The Kardashians Recap: Kim and Khloé Take Miami

This week, The Kardashians was a tale of two girls’ trips. But before we get to our respective jaunts to Miami and Las Vegas, we get Kris Jenner’s girls’ trip to the hospital for her hip replacement — and the corresponding viewer discretion warning at the beginning of the episode. How bad could it be, I wondered. Certainly not any worse than when they aired close-up footage of Kim’s LASIK surgery — which traumatized me into wearing glasses for life.

But lo and behold, Kris’s surgery is out of a horror movie. Even though she herself is out of view, we see the doctor drilling into her with bloodied power tools and hammering away like Dr. Frankenstein at a designer-clad monster.

Despite that, all goes well, and while recovering, Kris mentions that Kim wanted to keep the bone to make jewelry out of. Oh, I love that ring, where did you get it? Kris Jenner’s hip. Kris correctly finds this creepy, before Khloé reminds her that she once wanted to have her ashes turned into diamonds. This leads to a full conversation about cremation versus mausoleums, and Khloé says if they’re buried, a big company like Disneyland could buy up the land and build on top of their bodies for all they know. “I would love to be at the base of the Matterhorn,” Kris says, and since Hulu is owned by Disney, I’m confident that we can make that happen.

“Can you imagine being haunted by the Kardashians?” Kris speculates, and actually, yes, I can. Nobody’s home, the house is quiet, and then you suddenly hear the haunting swish, swish … swish, swish…of a phantom salad being shaken. You awake to find that your entire pantry had been organized in the night into aesthetically pleasing large clear jars. You find yourself levitating over your bed so you can sleep in your glam without ruining it. Blumhouse, when do we start production?

It’s been a few weeks since the birth of Kylie’s baby Not Wolf, so Kendall decides to pay her a visit. As a testament to how little Kylie films this show, she has to tell the camera crew which is her good side. We’re a season and a half into this series; if you were around, they’d surely know this by now. Kylie’s finally feeling like herself again after dealing with the postpartum “baby blues” and ready to have her first night out. And what great timing, because Kendall has to go to Vegas for 818 business, so why not make it a girls’ trip?

Meanwhile, their older sisters (sans Kourtney, of course) make a plan for a girls’ trip of their own. Skims is launching its swimwear collection in Miami, so Kim is going there for the night and wants to bring Khloé. “One Night in Miami, I can see it now,” Kris says, naming the episode in real time like she’s on Las Culturistas. (Title of ep!) Kim says that it would be a great opportunity to get Khloé out of the house, because the weight of constant public opinion and invasive paparazzi has started to make her sister into a recluse. With the added help of a pep talk from Malika, they get Khloé to agree to leave the safety of her gated community and head to Miami.

Though they had convinced Khloé to go on her trip, when we board Kylie’s private jet — dubbed Kylie Air instead of Flylie for some reason — Kendall informs us that her sister ended up bailing at the last minute: “Shocker.” Kylie explains herself in a confessional, and I think it’s fair to say that the vast majority of her appearances on this show are her explaining why she’s not appearing. Instead, we’re joined by Kendall’s friends Hailey Bieber and Justine Skye. But we also get a fascinating aside from Kendall about how she’s been hesitant about bringing friends on the show, going back to middle school when friends wanted to come over just to be on TV. Even later in life, she says inviting friends to film has felt awkward — but lucky for us and Hailey Bieber, she’s gotten more comfortable with it.

From one private plane to another, we cut to Kim Air, where the in-flight magazine is apparently Kim’s issue of Vogue, and we’re off to Miami to free Khloé from her reclusive Grey Gardens lifestyle. When they land, they get a phone call from their long-lost sister Kourtney, who tries to claim that she wasn’t invited, as if there were even a semblance of a chance that she’d go. She won’t even cross the street to film, let alone hop a flight. But Khloé tells her that the trip is already reminding her of when they filmed Kourtney and Khloé Take Miami, a show that belongs in the Library of Congress. Khloé describes it as three months of drunkenness, before their every move was being tracked by paparazzi. And, speak of the devil, their car is suddenly swarmed by paparazzi and autograph hounds banging on their windows at a stoplight.

After dodging them, and wading through another paparazzi mob, they finally make it to the Skims pop-up shop to check out the goods. Then it’s off to a Skims dinner, which Khloé didn’t realize was a company affair, where Kim is busy hobnobbing, but she makes the most of the bustling scene — splitting a shot with Malika.

Back at the hotel, and a few more shots in, Khloé is ready to paint the town. She’s made sure the pregame is in full swing, and suddenly the Khloé from KAKTM is back. I’m half-expecting her to relaunch that local radio show they made her do with Terrence J. “I am gonna party like it’s 2009, and I’m taking Miami back,” she exclaims, and just like that the editors play the old show’s theme song, the beautiful “I’m in Miami Bitch” by LMFAO.

Kim, meanwhile, is sitting at her computer because she has to approve all the images from that night. “I don’t trust anybody else to tell me when I look good,” Kim says, deathly serious and the most relatable she has ever been, because these photos have to go to print tonight. “If Malika looks bad, I’ll delete it, even if I look amazing. No one else is gonna look at ten people in a photo, but I do.” She’s really like Mother Teresa in that way. A drunken Khloé simply sees this dedication to flattering photos as her sister being a buzzkill who won’t party with them, but after enough peer pressure, they rally Kim to come to the club.

The bad news? The club sucks. Apparently they went way too early (2 a.m.) and the vibes are not good. Two o’clock in the morning? I thought this was a mom’s night out not a grandmother’s night out. Guess they were trying to get the early-bird special on shots, because as Khloé tells us, the party in Miami doesn’t really get going until 4.

While Khloé was taking Miami again, Kendall was at a Tao event representing 818, doing an interview on the step-and-repeat, before hanging out in the packed cabana. She’s trying to enjoy the work trip, but naturally there’s also some anxiety that comes with a big public crowd like this.

It’s fascinating to watch the Kardashians become more and more introverted over time, and this episode really reminds us how extroverted their social lives used to be in early seasons, when they’d host parties in Vegas and took Miami — and juxtaposes it with how far outside their comfort zone that now is. Their worlds (and circles) have gotten smaller and smaller with fame, and as their careers have grown, their lives have become more insular. A few more seasons and they can just shoot the show Big Brother style without them leaving their houses at all.

Kendall says that her anxiety, in part, comes from the fact that everything she does will get hate, no matter what it is. And the narrative about her family has gotten so out of hand that there’s no changing it anymore. In a confessional, she says one of the biggest misconceptions about her personally is that she’s a mean girl. Coincidentally, this is followed up by a quick little montage of her being a nice girl, greeting guests at the cabana with a big smile. See? Not a mean girl at all!

Fittingly for an episode talking so much about the retro days of Keeping Up and its respective spin-offs — in walks Scott Disick and Kendall’s brother Brody Jenner, never ones to miss a party. The whole event feels like it’s much more their speed than Kendall’s, who seems like a fish out of water — pining on about how she craves a simple life on a farm in Wyoming, and I’m sure she can find a Wyoming farmer more than willing to swap lives and drink 818 by a pool in Vegas.

Kendall’s Vegas jaunt ends with a boring dinner at Carbone with friends, including Andrew Watt, Zack Bia, and the walking jump-scare that is Scooter Braun. If Zack Bia’s name looks familiar, he was most recently romantically linked to Olivia Rodrigo. And now he’s here getting dragged by Kendall: “Why are you here? Just ’cause?” she asks him. I wonder the same about half the friends that parade through this show, but now we finally said it!

But across town, and without cameras, something far more interesting was happening. The episode ends with footage covering the breaking news that Kourtney and Travis got married in a secret ceremony in a Vegas chapel right after the Grammys. “Are you married and we missed it?” a producer asks Kourtney, doing a great job concealing what I can only imagine is rage. Imagine being a producer trying to somehow turn Kendall looking at her phone in a hotel room into compelling television, all while there’s a secret wedding happening without you? I’d be fuming. “Well, guess what,” Kourtney teases, just before the episode ends.