A special Black & White version premieres Friday, December 22 at 9/8C, with the normal Color version premiering right after at 10/9C.

Eep! i totally forgot this was coming back! mininova.org, here I come!

The opening scene works fine in B&W but the rest just looks dumb. But overall, a good episode, one of the better I've seen from this series lately.

It's wobbly. It's way too wobbly. Why is it so wobbly?

Haven't seen the recent new MONK episodes in a long time, but this was silly FUN! Caught the colorized, then the B&W version.

-- "Your leper wasn't even a real leper. My leper was the real deal!"

-- At the doctor's office:
"Can I help you?"
Lt. Disher: "No, I'm just browsing."

Great chemistry between Howard and Shalhoub.

I watched both and clearly the episode was shot in color, thus it was the much preferred version. Even the scenes with low light and the leper shot in noir style were not shot with black and white film nor was the episode photographed to compensate for that type of film. When you see the color version, you can see ALL of the elements of the frame. While in the B&W version, a lot of the image is lost and hard to see, especially in the background, the details.

This was a ridiculous idea. Fake B&W vs. Real Color. Good job guys.

Fun episode though.

"Give me your hand."
"Is there anyone else up there? Can you check?

Christmas episode from last month is coming on at 6 or 7 tonight incase you missed it like me.
New season officially starts Jan. 19

It was a fun episode, but I agree the gimmick was pretty pointless.

I thought the episode/story itself was just 'okay'. It was much simpler than a lot of other episodes.

Hated the B/W and then color. I only watched the B&W because it came on first and it looked horrible. I'm sure the color had to have looked better. The idea itself was just dumb to me. Maybe they wanted to get more people watching... i dunno. Didn't even know about the 2 different versions till it came on.

My thoughts exactly. While I think the "desaturating a color image" is just an awful b&w technique altogether, at least the bar scenes had some semblance of a noir-ish feel. But the rest of it (especially the daylight scenes) just did not work as b&w. If you're going to go with this b&w noir gimmick, at least write a script with a lot of nighttime stuff and dark shadowy scenes to make best use of the gimmick.

I do think the scene of Monk hanging over the cliff edge worked in black and white, too. Other than that, though, I agree with everyone else -- this episode was clearly lit and shot for color and just doesn't work as well in black and white.