‘XO, Kitty’ Season 1 Recap: What To Remember Ahead Of Season 2
Almost five years after the release of Netflix’s To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before (2018) film, main character Lara Jean’s (Lana Condor) younger sister Katherine “Kitty” Song Covey (Anna Cathcart) embarked on an adventure and spinoff show of her own, XO, Kitty.
The Netflix series was teased in the third To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before film, Always and Forever, Lara Jean (2021), when Kitty met Dae, who was portrayed by Jeon Ho Young in the short scene, during a family trip to Korea.
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Announced in Oct. 2021, eight months after the arrival of the final film on the streamer, Netflix’s first spinoff series inspired by a Netflix original film hit screens mid-May 2023. Just like her older sister, Kitty got herself tangled up in some complicated love triangles last season. She also picked up on an intriguing mystery to solve thanks to some things her mother left behind. Follow along below for what to remember from the first season of XO, Kitty ahead of the arrival of Season 2 on Netflix Thursday, Jan. 16.
Kitty Gets Into KISS (The Korean International School of Seoul):
Viewers caught up with an older Kitty Song Covey lounging in the pool in the opening of the first episode of Season 1, attempting a poorly connected FaceTime with her long-distance bae Dae (Choi Min-yeong), who happens to attend the same school that Kitty’s late mother Eve Song did when she was a junior in high school for study abroad. The call’s connection keeps lagging and freezing as Kitty laments not being closer to her boyfriend, but this changes when a phone call interrupts the FaceTime, and Kitty finds out that her application to KISS has been accepted after a last-minute spot opened up. She persuades her father Dan (John Corbett) and stepmother Trina (Sarayu Blue) to let her go with a PowerPoint presentation.
Yuri And Dae Are Fake-Dating
After Kitty finds her dorm at KISS following a ride to school from none other than Yuri Han (Gia Kim), daughter of hotel magnate Mr. Han (Lee Hyung-chul) and KISS principal Jina Lim (Yunjin Kim), she gets glammed up for the Back to School dance that night, where she plans to surprise Dae and kiss him. But she has a nasty surprise awaiting her.
Turns out Yuri, whom Dae tutors, blackmails him to be in a fake relationship with her by paying his school tuition. Dae’s father is Yuri’s driver, and he is on scholarship to attend KISS. The scholarship requires that he maintain top grades, and this will come into play later. Yuri wants Dae to pose as her boyfriend so that her mother thinks it was him she was sneaking around with all summer, not Julianna (Regan Aliyah), who has not been in touch with Yuri since the housekeeper walked in on them “embracing.”
Yuri is gay, but she has not come out to her parents or anyone but her girlfriend. When Julianna gets sent to Oakham, a school in England, for the semester, Yuri doubles down on the false romance with Dae. Kitty has a sense that it’s all fake when Dae appears on TV after Yuri’s father has to make a public apology, but the truth doesn’t come out until much later in the series.
Kitty Finds a Hospital Bracelet from a Birth Unit
At the end of Episode 3, Q (Anthony Keyvan) hands Kitty a hospital bracelet with her mom’s name on it, which fell out of an old journal of her mother’s. Q recognizes it as a baby bracelet, but it’s for a child born in Korea. Kitty surmises that her mother had a baby in Seoul that was not one of her sisters, and this sends her into investigative mode.
As she gets into a routine at KISS, she learns that one of her professors, Alex Finnerty (Peter Thurnwald), came to teach at KISS because he wanted to know one of his parents better — Professor Lee (Michael K. Lee). Kitty jumps to conclusions, thinking that Prof. Lee is the mystery man who was with her mom at KISS. It should be noted that Kitty also found a mixtape with several nostalgic songs like “Everybody Wants To Rule The World” by Tears For Fears, “Linger” by The Cranberries and “Friday, I’m in Love” by The Cure when sorting through her mom’s things back in Episode 1.
As Kitty and Yuri band together after realizing their moms were best friends at KISS, Kitty realizes that Jina was the one who was pregnant, and Eve let Jina use her name in the hospital. She made this discovery after seeing the hospital from a nature club hike, organized by Q — who is one of Dae’s roommates and whose full name is Quincy “Q” Shabazian. She races to the building and bribes her way into the records room after matchmaking a nurse and attendant with a bouquet of flowers, and she sees that the baby was adopted by Australian parents. Getting to know Alex, and if viewers observe him at Chuseok, the pieces start to come together.
Yuri has her own realization of her half-brother later, but she gets mad at Kitty for not telling her.
Yuri And Kitty Go From Enemies To Friends
Yuri matches Kitty’s meddling with her own, and she gets in the way of several moments where Kitty and Dae try to connect about the fake relationship. One key moment involves a necklace that Kitty gave Dae when she learned he lost his mom. The necklace was her own mother’s, and Principal Lim also has one that looks just like it. This becomes apparent when she sees Yuri wearing it at Saturday detention for some KISS students who get busted for attending a party thrown by Dae’s other roommate Min Ho (Sang Heon Lee) at a club in Seoul. Under-age drinking is a big offense in Korea, and luckily most of the students, bar Kitty, were not drinking alcohol. This party was one of the first times Kitty realized that she might have some warm fuzzy feelings for Yuri.
Also during the detention, the pair snuck out to Professor Lee’s house to look through yearbooks for their mothers in photos together, and they find one. Yuri notices that her mom had put on weight, and Kitty silently makes the connection then that Jina was the one who got pregnant. At Min Ho’s party, a look passed between Principal Lim and Professor Lee when Yuri DJ’d a remix of “Everybody Wants to Rule the World,” which was also Kitty’s mother Eve’s favorite song, as can be seen in To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before in a sweet moment between Lara Jean and Dr. Dan Covey. It should also be mentioned that Kitty drunkenly called Alex and then messaged Professor Lee about the party, so that’s how the KISS leadership got word and shut it down.
Florian & Q
Kitty used her skills as a matchmaker to put Q on Florian’s (Théo Augier) radar in chemistry class. They blossom into a cute couple, though Florian is going through it at the moment because his parents are divorcing and fighting over custody of him.
Ocean Park’s Grandma & The End of Year Talent Show
The final two episodes set the stage for Season 2 in a big way. It should be noted that Madison Miller (Jocelyn Shelfo), daughter of Yuri’s father’s business acquisition target, the man who runs The Miller Group, organizes a school field trip to help clean up celebrity Ocean Park’s grandmother’s garden, which was flooded by storms and waves. During the glamping trip, Yuri finally reveals to Kitty that her relationship with Dae was fake. She also helps Dae win Kitty back, for at least a short amount of time.
Madison and Min Ho also struck up a romance between the party and end of the show, but once the chase was over for her, she was less interested in Min Ho. He shockingly realized that he wanted more! A relationship! Go Min Ho!
But back at KISS, a school talent show sets off a few fires, literally and figuratively. Kitty participates in the show to boost her grade in Professor Lee’s English class. Yuri offered to teach her fan dance after her mother made her take lessons, but only during a private moment of rehearsal, Kitty and Yuri almost kiss! This reflects a sex dream that Kitty had earlier on in the show about Yuri. While we’re at it, Min Ho also had a sex dream about Kitty! More on that later.
At the actual show, Prof. Lee performs a martial arts dance, and Kitty has to try and get through her Spring Fan Dance routine with a freshly angry Yuri whose mother just told her she has a brother and that she thought Kitty would have already shared the news with Yuri. Kitty trips over a fireworks machine that Madison wants to use for her second performance, but the machine malfunctions and sparks fly, in more ways than one. Kitty’s traditional hanbok outfit catches fire, and who should come to her rescue? Min Ho! He puts the fire out, and Dae is right behind him. This moment becomes more heated when Kitty confesses to Dae that she has feelings for someone else. Dae thinks it’s Min Ho and threatens to beat him up, but Kitty then tells Dae it’s Yuri. Meanwhile, Jina takes Yuri’s and Alex’s hands and asks Professor Lee to go outside so they can talk.
A Cheating Scandal And Airport Chaos
Kitty passed all her finals, which was good news, because her scholarship to KISS depended on that. Only, the supervisor in the boys’ dormitory where she finds out this news discovers her there, wearing pajamas. Kitty moved in with Q, Dae and Min Ho after accidentally landing there early in the semester because the name Song can be interpreted as masculine. She tried to work it out with another roommate, but she got stuck with a gross, slob of a video gamer who wouldn’t clean up after herself. The discovery gets Kitty busted and expelled from KISS because there are also conduct requirements for her scholarship.
Also revealed by the grades postings, Florian got the top spot on the list, threatening Dae’s scholarship. But, as Dae and Min Ho discovered, Florian cheated, not on Q, but academically, and Q turned him in.
Kitty headed to the airport, where Dae asked his father to drive him so that he could fight for her. She broke up with him, saying he was the perfect first boyfriend. He told her he would always be rooting for her. Next, Kitty runs into Yuri, who is waiting for Julianna to come back after she came out to her mom, and her mom reversed Julianna’s banishment. Kitty got so close to confessing her feelings for Yuri, but Julianna’s arrival interrupted that.
Lastly, Kitty got on the plane to head home, and who should be sitting next to her, but Min Ho! Min Ho, who pretended not to speak English in the airport before they flew to KISS in the beginning. Min Ho, who barely blinked when saying goodbye to Kitty. To add more layers to the situation, Min Ho confessed his love for Kitty too. Then Marina’s “About Love,” which featured in P.S. I Love You (2020), the adaptation of Jenny Han’s second book in the To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before trilogy, played and the show cut to credits.
One last thing to note: Kitty received a letter from her mother to Principal Lim — they traded as Kitty returned Jina’s mixtape from Prof. Lee — before she left KISS, and it mentioned someone named Simon. This further feeds into Kitty’s family history and mystery, as noted in the Season 2 logline.
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