The third season of "Elementary" picked up eight months after the events on the show's second season finale, in which Sherlock Holmes (Jonny Lee Miller) decided to fly to London to work for MI6, leaving her partner Joan Watson (Lucy Liu) in New York alone.
In the Season 3 premiere, however, Sherlock came back to The Big Apple after things did not exactly work out with MI6. "Holmes [feels] a certain compulsion to come back to New York," the series' creator and executive producer Rob Doherty told Entertainment Weekly in a recent interview. "The biggest surprise he has in store is that he has found himself a new protégé and partner."
Sherlock's new protégé is Kitty Winter, played by the 28-year-old English actress Ophelia Lovibond who recently starred in "Guardians of the Galaxy."
"Joan's not really thrilled about Kitty," Liu, 45, recently told TV Guide. "That's not a good feeling, to think that you are not a unique and special person when they had a special relationship. It immediately degrades everything that they've been doing, like, 'Oh, we're going to do the same thing. I'm going to train somebody else to do that.'"
Doherty told Entertainment Weekly that Sherlock's move to train Kitty is a "little insulting" for Joan. "[Sherlock's notion] that it wasn't his partnership with Joan that was special, it was just the fact that he had a partner [at all], is a little insulting," he said. "When Sherlock says something like that, it's one of the rare occasions that he's not right."
Doherty added that Joan and Kitty are very different from one another. "Joan was always a very calming presence for Sherlock. Kitty is not a calming presence," he said. "If anything, she's a bit more like Sherlock. She can be a bit abrasive. She doesn't care all that much for how people view her. She could use a Watson of her own in a lot of respects."
Miller, 41, also told TV Guide that there is a huge difference between the way he treats Kitty and how he interacted with Joan as his partner in the past.
"They don't know each other," Miller explained of Sherlock and Kitty's relationship. "He's training her and is really quite firm and not particularly pleasant to her. He's probably trying to boss her around, dominate her a bit more as far as the teacher and mentor kind of thing goes, [more] than he ever would be able to get away with Joan Watson. So he's sort of taking advantage a little bit."
But why did Sherlock decided to take Kitty as his new protégé in the first place?
Speaking at the New York Comic Con earlier this month, Miller said that Kitty "had some not-so-great experiences, which is probably an understatement," Mashable reported, and this might be the reason why Sherlock decided to take her under his wing. Kitty's backstory will unfold in the next few episodes, said the "Trainspotting" actor.
"Elementary" airs Thursdays at 10:00 p.m. ET on CBS.