Sunday night’s Keeping Up With the Kardashians premiere didn’t confirm Khloé Kardashian or Kylie Jenner’s rumored pregnancies. Still, the premiere offered up some new information for Kardashian baby watch 2017: Khloé says that she wants to have children with NBA star Tristan Thompson “within the next 70 years” but that they don’t have any plans for the near future (or at least, any plans that she felt like sharing on national television). Kourtney Kardashian, who isn’t even pregnant, says that she would consider having another baby with Scott Disick “if the situation was right”—ideally a situation in which Disick wasn’t dating a 19-year-old. Annoyingly, we don’t get any juicy details on Kim’s pregnancy, even though the first confirmation that she and Kanye West are in fact expecting via surrogate came from a seconds-long clip in the season 14 promo video. Meaning that if you want to know who the surrogate is, you’ll have to keep watching Keeping Up with the Kardashians.
The rest of the episode is mainly preoccupied with extolling Cleveland’s many virtues and shitting on Caitlyn Jenner.
Kourtney and Kim travel to Cleveland to visit Khloé, where she spends about half of her time cohabitating with boyfriend (and reported baby daddy) Tristan Thompson, who plays for the Cleveland Cavaliers. The timing is particularly rude to Kendall Jenner, who’s left to sulk over the backlash to her Pepsi commercial all alone. A visibly upset Kendall seems shocked that a commercial in which a white lady de-escalates political tension by giving police officers free soda didn’t go over well. In a talking head, Khloé shares that Jenner is taking the criticism particularly poorly because “Kendall tries really hard to be socially conscious,” adding that “it sucks cause Kendall’s been taking the blame for it all.”
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Kendall explains that she was so excited to be working for Pepsi because they’ve worked with “iconic” artists in the past—which doesn’t really explain why she didn’t read the script well in advance and/or has never seen a newspaper. In her own words: “I trusted everyone, I trusted the teams, but after I saw the reaction and I read what people had to say about it I most definitely saw what went wrong.” Later in the episode, she confesses that, “I just feel really, really bad…I feel really bad that this was taken such a wrong way and I genuinely feel like shit. I have no idea how I’m going to bounce back from it.”
Kendall’s personal crisis leads to a particularly revealing conversation in which she calls Kim and expresses her concern that Caitlyn will say something about the commercial while she’s on her book tour. While Caitlyn promised her that she would dismiss those questions with a brief response, Kendall sighs, “To her brief is not so brief…she just tends to say a lot and I would rather everyone just not say anything.” Kim replies, “Caitlyn is known for saying all the wrong things, that’s just who she is.” This plot line concludes with another hilarious phone call in which Kim calls Caitlyn, who she is clearly annoyed with, and tries to walk her through the Pepsi talking points before faking a bad connection and hanging up.
The narrative throughout this episode is that Caitlyn Jenner craves media attention at the expense of her extended family. Caitlyn winds up going against her daughter’s wishes and brings up the Pepsi ad in an interview, saying that Kendall had read the script before shooting the ad and was fine with it. “My dad doesn’t actually know what happened,” Kendall tells the cameras. “She wouldn’t know if I had known at all.” Which is…not exactly a denial.
On their private jet to Cleveland, Kim reads online that Caitlyn has undergone gender confirmation surgery (Kourtney’s less than ideal response: “she snipped?”) Kim is pissed that she and her sisters had to hear this from the media, asking, “Why couldn’t she say that to us?” Khloé has some more pointed words for Caitlyn, saying, “Fuck off, and it’s not cause you’re trans, that’s not why I’m not talking to you, I’m not talking to you cause you’re a bad, mean person!” Throughout the episode, Kim insists that Caitlyn gave her a copy of her memoir The Secrets of My Life to look over before it came out. Only, according to Kim, that version of the book had crucial components edited out.
Kris Jenner FaceTimes the girls while they’re out in Cleveland; she’s crying about Caitlyn’s news and the fact that she didn’t talk to her before going to the press. “I never had any idea and I never would’ve done this to my kids and it’s just hard, it’s just really hard,” she sobs. “I just feel like I’m always in the dark. Always the last to know anything.”
Later on, once again staring at her iPhone while hanging out with her sisters, Kim reads, “It says in Caitlyn’s book Robert Kardashian knew O.J. Simpson was guilty but joined the defense team to get back at his remarried ex… Robert told Caitlyn in secret after the O.J. murder trial that he believed his friend was guilty.” The Kardashians are very pissed off by this news; Kim assures the cameras that “Dad so believed in him,” and Kourtney expresses outrage that Jenner would “make something up” to sell her book. Kim reiterates this whole advance copy fiasco, explaining, “It is so shady that Caitlyn came over and gave me the book and then on the phone she said ‘well the final version has a few more things in it, but don’t worry, it’s nothing about you.’ So she lied to me, because that is about me if it’s about our dad.”
She concludes, “I have always had Caitlyn’s back, but she is a liar. She is not a good person.”
