Never a show to juggle just one piece of vexing mythology, ABC’s Castle is poised to revisit the mystery of Rick’s months-long vanishing — and quite possibly add a wrinkle that will hit very close to home.

Having spent some of Season 8’s first eight episodes circling the LokSat mystery — Who was Senator Bracken’s high-powered accomplice in murderous drug-running? — “We’re going to go to Castle’s missing time next,” co-showrunner Alexi Hawley tells TVLine. “Not right away [when the season resumes Feb. 1], but definitely in the middle third [of the season].”

When last touched upon in April, Rick’s disappearance — which (ahem) famously began just prior to his wedding — was due to an old prep school pal, Bilal Khan, breaking away from Al-Qaeda to turn himself over to American intelligence. Thing is, after nearly dying the first time around, Bilal this time demanded to surrender himself to trusted classmate-turned-high profile author Rick Castle, whose presence in Thailand was thus needed ASAP.

Yep.

After stepping in (and in turn helping his country dodge a terrorist attack), Castle’s memories of Bilal and the covert op were erased, leaving him unable to account for his absence when he was found months later, adrift on a boat.

The Bilal situation, however, would only seem to account for a fraction of Rick’s missing months. So, maybe the next chapter will fill in new blanks and periods of time, possibly involving Rick’s wife in unexpected ways? After all, there was talk over the summer that the new showrunners hoped to explore a greater “cosmic” connection between Rick and Kate.

“We haven’t nailed the story down for it,” Hawley says, “but we do like the idea that something that Castle came across during his missing time is actually why his memory was wiped — and it wasn’t necessarily about the reason we showed in Season 7. And it does have something to do with Beckett. But we haven’t nailed it all the way down yet.”

Git your thinking caps on, people, and start speculating about how Kate might (might) have unwittingly been connected to Rick’s vanishing.