Mr. Monk and the Three Pies

"Mr. Monk and the Three Pies"
Monk episode
Adrian (left) and Ambrose (right) stand in the entry to the Monk home
Episode no.	Season 2 Episode 11
Production code	T-1412
Original air date	January 23, 2004
Guest stars
John Turturro as Ambrose Monk Holt McCallany as Pat van Ranken Leslie Jordan as the Town Official Marcia Ann Burrs as Gladys Dohan Crystal Santos as Rita van Ranken
Season 2 episodes
June 2003 – March 2004 "Mr. Monk Goes Back to School" "Mr. Monk Goes to Mexico" "Mr. Monk Goes to the Ballgame" "Mr. Monk Goes to the Circus" "Mr. Monk and the Very, Very Old Man" "Mr. Monk Goes to the Theater" "Mr. Monk and the Sleeping Suspect" "Mr. Monk Meets the Playboy" "Mr. Monk and the 12th Man" "Mr. Monk and the Paperboy" "Mr. Monk and the Three Pies" "Mr. Monk and the TV Star" "Mr. Monk and the Missing Granny" "Mr. Monk and the Captain's Wife" "Mr. Monk Gets Married" "Mr. Monk Goes to Jail"
Episode chronology
← Previous "Mr. Monk and the Paperboy" Next → "Mr. Monk and the TV Star"
Monk (season 2) List of Monk episodes

Mr. Monk and the Three Pies is the eleventh episode of the second season of Monk, and is the 24th episode overall. The episode introduces Adrian Monk's brother, Ambrose. For his performance as Ambrose, John Turturro won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series. Tony Shalhoub listed the episode among his favorites during the Monk Cast Favorites Marathon.^[1] It was also featured on the Best of Monk DVD.

Plot

The town of Tewkesbury is holding their centennial fair. At the fair, Pat van Ranken enters a roll of tickets into a raffle contest, intent on winning a homemade cherry pie. However, the ticket number called out is not one of van Ranken's tickets. It's the ticket of an elderly woman, who wins the pie. van Ranken follows her back to her car, and demands the pie. She refuses, and he smashes her head against the steering wheel and steals the car. While Captain Stottlemeyer dismisses the homicide as a carjacking gone very, very wrong, Adrian Monk remains suspicious.

While he is looking over the crime scene, Sharona gets a call from Monk's estranged brother Ambrose, an agoraphobic who has not left his house for thirty-two years. The brothers have not spoken for seven years - Adrian is still angry at Ambrose because he never called or wrote after Trudy died. Ambrose suspects van Ranken, his neighbor, of murdering his wife, Rita. Adrian and Sharona visit Ambrose and there are various clues of how dysfunctional the Monks were all those years ago. Sharona sees that Ambrose is obsessed with the belief that their father will return one day: he has saved thirty years' worth of mail and newspapers in filing cabinets, and always sets a place for their father at the dinner table. He is employed writing instruction manuals for appliances and tools, at which he is very successful. Despite his eccentricities, Sharona can tell that his intellect is on par with, and even surpasses Adrian's - he has a similarly prodigious memory, and has taught himself to speak and write over seven languages. After leaving, Sharona actually hugs Adrian, thanking him for making her own family seem normal.

Ambrose is suspicious of van Ranken, as two nights ago, Ambrose heard van Ranken and his wife arguing, and heard gunshots. Three hours later, van Ranken got in his old pickup truck, drove away and was gone all night. The next morning, Ambrose called the house looking for Rita, and van Ranken said she had flown to Argentina. Suspiciously, he denied leaving the previous night, saying his truck had been broken down all summer. Adrian dismisses his brother as delusional, but as they are leaving the house, he notices the dead spot on the grass under van Ranken's truck. Indeed, the truck has been moved recently.

Adrian and Sharona visit van Ranken, on the pretext of taking back a bag of flour that Rita borrowed from Ambrose, and Adrian catches van Ranken red-handed in several lies about his wife's whereabouts. For instance, he has a parking permit for a local state park that indicates that he got to the entrance near closing time, one of Rita's shoes is in the trash can, and there is evidence to suggest that he has been bleaching the floor.

The next day, Adrian and Sharona follow van Ranken back to the fair. He takes part in a potato sack race and deliberately trips in order to win second prize: another cherry pie (he only gets in by taking a ripped sack). Later, they see him rooting around in it, looking for something, apparently without finding it. Ambrose remembers that Rita baked three cherry pies to give away at the fair, and there must be something in them, or one of them, worth killing for. Stottlemeyer is skeptical, but admits that there was no pie in the car when the police got there. However, the airline records confirm that Rita van Ranken boarded a plane to Buenos Aires on the night of the murder.

The next day, Adrian and Sharona track van Ranken back to the fair again, having found that the third and final cherry pie will be given away at bingo. Despite purchasing twelve tickets, Adrian loses to van Ranken. Adrian convinces Stottlemeyer to search the third pie, but nothing is found.

Over dinner with Ambrose, Adrian berates him for not calling after Trudy died, and Ambrose, taken aback, says the reason he didn't call was because he felt guilty: Trudy was running an errand to get cough medicine for him when she was killed, and he blames himself. He breaks down crying, and Adrian, shocked, tells him it wasn't his fault, and embraces him.

Here's What Happened

Pat van Ranken got into a fight with his wife, and shot her to death. The shells were ejected from the gun as the bullets came out. Midway through disposing of her body, a woman arrived from the fair, coming to collect the pies. When van Ranken returned to cleaning up the kitchen, he realized that one of the shell casings from his gun was nowhere to be found. At first he believed it landed in one of the pies. This meant he had to go after all three of the pies, but despite having to kill for one of them, he never found them.

Adrian and van Ranken each reenact the murder in their own apartment. They quickly both realize that the shell casing is in the bag of flour that is at Ambrose's house. Adrian and Sharona race to Tewkesbury, realizing that Ambrose is in danger.

Van Ranken tries to get the flour back by claiming he is using it to make chilli, but Ambrose sees through his ruse, pointing out that the recipe van Ranken named does not call for flour. He locks the door, causing van Ranken to set the house on fire. Adrian and Sharona arrive, and see the flames, and while Sharona calls the fire department, Adrian rushes inside to convince Ambrose to leave the house. Adrian resorts to dragging Ambrose out of the house just as the fire department arrives to put out the fire. Meanwhile, Stottlemeyer and Lieutenant Disher arrive to arrest van Ranken; they just found Rita's body in the state park 20 minutes ago, and the "Rita van Ranken" that flew to Argentina is actually his girlfriend. Ambrose gives them the shell casing they were looking for.

The episode ends with Adrian and Ambrose visiting Trudy's grave.

Additional information

• Mr. Monk and the Three Pies is very similar to the Sherlock Holmes story The Adventure of the Six Napoleons, with van Ranken as the equivalent of Pietro Venucci.
• A diorama depicting the carjacking scene from this episode appears in Marci Maven's house in the season 6 episode Mr. Monk and His Biggest Fan. It features some anachronisms in it. The most noticeable is the fact that the diorama features Natalie (who is represented by a troll doll), who didn't first appear on Monk until at least a year after the events of Mr. Monk and the Three Pies, and hence the doll should represent Sharona.

References

1. ^ "Monk Cast Favorites Marathon". USA Network. http://www.usanetwork.com/series/monk/community/castfavorites/index.html. Retrieved 2007-01-01. 

External links and references

• Official Site for Monk