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You may have heard that Keeping Up With the Kardashians is coming to an end after 14 years and 20 seasons. Last night, the penultimate episode of the final season aired. Here’s what unfolded...
This week, we see the family taking their last on-camera vacay (sob!) at a perfectly relatable 17,000-square-foot property overlooking Lake Tahoe. But as they arrive, it’s clear there’s something wrong with Kim, who announces she wants to “go to her room and never come out.”
During a confessional, Khloé reveals that Kim’s been “struggling privately behind the camera about her relationship,” had a “huge fight” with Kanye right before they left for the trip, and is “redirecting her sadness, anger, and frustration.”
We’re then shown a flashback scene that broke my heart. In it, we see Kim crying to Kourtney, Kylie, and Kendall. “I honestly can’t do this anymore,” she sobs.
“I’m still in this place where I’ve been stuck for years," she goes on. "He goes and moves to a different state every year, and I have to be together so I can raise the kids. He’s an amazing dad, and he’s done an amazing job.”
When Kourtney responds that Kanye still will be a great dad even if they divorce, Kim sobs, “He deserves someone that can go and support his every move, and go and move to Wyoming. I can’t do that. He should have a wife that supports his every move and travels with him, and I can’t.”
Then, the sucker punch comes. “I feel like a fucking failure that it’s [my] third fucking marriage,” she cries. “I feel like a fucking loser. But I can’t even think about that. I want to be happy.”
There’s so much to unpack here that my brain is exploding. First, it’s interesting that the scene was inserted as a flashback when the promotional trailers for the season suggested it was part of a wider storyline.
It suggests that Kim shot the scene — and, perhaps, many others about the demise of her marriage — but ultimately decided against showing too many details once it came to the edit.
This aligns with Kris Jenner revealing in March that she was unsure how much of the split would actually feature in the show since Kim was intent on privacy.
Second, I couldn’t get over the similarities between this scene and the one from 2011 in which Kim sobbed to Kourtney and Scott about the breakdown of her marriage to Kris Humphries.
“At 30 years old I thought I’d be married with kids, and I’m not,” she sobbed in this scene. “I failed at this.” It was almost eerie watching Kim acknowledge her previous marriages while hysterically crying about “failing” again in this episode 10 years on from her last split.
It was also fascinating to hear about Kim and Kanye’s living arrangements, as it confirmed my suspicions that they’ve spent increasing amounts of time apart since Kanye decided to practically base himself in Wyoming in 2018.
This theory was only bolstered when, during the last season of KUWTK, Kim made a comment about her kids “going to Wyoming to be with their dad” for a portion of the pandemic.