We open with a little league baseball practice where a kid is depicted being a poor hitter, who luckily clobbers one over the fence despite swinging with his eyes closed. But as another kid goes beyond the fence to retrieve the baseball, he discovers that the ball clobbered an old lady who was walking in the head, killing her. Her relatives are shown going into her house to put her affairs in order and finding a box with a voodoo doll depicting the victim with a tiny baseball attached to the side of her head.
We hear about a similar victim who was struck by lightning while out golfing, then meet a woman whose uncle had a heart attack and died on opening a package with a voodoo doll sent to him. She tells Monk her uncle was very superstitious and must have just been scared to death on seeing the doll.
Monk & Co. are dumbfounded at how these things could happen because they can find no connection at all between the victims. Then Natalie receives a voodoo doll with its head cut off and is scared for her life. She has been troubled since the start, and later reveals that she had visited a neighboring voodoo priestess in South Carolina, where she was living with husband and daughter, who predicted something bad for Mitch just one day before he was shot down.
We get a rather comical scene where the "Reverend Hadley Jorgensen" (who Stottlemeyer and Disher met running a voodoo shop, the one where the dolls were purchased) comes to Natalie's to perform an anti-curse ceremony. But the ceremony is spoiled because Natalie shocked everyone by drinking this hideous concoction he prepared. He had never suggested anyone was to drink it, but she was too scared to let him do his thing.
Here we enter spoiler territory. Because she was feeling sickly, an ambulance was called and one of the attendants was the same woman, Angeline, whose uncle had been victim number three. Amazingly, she tells Monk he can't ride with Natalie to the hospital because there isn't enough room. Really? Wives/Husbands or other loved ones normally ride with the patient in ambulances-there is plenty of room for three.
So Monk is riding along with Jorgensen (played by singer Meat Loaf) when he finally figures out the mystery. Angeline is the killer, she planted the dolls in the first two victims homes AFTER they died by accident then killed her uncle for a nice inheritance. Not knowing the police had no clue she was involved, she thought it would keep them from her by scaring Monk's assistant. And of course, she just happened to be the one called to the scene when Natalie needed help. After all, San Francisco is a small town. It's only natural that this woman would be in the ambulance called to each of these three death scenes. Sure.
The major complaint here is that the killer would almost surely have gotten away with it had she just stopped. She had accomplished her goal and the police were stumped. Had there been no further voodoo dolls attached to dead people, they would have had to drop the open case and move on. Nobody was suspicious of her at all. Only the pointless scaring of Natalie, then showing up attempting to kill her caused her downfall. Lesser complaints include the fact that while she claimed her uncle was highly superstitious to help the story that the doll scared him to death, and Monk noticed as we all did that a horseshoe hung on the wall was upside down-supposedly meaning bad luck, did nothing to make Monk suspicious of the EMT attendant.
The kid baseball player was wearing a helmet with no earflaps, something not seen in youth baseball for over half a century. Totally unrealistic.
The voodoo un-cursing scene was rather funny and was surely the highlight of this episode. I enjoyed Randy's explanation of why he doesn't believe in voodoo to Natalie: "I'm a Pisces. We're not superstitious."
Maybe this series has had too many episodes where someone commits more than one murder (or in this case made it appear that voodoo killed three people) when all but one victim was killed/used just to throw suspicion away from the one victim that mattered. But it seemed obvious from the start, since there was no connection between the dead people, that two were likely just used to throw suspicion away from the real victim of murder.
Now we initially had some reason to think maybe the old woman wasn't actually killed by the baseball, but someone murdered her and made it look that way. But nothing about the scene made that seem possible. When we got to the lightning and the golfer, there was no more thought about the person not dying in what seemed like the obvious manner. The heart attack person led to no discussion by detectives on the show about any sort of tests proving or disproving it was a natural heart attack and nothing more-we were totally into the voodoo angle, ignoring science here.
I also didn't buy into Natalie's belief in voodoo based on what she told Monk about Mitch. Her husband was in the Air Force in the Gulf War and just happened to be shot down shortly after some woman he never met predicted some vague disaster for him, and that convinced Natalie that voodoo was real. The woman could hardly have gotten Natalie's attention by predicting her young daughter would only have two cavities on her next dentist appointment. Predicting something bad for the husband in a war would seem like an easy prediction for her to make.
The dramatic part was far too obvious even to me. I give this one a 4 for the comedy it provided, but that's as high as I can go.
We hear about a similar victim who was struck by lightning while out golfing, then meet a woman whose uncle had a heart attack and died on opening a package with a voodoo doll sent to him. She tells Monk her uncle was very superstitious and must have just been scared to death on seeing the doll.
Monk & Co. are dumbfounded at how these things could happen because they can find no connection at all between the victims. Then Natalie receives a voodoo doll with its head cut off and is scared for her life. She has been troubled since the start, and later reveals that she had visited a neighboring voodoo priestess in South Carolina, where she was living with husband and daughter, who predicted something bad for Mitch just one day before he was shot down.
We get a rather comical scene where the "Reverend Hadley Jorgensen" (who Stottlemeyer and Disher met running a voodoo shop, the one where the dolls were purchased) comes to Natalie's to perform an anti-curse ceremony. But the ceremony is spoiled because Natalie shocked everyone by drinking this hideous concoction he prepared. He had never suggested anyone was to drink it, but she was too scared to let him do his thing.
Here we enter spoiler territory. Because she was feeling sickly, an ambulance was called and one of the attendants was the same woman, Angeline, whose uncle had been victim number three. Amazingly, she tells Monk he can't ride with Natalie to the hospital because there isn't enough room. Really? Wives/Husbands or other loved ones normally ride with the patient in ambulances-there is plenty of room for three.
So Monk is riding along with Jorgensen (played by singer Meat Loaf) when he finally figures out the mystery. Angeline is the killer, she planted the dolls in the first two victims homes AFTER they died by accident then killed her uncle for a nice inheritance. Not knowing the police had no clue she was involved, she thought it would keep them from her by scaring Monk's assistant. And of course, she just happened to be the one called to the scene when Natalie needed help. After all, San Francisco is a small town. It's only natural that this woman would be in the ambulance called to each of these three death scenes. Sure.
The major complaint here is that the killer would almost surely have gotten away with it had she just stopped. She had accomplished her goal and the police were stumped. Had there been no further voodoo dolls attached to dead people, they would have had to drop the open case and move on. Nobody was suspicious of her at all. Only the pointless scaring of Natalie, then showing up attempting to kill her caused her downfall. Lesser complaints include the fact that while she claimed her uncle was highly superstitious to help the story that the doll scared him to death, and Monk noticed as we all did that a horseshoe hung on the wall was upside down-supposedly meaning bad luck, did nothing to make Monk suspicious of the EMT attendant.
The kid baseball player was wearing a helmet with no earflaps, something not seen in youth baseball for over half a century. Totally unrealistic.
The voodoo un-cursing scene was rather funny and was surely the highlight of this episode. I enjoyed Randy's explanation of why he doesn't believe in voodoo to Natalie: "I'm a Pisces. We're not superstitious."
Maybe this series has had too many episodes where someone commits more than one murder (or in this case made it appear that voodoo killed three people) when all but one victim was killed/used just to throw suspicion away from the one victim that mattered. But it seemed obvious from the start, since there was no connection between the dead people, that two were likely just used to throw suspicion away from the real victim of murder.
Now we initially had some reason to think maybe the old woman wasn't actually killed by the baseball, but someone murdered her and made it look that way. But nothing about the scene made that seem possible. When we got to the lightning and the golfer, there was no more thought about the person not dying in what seemed like the obvious manner. The heart attack person led to no discussion by detectives on the show about any sort of tests proving or disproving it was a natural heart attack and nothing more-we were totally into the voodoo angle, ignoring science here.
I also didn't buy into Natalie's belief in voodoo based on what she told Monk about Mitch. Her husband was in the Air Force in the Gulf War and just happened to be shot down shortly after some woman he never met predicted some vague disaster for him, and that convinced Natalie that voodoo was real. The woman could hardly have gotten Natalie's attention by predicting her young daughter would only have two cavities on her next dentist appointment. Predicting something bad for the husband in a war would seem like an easy prediction for her to make.
The dramatic part was far too obvious even to me. I give this one a 4 for the comedy it provided, but that's as high as I can go.