I think Trudy is alive and has been in hiding. What do you say? We’ll find out tonight on “Monk‘s” series finale (9 p.m., USA). Monk, the San Francisco detective with obsessive-compulsive disorder, was poisoned while trying to solve his wife’s decade-old car-bomb murder in Part 1 of “Mr. Monk and the End” last week. The hour ended with Monk, getting sicker and sicker as doctors tried to find a cure in time, finally opening the Christmas gift that Trudy left for him. It’s a videotape with the message: “If you’re watching this, it means I’m dead. … There’s something I never told you. Something happened … something terrible. It was years ago, before we met.”

Tony Shalhoub, who played Monk so perfectly for eight seasons and won three Emmys for his work, discussed the finale in an interview with AP:

“The ending, just from my point of view, is very satisfying. Granted, the last two episodes are much darker than episodes we’ve done in the past, more drama than the usual dramedy tone, but I really thought the writers hit it out of the park… I think what they [the viewers] will feel is kind of a magnification of what I believe they’ve been feeling all along, which is kind of mixed about Monk: Feel good for him, bad for him, frustrated for him. Hoping for his success and for his healing, his recovery.”