The Kardashians

Never Go Against the Family

Season 1

Episode 8

Editor’s Rating

4 stars

****

Photo: HULU

Kourtney has officially finished her seven-day toxin-removal cleanse that we saw last week, and she simply can’t stop singing its praises to her family. “I’m gonna buy you guys all yoni steams,” she says of the vagina-steaming treatment, which is essentially just swamp ass, but on purpose. “What is more luxurious?” she asks, and allow me to answer: A free massage chair in a Brookstone, a coach flight in the emergency-exit row, and the Cheesecake Factory are just a few examples of things more luxurious than squatting over a humidifier.

But the important thing is that Kourtney and Travis feel healthier than ever, so they’ve decided to take a break from IVF and just try things naturally for a while — hopefully off-camera.

There have been a lot of celebrity cameos on this show, but none has felt more like a dream sequence than that of Gwyneth Paltrow. The Glee songstress and (despite what she may tell you) Spider-Man star floats into the frame for a meeting of the minds with Kourtney.

Before the masterminds behind Goop and Poosh get down to business, they chat about their shared experience with this miracle cleanse. I know, shocker, Gwyneth did it too. However, she was surprised to hear about the no-sex rule that Kourtney and Travis had to follow — supporting the theory that their therapist, Martha, made that up as a beautiful gift to us, the audience.

At this G20 Summit for white-lady celebrity wellness brands, the duo decides to collaborate on something to prove that there’s enough room for both of them in this industry — a fact that I personally never questioned. What will this collaboration between Poosh and Goop (which I’m dubbing “Poop”) look like? Well, obviously, it’s a vagina-scented candle called “This Smells Like My Pooshy.”

Over at Kris’s house, Kim is admiring her clear refrigerator filled with every green vegetable and fruit imaginable — meanwhile I’ve never finished a full bag of lettuce without at least half of it immediately going bad in the fridge. Right next to that farmers’ market of a refrigerator is a freezer filled with no less than 60 pints of Häagen-Daz, so Kris is pretty much set on all fronts.

Kim tells her about a conversation she overheard between North and Mason (North forgot to have her sign an NDA, apparently), in which Mason was talking about Travis becoming his stepdad. While we didn’t see his reaction after the engagement, Kim seems to confirm that it wasn’t positive, but he’s starting to come around — telling North that getting a stepparent isn’t all that bad, and they aren’t evil like in the movies. It seems like Travis has yet to reveal his plan to ship the brats off to boarding school in Switzerland and inherit Kourtney’s fortune.

Kim was happy to hear the conversation, not just for Mason, but because she also felt like it was reassuring for North to hear now that Kim is starting to date again after Kanye. Speaking of which, she’s starting to be a little less secretive with production, telling them that the reason she’s mostly kept her mouth shut is that she didn’t want to look like an idiot in case she and Pete stopped talking.

Yes, we’re finally getting answers on Pete this episode, but we’re also getting answers on a far more pressing matter that has been personally haunting me all season. We finally get the story behind the fake Emmy in Kris Jenner’s office. Khloé, my surrogate in this moment, asks the question on my mind for weeks: “Why do you have an Emmy behind you?” We find out that it isn’t a fake, but it’s actually a real Emmy that Kim bid on at an auction and gave to Kris for her 60th birthday. Who did it belong to? Still unclear. “Fake it till you make it,” she says.

She’s meeting with Khloé and Scott to talk about doing a MasterClass and what she will say. Ultimately they decide that it should be predominantly pithy catchphrases. It has worked for 15 years, so why stop now?

While entangled in a complex Pilates machine with her sisters, Kim tells them the news that she got the cover of Sports Illustrated, continuing her impressive run of photo shoots. But even more exciting than that, they follow up their workout with a truly nostalgic treat for all Keeping Up watchers: shaking their salads. It’s been quite some time since we’ve seen the rhythmic, hypnotic salad shaking that the sisters made famous (or, as Kourtney says, “a phenomenon”), and they know it, with Kim looking directly into the camera and saying, “We know how much you guys love it, eating a salad with us and just shaking a salad.”

Post-shaking, Khloé asks Kim about her love life, and she vaguely says that she’s got happiness, peace, zen, laughter. “A lot of laughter?” Khloé probes. Having officially been cornered by her sisters on the subject, she doesn’t have much leverage to escape the topic, especially since she once followed Kourtney with a camera crew to catch her with a boyfriend she didn’t want to talk about on-camera.

So finally, we get a confessional where she fills us in on Pete. She says that when they kissed during their Aladdin sketch, it was “a vibe.” Now, as a viewer, it didn’t necessarily look like “a vibe,” and Pete Davidson surely has looked better than when he’s in Disney cosplay — so I’m not so sure that’s really when sparks first flew. But it is the only filmed moment between them that production can include, so of course Kim has to mention it. Despite that supposed vibe, as we saw, he skipped her after-party, and everybody went to her after-party, she says — and by everybody, she means Gayle King. So a few days later, she calls up an SNL producer (I suspect Shookus) for Pete’s number — but she had no intention of dating him. Kim, an abbreviation maven, says she simply heard about the BDE and was DTF.

Later, she found out that Pete apparently asked for Kim’s number months earlier from Megan Fox, who told him that there was a better chance of her and MGK getting eaten by crocodiles. And honestly, I think she’s still right; I don’t think it’s far-fetched that Machine Gun Kelly would bring home a crocodile for some blood-oath situation.

With Kris’s MasterClass quickly approaching, she’s starting to feel nervous, so she summons Khloé over from next door to go over some of her talking points while she takes a bath. Kris saunters into the bathroom dressed as Gertrude McFuzz from Seussical the Musical, martini in hand. She loses the Zsa Zsa Gabor–feathered bathrobe to get into the tub, where she wonders aloud to Khloé about how she’ll be able to make the MasterClass feel personal to the viewer. But before they get too in-depth, she sends the cameras away because her “bubbles are disappearing, and it’s not that kind of show,” which is a memo that Kourtney and Travis never got.

While her boyfriend was busy buying the Staten Island Ferry, Kim bought the diametrically opposite form of transportation — a private plane. Custom-designed in her signature color (beige) and described by Kim as “all cashmere,” she explores the new digs as she prepares to take it to the Dominican Republic for her Sports Illustrated photo shoot. She goes back and forth between calling it Air Kim or Kim Air, completely ignoring great options like Good American Airlines, Plastic-Surgeon Atlantic, and Northwest Airlines.

Before takeoff, Kim gets a phone call from what sounds to be a Muppet, but it’s soon clarified that we’re actually getting our first lines of dialogue from Pete Davidson. Who, a flight attendant says, got Kim a special surprise for the plane … which I guess we have to wait until next week to see.