The return of Doctor Who for its eighth season (or series) is only a few days away, and outside of the 50th anniversary, it’s been years since we’ve had something so exciting drift into the Whovians’ orbit. Indeed, even the most oblivious purveyors of pop culture know that there’s a new Doctor gearing up for his first ride in the TARDIS on Saturday, and Doctor Who hasn’t felt so simultaneously new and old-fashioned since the current Doctor Who series resurrected the Time Lord with a leather jacket in 2005.

Obviously this all comes down to what a departure (or a status quo return) the casting of Peter Capaldi is. While the (patient and honest) fans have not seen a single consecutive minute of footage of Capaldi with the Sonic Screwdriver, they know that they are in for a very different kind of regeneration than either the David Tennant or Matt Smith eras. At the heart of this is the first full teaser that we got for the new Doctor Who series which featured a thousand-yard stare from Capaldi that could burn a hole through a Weeping Angel, and the goosebumps-inducing sign-off, “Clara, tell me, am I a good man?”

Obviously positing to be the mystery for Saturday’s “Deep Breath,” it may very well be the bigger question mark of the whole season. Yet, even that appears unambitious to me with a writer and executive producer like Steven Moffat steering this police box. Whether we’ll know it or not by season nine, much like the crack in Amelia Pond’s bedroom for the Eleventh Doctor, this mystery is likely to define Peter Capaldi’s entire run as the Twelfth, because Peter Capaldi’s Doctor might be the Valeyard.

On the off chance some are unaware of this Gallifreyan Anti-Christ, the Valeyard has long been the dreaded destination for the Doctor since 1986. As introduced in season 23 of “Classic Who,” the Valeyard spent the entire serial length of that year, “The Trial of a Time Lord” bedeviling the Doctor as a vengeful prosecutor for the High Council of the Time Lords. As played by Michael Jayston, the Valeyard was all pomp and self-righteous malevolence when he conspired to manipulate the Matrix—Gallifrey’s digital repository for the cumulative knowledge of the Time Lords species—in an attempt to frame the Sixth Doctor (Colin Baker).