Monk/Mr. Monk and the Election

Mr. Monk and the Election
Season 3, Episode 15
Airdate	February 25, 2005
Production Number	T-3013
Written by	Nell Scovell
Directed by	Allison Liddi-Brown
Stream
← 3x14 Mr. Monk Goes to Vegas	3x16 → Mr. Monk and the Kid
Monk — Season Three

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Mr. Monk and the Election is the fifteenth episode of the third season of Monk, and the forty-fourth episode overall.

Starring: Tony Shalhoub (Adrian Monk), Traylor Howard (Natalie Teeger), Jason Gray-Stanford (Lt. Randall Disher)

and Ted Levine (Stottlemeyer)

Guest Starring: Tim Bagley (Harold Krenshaw), Nick Offerman (Jack Whitman), Sue Cremin (Reporter), Neil Giuntoli (First Attendant), Emmy Clarke (Julie Teeger), Christopher May (Second Attendant)

and Stanley Kamel (Dr. Kroger)

Co-Starring: Nancy Daly (Mrs. Giddons), John Maynard (Repairman), Bru Muller (Ellis), Sally Ann Brooks (Mrs. Bloom), Alex Quijano (First Uniform Cop), Debi Meyer Cox (Voting Attendant), Matthew Legaspi (Smaller Boy)

Plot Overview

While running for a seat on the local school board in order to save Julie's school from closure, Natalie is targeted by a sniper who fires 14 shots into her campaign office with a semi-automatic gun, narrowly missing her and killing a security guard. After a grenade is thrown through Natalie's living room window by the same sniper, Monk begins investigating and starts to initially suspect his nemesis Harold Krenshaw, who is campaigning against Natalie on a platform to consolidate several schools to save on taxes and who, like Monk, is a patient of Dr. Kroger's, but he later rules Krenshaw out as a suspect when he learns that whoever threw the grenade, who also sent Natalie a note telling her to withdraw from the school board election, has also begun targeting Monk because he has become nervous about Monk getting too close to the truth about the reason for Natalie being targeted.

Later on, when Monk goes to Natalie's house to try to convince her to quit the election, she tells him that she cannot quit, then confides in him a story she had never told anyone else; her husband Mitch, who had been reportedly killed in a plane crash behind enemy lines during the Kosovo War, had been accused of cowardice and desertion by two soldiers who had been with Mitch on the plane when it crashed but survived the crash (though in reality, the details of Mitch's death are unclear), and she refuses to quit the election because she does not want Julie to think of her as a coward as she fears Julie might do of her father should she ever learn about the claimed details surrounding his death. Soon after at a debate between Natalie and Krenshaw at the auditorium at Julie's school, Monk realizes that Jack Whitman, a Kosovo War veteran who had infiltrated Natalie's campaign in the guise of volunteering, is the man who had attempted to assassinate her to cover up his post-war involvement in illegal weapons sales because incriminating evidence tying him to those activities was jammed up inside a used photocopying machine Natalie had bought for her campaign.