While speaking at L.A.’s PaleyFest last night, The Good Wife star Julianna Margulies accidentally strayed from the realm of pure speculation into spoiler territory. Unless she’s messing with us (it’s been known to happen), Margulies just revealed the outcome of Alicia’s race for state’s attorney.

In this post–Will Gardner world, the biggest question of The Good Wife is no longer “will they or won’t they?” (And that may be to the season’s detriment.) Instead we’ve gotten smaller questions spread across all our favorite characters. Will Cary get out of jail? (Yes.) Will Kalinda make it out of this mess with Lemond Bishop in one piece? (Probably not.) And, most significantly, will Alicia be Chicago’s next state’s attorney? I’m thinking yes.

Margulies told Vulture, this is what Margulies said:

I think what you will see — if she wins — I’m speculating. You would see more of a competition between her and her husband, because she’s in his world. I can’t tell you more because I don’t want to ruin it, but it gets really good, and there is that weird competition between the two.

If Margulies is only speculating, then how can she say with certainty that the power dynamic between Alicia and Peter “gets really good?” It may have seemed like a foregone conclusion that, despite the neck-in-neck aspect of Alicia’s race with David Hyde Pierce’s Frank Prady, our hero and show’s titular character would win the day. But I was actually pretty sure Alicia would lose. The more she stays in this race, the less significant Florrick, Agos, and Associates becomes. Will next season take us even further from the courtroom drama aspect of The Good Wife? Perhaps that’s what the show needs in the glaring absence of Josh Charles: a radical re-invention.

But no matter what the outcome of the race, Margulies says that David Hyde Pierce’s character will be back. (The last scheduled episode of his arc airs next Sunday.) Trying to return to the realm of ambiguity, Margulies said during the PaleyFest panel:

Working with David Hyde Pierce was incredible. He did a six-episode arc, but he’ll come back. . .It’s not clear in what capacity Pierce’s character, Frank Prady would return (as the new State’s Attorney or back to his old job as political commentator), but whatever it is, we’re ready for it.

But the outcome of the race won’t be announced in this week’s episode. Instead, The Good Wife is taking a radical departure from its usual format and airing an episode (“Mind’s Eye”) set almost entirely in Alicia’s mind. The series has flirted with this format before, quite successfully in last season’s brilliant “The Decision Tree” and somewhat less successfully in this year’s Elsbeth Tascioni–centric episode “Shiny Objects.” But this time we’ll take a trip inside Alicia’s mind, complete with a mental showdown between Alicia’s two suitors (Finn and Johnny) and a Kalinda-and-Peter-in-bed fantasy sequence. Buckle up, it should be a wild ride.