By Ayesha Khan 
Mumbai, March 14: Nobody planned for Kader Khan to show up tonight.
The finale of The Great Indian Kapil Show’s fourth season on Netflix was supposed to be a comfortable close to a good run. Father-son Bollywood nostalgia, some gentle ribbing, a few laughs. David Dhawan and Varun Dhawan were the guests, and the occasion was their upcoming film Hai Jawani Toh Ishq Hona Hai. A pleasant enough send-off for Season 4.
Then Sunil Grover walked out in character as Khurana, and the room changed.
Anyone who grew up watching Hindi films in the nineties knows that name. Khurana was one of Kader Khan’s signatures, a recurring comic persona built on bluster and impeccable timing that somehow made even the thinnest slapstick feel alive. Khan played him across several David Dhawan films with an ease that looked effortless and almost certainly wasn’t. He wrote his own dialogues half the time. He knew exactly what he was doing.
Grover knew it too. That much was obvious from the first line.
The Moment That Got Away From Everyone
Clips from the finale had been circulating since the morning. By early afternoon, the comment sections were already doing what Indian social media does when something genuinely surprises it: they got loud and a little emotional. “For a moment it felt like Kader Khan himself was on stage,” one viewer wrote. Another: “Sunil Grover day by day is more dangerous than AI.” That last one is clumsy phrasing, but you understand exactly what the person meant.
Actor Bakhtiyar Irani, who has spent enough years in this industry to have a calibrated sense of what good mimicry looks like, was not subtle about his reaction. He wrote that only Kader Khan had been left unportrayed, and Grover had now done that too. “You are one of the best things happening on television,” he added.
That is a significant thing to say about someone who spent years being known mainly as the guy who played Dr. Mashoor Gulati and Gutti. Those characters were popular, genuinely funny even, but they kept Grover in a particular box. What he has done over this season and now decisively in this finale is kick that box apart.
David Dhawan in That Seat
The timing of this tribute, with David Dhawan as a guest, is the part that hits differently when you sit with it.
Dhawan built the most commercially successful run of Hindi comedy cinema in the nineties, and Kader Khan was woven into nearly all of it. Not just as an actor but as a collaborator, someone who understood the register Dhawan was working in and could elevate it from within. Films like Coolie No. 1, Hero No. 1, Judwaa. The formula gets described dismissively sometimes, usually by people who have nevertheless seen every one of them. What held those films together was often Khan’s presence, a veteran’s ability to anchor absurdity without ever letting it collapse.
So when Grover stepped into that character on tonight’s stage, David Dhawan was not watching a comedy bit. He was watching a memory perform in front of him. By all accounts from the preview footage, he laughed. Of course he laughed. But there is a particular kind of laughter that comes with a lump in the throat, and that seems closer to what happened in that room.
Varun Dhawan, meanwhile, brought exactly what this show needs from a younger Bollywood presence: genuine warmth and the willingness to let his father embarrass him a little. Their banter about working together had the texture of something real. David, asked about directing his son, reportedly said Varun asks too many questions and sometimes you simply have to tell him to follow instructions. Varun took it with the grace of someone who has heard this before.
Still. This episode belonged to a man who wasn’t even scheduled to be there.
What Grover Has Been Building
It would be a mistake to treat tonight as a surprise if you have been watching this season carefully.
Over twelve episodes, Sunil Grover has been doing something methodical. His Aamir Khan was so accurate earlier this season that Aamir himself watched a clip and could not stop laughing. “I won’t even call it mimicry,” Khan said in an interview afterward. “It was so authentic, I felt I was watching myself.” That is about as high a compliment as that particular industry offers.
His Amitabh Bachchan drew similar reactions. Each one built on the last. Each one quietly shifted the public understanding of what Grover is actually capable of.
The Kader Khan tribute is the culmination of that arc, and it is harder than any of the others. Aamir and Bachchan are alive and working. Their voices, their mannerisms, their particular ways of inhabiting space are available for study in recent material. Kader Khan has been gone since January 2019. To recreate him you have to go back, dig into old footage, find the internal logic of how he moved and spoke and paused, and then reproduce it for a live audience without the safety net of anyone being able to say “well, he doesn’t quite do it like that anymore.”
Grover apparently did it well enough that people forgot, briefly, that Khan was gone.
A Season That Deserved This Ending
Season 4 ran twelve episodes on Netflix, its guest list ranging across Madhuri Dixit, Jackie Shroff, Shahid Kapoor, Vijay Sethupathi, Rani Mukerji, Kartik Aaryan, and a handful of others. It was a strong season by the show’s standards, consistently watchable and occasionally genuinely good.
Ending it here, with the Dhawans and with a ghost from nineties Bollywood made briefly visible again, is an editorial instinct that whoever put this episode together should feel good about. It did not need to land this well. These things often don’t.
As it turns out, it did.
What’s Next
Netflix has already confirmed Season 5. The announcement came from the platform’s India chief Monika Shergill at an event, where she described it as the first fifth season the show has done and said they were genuinely excited for it. The core cast stays intact: Kapil Sharma, Sunil Grover, Kiku Sharda, Krushna Abhishek, Archana Puran Singh, Navjot Singh Sidhu. New characters are reportedly being developed for Kapil, including something described as a GenZ Baba persona, which raises more questions than it answers but also sounds exactly like something this show would attempt.
Season 5 promises a wider guest net: World Cup champions, global superstars, Bhojpuri stars, and what the production is calling Gen Z icons. Whatever that means in practice, the show is clearly not planning to slow down.
For now, Season 4 has its ending, and it is a good one. Sunil Grover in a costume that does not look like much until he opens his mouth, and then suddenly it is 1997 and a man who loved this industry more than it ever fully acknowledged is back in the room, if only for a few minutes.
David Dhawan was sitting right there when it happened. He laughed, and he will remember it. So will the people watching at home.
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Ananya Sharma and Ayesha Khan