On Thursday, the first season of Hulu’s The Kardashians came to a close with a finale focused on the saddest and least interesting drama in the Kardashian Kanon: Tristan Thompson’s relentless infidelity. The inaugural season of the famous family’s new docusoap has seen Khloe and Tristan happily co-parenting their daughter, True, and preparing to move into a house together as a family. However, the past nine episodes have been leading up to the big reveal that Tristan cheated on Khloe and fathered a child with another woman.
Yes, it’s juicy gossip, but it’s really just too tragic at this point to be fun to watch. Khloe wants more than anything to have a family and another baby, and since she thinks this cheater is her best shot, she has given him chance after chance. There was the first known instance of infidelity when Khloe was nine months pregnant with True, Tristan’s rumored affair with a close friend of the family, then-21-year-old Jordyn Woods, and now this. Between Tristan, the vicious body-shaming she endured in the early days of Keeping Up with the Kardashians and her struggles with ex-husband Lamar Odom’s substance abuse, Koko can’t catch a break. The fans want to see her get the happy ending she deserves.
In last week’s episode, poor naive Khloe declared that everything is going really well in her life. Perhaps…suspiciously well? We know what’s coming, of course, because the show was filmed late last year. Plus, it’s an unspoken rule of reality TV editing that when someone is effusively discussing how amazing they’re doing, disaster is about to strike.
Cut to Kim shouting into her iPhone in the personal Equinox attached to her house. When any of these women’s voices rise above a monotone, you know shit is going down. Somehow, Kim has gotten her hands on Tristan’s written declaration from his paternity lawsuit with Maralee Nichols in which he admits to having sex with her after the birthday party Khloe threw for him in Houston. The KKW Beauty founder frantically does bicep curls and presides over an emergency three-way phone call with Kylie and Kourtney about whether or not Khloe will finally get it through that bronzer-coated head of hers that Tristan is bad news. The episode ends as Khloe returns Kim’s calls.
When the finale picks up, Khloe has just woken up to Kim’s texts and calls, so the cameras catch her live reaction to the news. Her initial response is one of shock and anger. Luckily, Kim passed the baby Bar on her fourth try and can explain the legal nuances of the situation. Kimberly is righteously throwing around words everyone knows like “attorney” and “petitioner” as if she is Elle Woods in the courtroom explaining that there’s no way Chutney could have showered within 24 hours of getting a perm. The reality of the situation finally sinks in and Khloe can be heard sobbing on the other line. Kim, satisfied that she sufficiently milked her sister’s heartbreak for ratings, waves the cameras away.
“I find out what Tristan is doing with the rest of the world,” Khloe says in a confessional. “A courtesy would be not doing it, but fine, if you do it, you’re not even going to give me a heads-up before the rest of the world? It’s just an additional slap in my face. It’s humiliating.” Ugh. It really sounds like a terrible way to live in a relationship. Tristan sucks! And is bad at basketball! OK, so I’m not sure about that last part, but I’m mad!
The show’s editors appear to share my personal vendetta against Khloe’s adulterous baby daddy because they include a montage of adorable videos of Tristan and 4-year-old True as Khloe laments in voiceover that every grand gesture, family vacation, and event was a lie. The effect is to make Tristan look like even more of a dirtbag than we already knew him to be.
Next, we check in with Kendall, who I forgot was on this show. That’s probably because she literally never does anything except for that one time a few episodes ago when she couldn’t figure out how to slice a cucumber. In this week’s episode, we see her unzip herself from a coffin-sized hyperbaric chamber and emerge, laptop in hand, as if she had been catching up on emails in there. This scene is utterly pointless, though it does contain the funniest line of the episode and possibly the whole season. “For the past couple years I’ve been, like, really just loving health,” the supermodel proclaims. Good for you, Kenny! It’s giving the same energy as Kylie saying that 2016 was “the year of realizing stuff.”
Kourtney, meanwhile, takes a break from fretting about Khloe to do some softcore porn for the Hulu camera crew. She and now-husband Travis greet each other with what is not so much a kiss as breathing into each other’s open mouths while gently touching tongues. It’s some of their most disgusting PDA to date, prompting me to reflexively shriek and push my laptop away. The loved-up couple is at Travis’ studio where Kris is recording a cover of “Jingle Bells,” just because. Her rendition of the holiday classic sounds like ghosts laughing and it is all very funny.
There’s also an incredibly chaotic sequence of Kim attempting to wrangle her children for a Christmas photoshoot. Her gorgeous, unruly brood of lookalikes, decked out in matching SKIMS sweats, runs wild through the studio as helpless photographers look on. Three-year-old Psalm chugs ginger ale unsupervised and Chicago won’t stop crying. Kim complains that there is not a single usable shot because North is flipping off the camera in every photo. Where are the 17 nannies she presumably has on her payroll?
In between these scenes, different combinations of family members convene to discuss the Khloe-Tristan saga, but frankly, those conversations are way less entertaining than the hilariously unrelatable rich people nonsense that fills the rest of the episode. Everyone is begging Khloe to confirm that she is done with Tristan for good this time.
At one point, Scott—the original deadbeat Kardashian boyfriend—attempts to console her, but instead ends up saying that if he were her, he would never be able to trust another person ever again. Kim is 100 percent over the bullshit, telling her younger sister toward the end of the episode, “If that were me and I was really trying to redeem myself and I was trying to be a better person, I would definitely just keep my dick in my pants.”
Overall, though, it’s the comical, genuinely weird in-between moments that make this a solid finale, like when Kris keeps mispronouncing cacio e pepe pasta as “cacio de pepe”; or when, during their Hulu promotional photoshoot, Kourtney suggests they do a “silly one,” and they all remain completely straight-faced and just flash peace signs.
Each of the sisters and Kris gets a montage wrapping up their season arcs. Khloe talks about her resilience, Kourtney gushes about her perfect love story, and Kendall makes vague comments about the rest of the family because she doesn’t have anything going on in her own life. Kylie pops up for the first time in the episode to remind us that at the time, she was pregnant with her unnamed son formerly known as Wolf Webster. Kim jokes about going to med school once she’s done with law school.
The finale ends with Kris tapping at her iPhone screen and pretending to get a dramatic text, but before she can tell us what’s going on (nothing), the episode ends with a completely unnecessary and overutilized “To be continued” title card—as in, the story will continue next season. Like, yeah, that’s just how TV shows work.
Anyway, if Pete Davidson doesn’t make an appearance in Season 2, I’m prepared to sue.
