Elementary season 3 is off to a rocky start for the Holmes and Watson duo. Get to know more about the newest character, Kitty Winter.

Last night’s premiere of Elementary made one point very clear; Kitty Winter is not the the new Watson in Holmes’ life. That leaves one burning question: Who is she exactly?

Kitty Winter, played this season by Ophelia Lovibond, is a character pulled straight from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s canon. Kitty appears in the short story, The Illustrious Client, one of 12 stories that make up The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes. For Elementary‘s purposes, in episode 1, “Enough Nemesis To Go Around,” Kitty is introduced as Sherlock’s London protégé. He later expands his description to infer she is nothing more than a means to reconstruct the mechanics of the relationship he lost with Joan when he left New York. But as you can well imagine, to meet Sherlock’s standards, you need to be more interesting than that.

The Illustrious Client centers around Holmes attempts to dissuade a love-struck young woman from marrying a man with a notoriously violent past at the request of a prominent anonymous member of London society. The Austrian Baron Adelbert Gruner, the man behind the murders, does little to shield his fiancé from blood he carries on his hands. Instead, his latest victim finds the Baron to be a martyr for carrying the weight of the crimes around and will not be convinced otherwise.

Related: Elementary season 3, episode 1 recap: Holmes sweet home

The Baron’s connection to Miss Winter is what brings the “slim, flame-like young woman with a pale, intense face, youthful, and yet so worn with sorrow that one read the terrible years which had left their leprous mark upon her” into Arthur Conan Doyle’s Holmes case.

In her origin story, Kitty Winter is the victim of psychological and emotional abuse at the hands of Baron Gruner. She is vengeful, relentless, and does not seek credit, but rather she will do anything to have the opportunity to “see this man in the mud… with [her] foot on his cursed face.” She informs Holmes of a book that Gruner keeps of all the women he “collects.” Inside there are snapshots, descriptions, and names of the hefty lot of victims he should have titled, “Souls I have ruined.” In the end, Kitty Winter is responsible for throwing sulfuric acid at the face of Gruner, a crime she is later pardoned from due to the severity of his crimes against her and others. Can you see why Sherlock might like her?

The crimes against Kitty Winter are yet to be explored in the Elementary universe, but they will surface sooner rather than later. In fact, the writers hint that next week Kitty’s place among Sherlock and Watson’s attempts to reconcile will be a point of contention.

Kitty is certainly a force to be reckoned with and her presence may require a bit of adjusting for both viewers and onscreen detectives alike. At the close of Elementary‘s premiere, Kitty has a moment with Watson outside of the brownstone where she offers an olive branch to Watson. She, in only so many words, explains that her decision to study with Sherlock is out of a need to move towards something, to make a new beginning. With a new free radical in the mix of the Holmes and Watson dynamic, season 3 is already off to a strong start in the character development leg of the game.

Writers, Jeff King and Robert Doherty took over the Elementary STAFF account on Twitter last night and hinted that Sherlock’s time in London will be set on the back burner for now, but that fans can expect to see bits of his time there midseason. Our bets are on episode 11, “The Illustrious Client,” giving us the answers to Sherlock’s eight month venture abroad.

Will the “Murderous Attack on Sherlock Holmes” make headlines on Elementary as it did in the story? We’ll have to wait until episode 11 to find out!

Until then, Elementary season 3, episode 2, “The Five Orange Pipz,” airs Thursday, November 6 at 10:00 p.m. ET on CBS.