The saddest thing about the next-to-last episode of The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey on Apple TV+ is that it looks like Ptolemy is at last beginning to lose it.  The "it" being the enhanced, super-sharp mentality that Dr. Rubin aka Satan's treatment has given Ptolemy.  At that party, the occasion for Ptolemy's speech that Rubin attended -- the only white guy in the room, as Rubin (very well played by Walter Goggins) observed and noted -- Ptolemy can't quite get that last line out.   Ptolemy (for my money, one of Samuel L. Jackson's best performances) is aware of that, too, but soldiers on.  He has crucial work still to do.

But that slippage wrecks my theory/hope that Ptolemy will somehow avoid what Rubin sees as an inevitable decline.  Though -- maybe not.  While there's life, there's hope, right?  And there's still one more episode of life in this six-episode miniseries.

A large part of the work left for Ptolemy is to convince his nephew Reggie's wife Nina's boyfriend -- who, in fact, killed Reggie to prevent him from taking Nina away by way of Texas -- to take some big sum of money to go away himself and leave Ptolemy's family alone.  It's a safe bet, I'd say, that this killer is not going to go away so easily.

The other work left for Ptolemy is to get Robyn to take control of his money -- multi-millions --when he's gone.  As Robyn rightly says, she's only seventeen.  She knows nothing about how to handle big money.  I'd say it's also a safe bet that Robyn will agree to Ptolemy's request before the series ends next week.

But Ptolemy will have to do all this work with his mind slipping.   And I'll be hoping until the end that that just doesn't happen.

See you back here next week, when I'll let you know what I think of how it all turns out.

a little time travel story -- free