With the Eligius prison transport, The 100 season 5 introduces a brand new faction of characters. The latest is Mike Dopud’s Vinson, one of the most hardened criminals on board.

The 100 season 5, which premieres some time in early 2018, propels our protagonists six years into the future.

As glimpsed in the season 4 finale, an older Clarke (now with a young girl named Madi, played by Lola Flanery, in tow) comes face to face with a space ship that — to both her and the audience’s surprise — doesn’t belong to her friends on the Ark, but is the prison transport of the mysterious Eligius Mining Corporation.

Related: We’re all Grounders now: Humanity, tribalism and the pursuit of unity on The CW’s The 100

Aboard the ship we’ll find several new characters, the latest addition being Mike Dopud (Power, Arrow)’s Vinson, a “key recurring” role.

The news comes via Deadline, for which Denise Petski reports that Vinson is “overly polite” and looks “more like a professor than a hardened criminal,” but is in fact “a ruthless serial killer, terrifying enough to keep even the worst of the criminals on their toes.”

Vinson is an interesting addition, considering that we already had a character presumed to be the season’s ‘big bad’ in William Miller’s Robert McCreary. As previously reported, McCreary is “a former enforcer from a powerful crime syndicate [whose] ruthless, violent methods make him a formidable antagonist to our heroes.”

Vinson looks set to match (or exceed) McCreary’s level of ruthlessness, and unless they’re working together, he could potentially challenge his authority among the prisoners, sparking conflict and division within Eligius itself.

At a glance, the Eligius faction seems to resemble that of Mount Weather in season 2, when we similarly had a more benign ‘big bad’ in Dante Wallace, but it was in fact his son Cage and Doctor Tsing pulling the strings of evil inside the mountain.

Time will tell if things are exactly like they appear within Eligius, or if we can expect more surprises and alliances/rivalries to form as the season goes on.

Also joining The 100 season 5 as Eligius team members are Ivana Milicevic as Charmaine Diyoza and Jordan Bolger as Zeke Shaw.

At SDCC 2017, showrunner Jason Rothenberg said of the newcomers that they will initially “seem like villains” that will ultimately “be a threat,” but “we’re gonna find some guys in there that we really like.” I’m gonna take a wild guess and say that Vinson won’t be one of those guys!

The 100 season 5 trailer has yet to be released; the season 5 premiere date is TBD.