Week after week, the lines continue to blur between Kim Kardashian’s two currently airing shows, The Kardashians and American Horror Story: Delicate. Booking the cover of Vogue, chopping a cucumber, borrowing famous archival fashions for a red carpet — it’s nearly impossible to say which show each plotline is from (all of them happened on both). Each program is also rife with conflict, but which finds Kim at her most menacing? Let’s take a look at this week’s offerings to answer that question.
How menacing was Kim on The Kardashians?
As we know, the primary target of Kim’s venom is typically Kourtney. That means Kourtney oftentimes avoids their Hulu camera crew like it’s processed sugar, meaning she’s largely MIA from this week’s episode. Without anybody to terrorize, will Kim’s ire find a new target?
The episode focuses largely on the family’s different business ventures. Khloé struggles to open a brick-and-mortar Good American store; Kris stars in the music video for Meghan Trainor’s song “Mother” (which she keeps incorrectly referring to as “I Am Your Mother”); and Kim jets off to Boston to speak at Harvard Business School. Harvard, if you’re not familiar, is the school from Legally Blonde.
That’s also where we see our first flicker of Kim’s irritation, because while she’s thrilled to have been invited, she seems irked that they’re not letting the camera crew capture her talk because “it’s, like, a sacred room.” Even after the unseen talk, she keeps bringing it up: When one of the professors she’s talking to says that he’s never seen that side of Kim before (clearly, he doesn’t watch The Kardashians; Harvard should lose its accreditation), she points out that it would be easier for people to see if she were able to film it. When the professor asks if she intentionally hides this business side of herself, Kim doubles down, saying, “I think that’s why we push to even have cameras in places that sometimes people wouldn’t typically have cameras, because I want to show that side.” Take the hint, Harvard!
Though she didn’t get to film the main lecture, she does have a smaller Q&A where cameras are allowed (perhaps thanks to her campaigning). The first questioner asks why Kim continues pursuing new opportunities even though she’s already had so much success, prompting her to say directly to the camera, “I should say, ‘Thanks, Kourtney’; that’s exactly what Kourtney harasses me for all the time.” Over 2,500 miles away, and Kim still finds a way to get her licks in.
But against all odds, Kim’s most menacing moment this episode sees her teaming up with Kourtney, as the pair recount a truly crazy stunt they used to pull as kids. Kim tells us that when they were teenagers, they would call up dating hotlines and tell random men to meet them at the mall in which Good American is now opening (full circle). As if it weren’t cruel enough to stand up these men and leave them waiting all night at Blockbuster, Kim and Kourtney would go to the parking lot and take a Polaroid of them waiting, which they’d collect in a book. This is truly serial-killer behavior! I’m surprised they haven’t published this collection as a coffee-table book.
As she’s confessing to her childhood crimes, Kim calls up Kourtney to see if she remembers the phone number. “I know it by heart,” she says before reciting it, and Kim dials it up for old times’ sake. Kourtney immediately ditches the three-way call, and Kim puts on a sultry voice to chat with “Chris from Ventura” before panicking and hanging up on him.
But all of Kim’s misdeeds this episode, from being passive aggressive toward Harvard to torturing lonely men in the ’90s, are essentially canceled out by her work with the Innocence Project, which is heavily featured this week. She’s off to Ohio to finally have an in-person meeting with Kevin Keith, who was the subject of her Spotify podcast, and speak at a panel in hopes of raising awareness about his case and ultimately having his life sentence commuted. By episode’s end, we find out that the trip resulted in Keith getting an upcoming parole hearing in front of the governor.
How menacing was Siobhan on Delicate?
Before we even see Siobhan, she’s creeping me out. When she calls up Anna, we hear that her ringtone is now an eerie rendition of “Rockabye Baby,” which we saw her ominously sing to Anna as she slept last week. Then right as she picks up her phone to answer it, Siobhan appears behind her with a jolting, “Hi, Pretty!”
A recurring element of what seems to be Anna’s mysterious nervous breakdown is gaps in her perception of time, amplifying the Siobhan jump-scare. Anna is unnerved because Dex had only just called her to come over seconds ago, but Siobhan assures her it’s been hours. Kim’s acting here is a little awkward and stiff, like she doesn’t know what she’s supposed to do with her arms, and yet somehow that makes the scene stronger, with her palpable discomfort making Siobhan feel increasingly unsettling to the viewer.
When a fearful Anna confides that something is happening to her, Siobhan just tells her that she needs to eat and makes her a salad. We then get a very deliberate close-up shot of Siobhan cutting a cucumber — correctly! Had another actress been playing the role, this might read like they’re foreshadowing Siobhan’s knife skills, but since it’s Kim, we know that they’re referencing Kendall being famously unable to cut a cucumber on The Kardashians.
As she chops away, Siobhan tells Anna that she also felt like she was going crazy after her miscarriage, and she assures her that everything she’s going through is totally normal. But the thing is, it’s definitely not normal, which has me wondering why she keeps encouraging Anna not to worry about something worth worrying about. Either she simply doesn’t care about Anna’s well-being and wants to sweep this all under the rug until she nabs her Oscar, or she’s in on this plot against her and trying to keep her defenses down.
Once they have their salads (which they don’t shake, as not to be too self-referential), the pair takes a walk on the empty beach. When Anna mentions she’s worried that Dex is having an affair, Siobhan tells her she’s done with the pity party. “Dex is not having an affair, that fake nurse didn’t give you a miscarriage, and there’s no secret plot to sabotage your chances of getting pregnant,” she says coldly. She grants her one more week of moping before she has to get back to work to shoot the cover of Vogue. It’s just like that scene in The Princess Diaries where Lilly says to Mia of her dad’s death, “I thought you’d gotten over that. It’s been what? Two months?”
After Siobhan leaves, Anna stumbles on something in the sand and digs up yet another one of the dolls that have been haunting her ever since she signed one in Siobhan’s office. This one has nails protruding through its abdomen, and I don’t think this story line is just some kind of elaborate Dash Dolls reference.
Who did more tormenting?
Kardashians Kim bought herself a lot of goodwill with her activism this week, and Siobhan doesn’t seem like she cares about people being wrongfully imprisoned at all. So even though Kim used to lure lonely men to the mall and scrapbook it, Siobhan ultimately edges her out as the more sinister Kim. Ominous aura aside, there’s something truly evil about the way she keeps telling Anna to just get over a deeply traumatic event.
