The Kardashiad, Part 20: We Have to YOLO It

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Everyone who was in Greece is still in Greece. Khloe’s in kornrows, on a hotel bed with Kim, saying, “The only thing is, if I brought Lamar here, he just couldn’t fit on the bed.” Kim asks Khloe if she wants to try something she calls “lizard legs.” It’s actually some kind of tingly lotion from Lucky Legs, makers of many fine cooling serums. She rubs it on Khloe’s thigh. She rubs lotion all over herself. Khloe gives Kim a foot massage, warning her, “Don’t get horny.”

Brody calls Rob to give him a hard time about not being in Greece. Rob doesn’t pick up, so Brody leaves him a message, calls him “Roberto.” Brody has Elvis’s TCB logo tattooed on his wrist. Which is, just saying, kinda weird, because Brody’s mom totally had sex with Elvis.

Khloe’s worried about going snorkeling. She has trouble with stuff like this. Cut to flashback of Khloe having full-on blue-orb panic attack while trying to scuba dive. Khloe says she’ll go snorkeling only if Kourtney does. “Swear on the YOLO pact that you’re not going to chicken out on me,” and Kourtney says “OK — YOLO pact in full effect.”

They head out on the boat with a statuesque Greek spearfishing instructress. Everyone snickers at a blurry-faced naked guy who’s blithely tanning his big pale belly on what he obviously believed was a private beach. Khloe tries to put on a wetsuit but has trouble getting it on over her butt. The spearfishing lady is amused. “The spearfishing lady thinks it’s the most humorous thing, that my butt cannot fit into this wetsuit,” Khloe says. The spearfishing lady helps get Khloe’s butt where it needs to go. Brody and Brandon and Leah just take to the water like mer-people, like Aqua-Men and -Women. Fucking Jenners. Khloe and Kourt sit on the edge of the boat, holding hands. “We can’t be showed up by the Jenners,” Khloe says. “We’ve got to do this. We have to YOLO it.” They dive. They come up shrieking and laughing seconds later and paddle back to the ladder, having technically met the terms of the YOLO pact. “I’ve never experienced something so cold,” Kourtney says. Khloe says “I’m glad that we did this.”

Leah asks where Scott is and Kourtney explains that he’s decided to hang out in London with his bros. She takes off her sunglasses to wipe them on her coverup and sad soap opera music plays. Cut to Scott in England, hitting the town for a few personal appearances, heading up a flying-V team of dudes who look like Guy Ritchie–in–1996 cosplayers. Cue montage of douchebaggy in-the-club b-roll. Posh birds excitedly holding up LORD DISICK signs? You know it! A Gray Goose bottle with a sparkler in it? You bet!

We don’t actually see Scott doing anything untoward — it actually looks like kind of a miserable night edited to look like an insane bender. But by the next morning somebody has texted Kourtney some paparazzi shots of Scott and his Brit-bros leaving a club and ducking into a limo with some girls. They have a phone conversation we don’t see in which Scott tells her he knows the pictures were horrible. Kourtney, wearing the Yellow Blouse of Merciless Judgment she’s worn in her talking-head interviews all season, says she understands that Scott can’t handle that much time with her family because he’s an only child. But she’s not happy.

Kendall, Kylie, and Bruce arrive. Kris greets them at the villa in a vampy black wig. It looks a little like a Sexy Bebe Neuwirth wig, a little like it came in the bag with the other accoutrements of a Kim Kardashian costume. “I’ve decided to debut my gorgeous new Grecian locks to my family,” Kris says. The camera catches Kim seeing the wig for the first time; instinctively, her hand goes to her own hair, as if to make sure it’s still there. Cut to flashback of Kris in a makeup chair, just trying on a black wig — just trying on a black wig, just for chucks, like you do — and saying how amazing it would be in Greece.

At dinner, Kim’s sort of shiatsuing her breasts with her fists. She’s itchy, but if you scratch that’s how you get stretch marks. Kris still has the wig on and everybody’s trying to process what’s happening. Bruce says, “The hair’s kind of wearing on me.” Brody says, “Growing on you, or wearing on you?” Kris says to Bruce, “I don’t want something to wear on somebody. I want it to be like, BAM. You gotta look at me and go, ‘Baby, you look so beautiful tonight, I can’t even take it,’ OK? Just say it. Just say it, come on. Just, go. Please. Please.”

It’s sad and weird. Cut to totally unnecessary interview clip of Brody saying it’s weird. Cut back to the table, Bruce clearly not giving Kris what she’s looking for, Kris lamenting, “I was just trying to spice things up.” PEOPLE ARE EATING. Except they’re not, not anymore. Kendall’s texting. Kourtney’s texting. Suddenly everybody’s saying goodnight. Nobody can get away from this scene fast enough.

The next day Kourtney walks into Kris’s room and says “Hey, Mom. Do you like this bathing suit or is it too boobilicious on the side?” Kris says it isn’t. She’s got a scarf tied loosely around her head. “I’m trying to be Grecian,” she says, then says “When in Greece,” in a singsong when-in-Rome kind of way. She asks Kourtney if she can ask her a question about Brody. Kourtney says “Yeah.” Kourtney inspects a fingernail. Kris moans about Brody, how she tries and tries with him. “A lot of times,” Kris says, “he takes me the wrong way. He doesn’t get my humor.” Kourtney says it’s probably because they haven’t spent a lot of time together. Kris has part of Kourtney’s attention. She has the minimum amount. “I want him to be one of us,” Kris says. “Family comes first.” It sounds like a trailer line from a horror movie that ends with her eating Brody’s eyes.

So there’s this yacht everybody is supposed to go on. But Leah and Brandon decide they want to go explore Mykonos by themselves instead of going out on the yacht. Things fall apart! The center does not hold! “This doesn’t get you out of the family video,” Kris says, sounding almost like she’s joking. “We’re doing a music video on the yacht.” The sort of thing she’s describing actually has happened before on this show, but if it happens today we don’t get to see it.

Instead everyone is upset about someone else not being on the yacht, or about someone who is on the yacht not enjoying the yacht to its fullest. Brody’s missing Brandon and Leah, who would have kept him from having to talk to Kris. Kourtney’s bummed that Scott’s not there. And Khloe’s trying to persuade Kim, who’s taking a nap in a belowdecks bedroom, that she should be outside. “It’s a world of gorgina!” Khloe says. No dice. Nobody says anything about Rob not being there.

When Kim finally appears topside, everybody’s laying out and talking about what she should name her baby. Brody says, “I’m feeling ‘North West.'” Kourtney says, “Me too. It’s pretty and cool.” Kim says she and Kanye have talked about naming their kid a “K” name. “Mainly just because Kanye and I are K’s?” she says. “But then our kid, if it’s a K, they’ll call us the KKK.” Nobody seems to know quite how to react to this. Kim tells a story about decorating little as-yet-unborn K’s playroom. “Kanye’s like, ‘I didn’t have a playroom — I just played in my room, and then I cleaned it up!’ It’s like, how much do you give them, y’know?” she says.

Brody nods understandingly, tells Kim that she’s going to be a good mom, and that Kanye “seems like he’ll be a good dad.” Which is ridiculous — it’s entirely possible that Kanye will be a good dad, but by no stretch of the imagination does he seem like he’s going to, y’know? Anyway: Kim says, of Kanye, “He always says ‘There’s nothing more I love in this world than you and me. Myself.” So he’ll love the kid, Kim says, because it’ll be a combination of the two! Then Kris shows up and everyone practically does a spit take. She’s got the wig on again, some kind of half-assed scarf tied around it. Like a stylist showed her how to do it back in L.A. but she did it just now using a shiny bulkhead as a mirror, maybe with a drink in her hand. We see her throwing her head back and laughing and then she says “I do leave my ego at the door.”

(At this point I’m pretty sure I had a smallish stroke. When I came to I’d made this:)

“On this trip,” Kris says, “I want Brody to be a part of my family. I hope to be able to let him see what I’m like when I’m having a good time and bonding with my family.”

And maybe once he sees that, he’ll go away and leave us alone, she doesn’t add, but that seems to be the subtext of what follows. Kris asks if anybody needs sunscreen. Khloe, from the hot tub, says “No,” pointedly. Kris says, “Brody, you’re getting all burnt!” She asks if he wants sunscreen; he says no; she asks again. She touches his back. “You need some,” she says. “You feel really hot. You could fry an egg on your back.”

“Epic,” Brody says. It’s the least stoked anyone has ever sounded while saying that word. Kris starts spritzing him with sunscreen. Khloe V/O: “My family, we’re really affectionate, touchy-feely … We don’t have, like, boundaries with each other. But my mom, with Brody, that’s not your biological son. And you guys are trying to get it out of the awkward zone?”

Kris rubs lotion into Brody’s skin. “Your dad had the exact same back,” she says, so quietly it requires subtitles. Khloe says “Mom, that is so weird of you.” Even Kim looks up, feeling a great disturbance in the attention-Force. And then Kris kind of jumps on Brody’s back and rubs herself on him.

Everyone starts jumping off the yacht at this point. Who could blame them? Kendall and Kris go Jet Skiing. Khloe says to Bruce, “Isn’t Mom, like, so insane? What’s going on with her?” Bruce says, “I don’t know what’s going on with her. She’s just getting full of herself.” She’s definitely full of something. She’s doing doughnuts in the water. Brody jumps from the top deck of the boat and climbs onto the back of Kendall’s Jet Ski. “Brody just set the YOLO bar pretty high,” Khloe says. She and Kourtney talk about jumping off the boat and then they do. Kris takes Bruce on a Jet Ski ride and the wind rips her wig off. “Sometimes God works in mysterious ways,” Khloe says. Bruce fishes it out of the water, rodentlike and dripping.

They have dinner on the yacht. Everyone is taking pictures of each other, but the camaraderie is short-lived. Khloe’s cuddling with Kendall and Brody makes a weird joke about being jealous and somebody makes a weirder joke about Brody having Kris to cuddle with and off in the distance the sun either sets or dies of awkwardness.

Back on land the next day, Brody and Brandon and Bruce get dressed up in Rollerball outfits and go kite-surfing, even though the wind’s blowing hard and the sea is churning with whitecaps. We watch Bruce eat it in the ocean about 50 times. He’s basically being waterboarded by a kite. I could watch another 25 minutes of this, easily. Instead we cut back to the villa, where Kris is on the balcony in a sparkly caftan pretending she’s really upset about this Brody situation. Kourtney — who apparently drew the short straw again — walks in and asks her how things are going with him. “He doesn’t get my personality,” Kris says. “I don’t like it when I feel like someone doesn’t get me, or doesn’t like me.” The fact that she thinks those two things are the same thing is obviously a big part of the problem here. Being able to laugh at yourself and finding your own jokes endlessly amusing are also two different things.

Brody and Brandon ask Bruce why he gave up his Malibu man-cave, and why he never got that putting green put in at the Calabasas house. “The putting green bothers me a little bit,” Bruce admits. “It’s a soft spot.” Seems there was a perfect place for it out back when they first moved in, but Kris said no way. “You gotta fight these battles,” Brody says. Bruce tells the talking-head camera that they don’t understand how marriage works. “The reason Kris and I have been married so long — I know the formula,” he tells Brody and Brandon. “When to be quiet. And when to speak up.”

The secret ingredient in the formula? Ninety-eight percent “be quiet.” Even talking about this with Kris nowhere in sight makes Bruce uncomfortable. He gets up abruptly and says he’s going to go take a shower and get ready for dinner because hey look at that sunset, and then he’s gone, practically leaving an Olympian-shaped hole in the wall he’s out of there so fast. Brandon and Brody talk about what a giant puss-in-boots their dad is and then decide to get him a putting green. Fingers crossed that the ensuing high jinks are somehow documented for our enjoyment, boys!

Meanwhile: London! The Eye keeps a-turning and Scott keeps a-dickin’-around with his bros instead of going to Greece to serve his contractually mandated vacation sentence. It’s his last day in Old Smoke and he’s in a hot tub making man-estrone soup with three pasty dudes. “I figured, what better way to spend the day with your boys than to hit the steam rooms and saunas,” Scott says. It’s less sleazy, but also sadder. There’s a framed print on the wall that reads “ME ME ME.”

In Santorini everybody boards a catamaran called the Dream Catcher. Kris takes selfies. “I’m doing a full-on photo shoot of myself,” she says. “It’s a little cray-cray.” Can we go back to when everybody was saying YOLO all the time? Brody’s all by himself, in the boat’s front prow shirtless-brooding area. Kris joins him there. She has a drink in her hand. “I kind of think that I worry about, like, how you feel about me now as a mom, that, like … ”

“I have a serious issue,” Brody says, “and I’ll tell you … ”

She cuts him off. “I can’t change what happened between you and I … ”

He cuts her off. “I’m gonna be totally, brutally honest with you,” he says. Cut to Brody interview segment: “I’ve bit my tongue for long enough. I think it’s time for Kris and I to have that talk that we’ve always needed to have.” (Commercial break. A girl in a white bathing suit does a backflip off the diving board, because she’s confident, because of tampons. Tampons: Fear is the mind-killer.)

“I know you love the lavish lifestyle,” Brody’s saying.

“Yes,” Kris says. “I’m definitely a bit of a diva. I’m not gonna deny it.”

“You can’t,” Brody says sharply. “You need to look at yourself. And be like, ‘Are these things really what’s important in life? Like this — ” he looks around, at the catamaran and the landscape and the Santorininess of it all — “I don’t give a [bleep] about.”

Watch enough reality TV and you know instantly when the producers are cutting around a conversation in which people talk about the fact that they’re being filmed for a reality show; that’s what happens here. There’s a weird cut and in the next shot Kris is looking directly at a camera. Then she looks at Brody and makes a circular motion with her finger and says, “This,” meaning the family, I guess, or the show, “is how we came to this,” meaning Santorini or the boat or whatever. “That’s it. And that’s what I want you to know, at the end of the day … It’s not about the stuff. It’s about all of you.”

“Is it, though?” Brody asks.

Kris says that when Brody was really young, she’d always think, I wish he liked me. If he knew me, he would love me. “I felt like you didn’t know me. You didn’t know all these different layers of me, or sides of me.”

“I heard things,” Brody says. “Well, I heard things.”

“What makes you genuinely happy?” he asks her. There’s a shot of the boat that makes it look like it’s headed for the rocks. No such luck.

“Having you genuinely happy,” Kris says.

“No, that’s — that’s a lie,” Brody says.

“No it isn’t,” Kris says. “Swear to God. It’s not.”

“For me, or them?” Brody says.

“All of you,” Kris insists. “That is, as a mom or a stepmother, the most satisfying place you can live in.”

Brody’s not buying it. There’s a lot of boat/wind noise over this whole conversation and up until this point it’s been subtitled; here, right before they cut away, Brody says something to Kris that we’re not allowed to see, because presumably Kris gets final cut on every episode of this show. Honestly it’s pretty stand-up of her that she left all this in, even if it’s ultimately in service of making her look like the victim; Brody is obviously not wrong that Kris is gross, but he’s picked a weird moment (of his life of unbelievable ease and privilege) to make a point about materialism.

“I don’t feel like you’ve ever given two [bleeps] about the way Brandon and I have grown up,” Brody says. Cut to Kris telling the talking-head cam, “This is one of the most hurtful attacks that’s ever been thrown my way. I just don’t understand how I got here. And I feel so defeated.” Back on the boat, she starts crying and says “Cut.”

Next week: My DVR cut off the preview; fingers crossed for a kraken attack.

Filed Under: Kanye West, Keeping Up With the Kardashians, Kim Kardashian, Kourtney Kardashian, The Kardashiad

Alex Pappademas is a staff writer for Grantland.

Archive @ PAPPADEMAS