This has to rank as one of the worst in the series. I say this because there were almost no funny moments, the means of committing the crime seemed obvious, and there was never more than one suspect, even though we didn't actually see the crime being committed. There was almost no action, no scenes where Monk or any of the "good guys" was being threatened, just polite conversations between the suspect and Monk for almost the whole show.
And there were plot holes big enough to drive a Mack truck through.
We begin with a woman inside Monk's home, claiming the "door was open." At Monk's house? I don't think so, Tim. She says she expects to be killed soon, by her husband. She is quite serious, explaining he has said it will happen almost every day for some time. She lives in a mansion, with servants, and has no intention of moving out, or hiring someone to keep it from happening. She only wants to give Monk a check to promise to investigate her murder AFTER it happens, so he can keep the husband from getting away with it.
If my wife seriously told me she planned to kill me, and I believed her, I would be putting as many miles away from her as I could, pronto. This woman just resigns herself to this fact because...her husband is a genius. Even if she thinks he will somehow, someday be able to locate her, since she believes it will happen soon, she could certainly have taken some of the couple's fortune and gone someplace where he would have certainly not found her immediately.
He is a renowned chess champion, currently competing in Vancouver. Monk promised to help her. He is trying to get the captain to help with protection when they learn she is already dead. The coroner's report says it was a heart attack, not murder at all.
The champ comes home and before Monk can do anything but verbally joust with the man, the body is cremated. Monk has found a common garden plant that could have served as poison but has no way to learn if it was in her body. There was one funny scene, where Monk is at a funeral home in a room where there is one casket and the suspected chess champ. He assumes, as would anyone, that the casket has his wife's remains. Two old women come in to see their niece. Monk goes into a detailed description of what the police are going to have done to the body, horrifying the women, right before he learns that the casket contains their niece, but the chess champ's wife's remains are in a small box on the side of the room.
Monk decides to try to learn more about chess to learn about the man. We never see any hint that he learned anything useful here. As far as the viewer is concerned, it was just a way to fill some time. Same as was the case where Julie-who was in the chess club in school-plays a top-notch player about her age just so Monk can talk to him during the game. Julie is such a complete novice at chess, that she loses in four moves-something most people learn not to do by about the 5th game they ever play. It takes making some really bad moves and ignoring everything your opponent is doing. If you have a grade school chess club that starts in September, the worst player in the club will know not to let this happen before October begins.
Later, Monk gets into a game with the champ. The champ opens with a basic pawn move, then moves on to open three other games, as he is playing four people at once. When he returns to table 1 where he is playing Monk, Monk still hasn't made his opening move. He appears to be contemplating it. He said he played some, but when his opponent has made the most common opening move, he can't figure out what to do for his opening move and we eventually see the other three games are over or nearly over, with many moves and Monk still hasn't made his opening move. It would have been clever if they had showed our hero getting the champ to either lose, or settle for a draw. I'm thinking he got flustered when Monk talked during the match and made him concerned about the progress he was making on the case so that he blundered on the chess board. For Monk to just sit there and never make a move just made him look stupid. Monk tells the champ that he knows he did it, he just doesn't have proof. The man calmly continues to treat Monk politely, and speak about the "game" the two are having.
SPOILER-- Near the end, Monk happens to learn that the man is now twice widowed. They have a hearing with a judge where that first wife's body is to be exhumed to see if she had poison in her, like Monk has theorized the second wife did. We see Monk and Co. wandering about a cemetery before they find the headstone for the first wife. To their chagrin, the coroner finds no poison in that body.
We later learn that the champion somehow was able to switch headstones once he learned about this exhumation. Monk sees evidence in the dirt that a headstone was moved.
Now I find it hard to believe the ever-observant Mr. Monk didn't notice the recently replanted dirt around the headstone when they were digging up the body. Furthermore, when they go to the cemetery office with the order, the cemetery director would likely have had a map to specifically show them were the grave is AND that director would surely have known about the large headstones being moved quite recently. How did they moved these above-ground headstones without someone at the cemetery noticing?
Someone in the police department, if not Monk, would almost certainly have examined the chess player's biography early on, learning then about the first wife. We've all seen several shows where someone is killed and when the police can't get any real evidence on the spouse, they immediately start looking to see if they might have done something similar before. In fact, the insurance company would likely have alerted the police to the fact that this same man collected on a huge policy on his first wife and they are now suspicious about this second wife's death.
The best Monks either have a whodunit for us, or a really clever method the murder being committed-ala Columbo, AND a goodly number of laughs. Since this episode had none of those, I cannot give it more than a 3 out of 10.
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