly rolling foward all the time, and, as Jack realizes their brakes are gone, the truck picks up speed and careens down the hill, narrowly dodging oncoming cars.

As Jack steers desperately to keep the truck from going off the road, he tells Adrian to look for a runaway truck ramp. Adrian spots one, but Jack is unable to turn to get onto it in time. He begs his son's forgiveness for abandoning him and Ambrose. He laments that they are about to die, and he has failed as a father. When Adrian reminds him of Jack, Jr., Jack, Sr. says he lied: Jack, Jr. is an unemployed "putz" who lives in his father's basement, smokes marijuana all day long and steals money from his father's wallet. Jack simply wanted to have a son he could be proud of – not knowing he had one in Adrian.

Just then, Adrian spots another runaway truck ramp, and Jack steers the truck onto it. The truck comes to a stop before hitting the barrier at the end. Adrian looks at the GPS and laments that they ran over 5,000 miles, and the box has reset itself. Jack doesn't hear him: he realizes that Adrian, in the heat of the moment, called him "Dad" for the first time since they saw each other again.

Back at the home office, Adrian and Jack pull up. Ben berates Jack about the rule regarding passengers in the cab, and then he notices that they aren't alone - two detectives have arrived with a warrant to arrest Ben. They mention that they've seen the sign-out sheets, proving that on the day Kenneth vanished, he was in the truck Jack and Adrian are currently driving. Ben scoffs, saying they can't prove anything without the GPS record, but Adrian contradicts him: all along the route, there was a rattling sound in the truck's engine that both he and Jack noticed. For much of the route, they thought that there was something wrong with a fan belt inside the engine. They finally looked inside, and found a piece of Kenneth Woods's necktie still caught in it (Jack recognizes it because he gave it to Kenneth at the annual Christmas party). When asked to explain how part of the victim's necktie found its way into the engine of the truck that he was driving, Ben has no answer, and he is arrested.

Watching as Ben is led away, Adrian turns and is surprised to see that his father has bought him a brand-new bicycle. With the elder Monk's help, Adrian learns to ride for the first time in his life.

Goofs

 * A tractor trailer does not have hydraulic brakes. If the line breaks air would come out not oil and by default the brakes would lock up.
 * Midland, Texas is shown with lots of trees and mountains in the background and a rolling terrain. Midland is, in fact, flat and featureless and this episode was obviously not filmed there.
 * When Jack is refueling the truck, he is standing in front of a pump that is labeled "Premium". Diesel fuel of the type used in semis is not offered in a premium grade. Gasoline comes with a premium setting, but it's only usable on cars, SUVs, pickup trucks, and lighter vehicles.
 * The total gas price is inconsistent with the price per gallon and the number of gallons pumped.
 * In this episode, Monk is furious that his Dad left and wanted nothing to do with him, but in "Mr. Monk Goes Home Again" he was sad and anxious to meet him and also felt guilty that he "drove him away."
 * It's certainly possible that Monk's uncharacteristically impulsive road trip in a tractor trailer was due to his complicated reaction to being with his father again, but it's hard to believe that he would wear two different hats that have been worn by other people.
 * Adrian makes hand contact with his father (and one other person), but isn't seen going for one of his trademark wipes.
 * Truck "runoffs" (more commonly called "runaway truck ramps") don't work the way we see it in the episode. They have several methods of stopping a truck, but all of them require hitting something. Generally, the vehicle first drives over a tall pile of gravel which greatly reduces speed, and if this doesn't stop the truck, a barricade (similar to the one shown, but the truck never touches it) is at the end to stop it. Other forms of this are present that involve the truck going up a hill.