When vengeful detective Kitty Winter (Ophelia Lovibond) first appears in the third season premiere of Elementary, she is a mysterious live wire who quickly engages in a baton fight with Dr. Joan Watson (Lucy Liu); it is not until the following episode that it's revealed euphemistically that she was "the victim of a horrific crime," as Sherlock Holmes (Jonny Lee Miller) puts it. He continues, "She was taken. By a man." It's Joan who is the first to say the r-word, in the third episode: "She's a rape victim."

The initial sketch of Kitty Winter, portrayed by Lovibond in a 12-episode arc that ended Jan. 29, dances at the edge of sexist caricature. It begins with a catfight, Kitty battling Liu's Joan on the street, two women pitted against one another over Sherlock — a man. In the next episode, the stereotype threatens to compound: Kitty Winter is a rape victim. But instead of falling into easy clichés of inimical women and fragile victims, Elementary proceeded to create not only an authentic representation of female friendship, but also a deeply empathetic, empowered story of rape survival. The crime is named. The woman does not "overcome," but rather takes charge of her recovery. She is surrounded by a network of support. Her story is never disbelieved. And, ultimately, Kitty shreds her rapist's cloak of respectability.

"She's not a victim. She has not allowed this to take over her life," Lovibond told BuzzFeed News. And still, throughout her episodes, Lovibond took great care to make the trauma a central part of the character. "Rape isn't a one-time thing: It is something that will change your wiring a little bit," she said. And this is what's so striking about Kitty Winter: She is indeed not defined by her victimhood, but she is inflected by it. It's never an afterthought, as gender-based violence so often is on television.

Small choices brought Kitty to life; Lovibond mentioned a scene in the Nov. 20 episode where one of Sherlock's eccentric consultants — Harlan, a doughy mathematician played by Rich Sommer — is alone in a room with her, shirtless.

"I said, 'I don't want to be too close to him, because even though he's clearly nonthreatening, Kitty's not comfortable being in a room with a naked man,'" Lovibond said. "It's not appropriate; it makes her uncomfortable."

That was a new notion to Elementary's showrunner, Rob Doherty. "That hadn't occurred to me," he said. "Harlan is this lovable goofball we introduced last year. I worked with the writer on that scene, and it never occurred to me. … When Ophelia pointed it out, it made all the sense in the world."

Kitty Winter is a minor character from an original Holmes story, "The Adventure of the Illustrious Client," so — SPOILER ALERT for a plot point that's going on a century old — Doherty always knew her arc would end with Kitty throwing acid in the face of her attacker. What was unclear to Doherty was just how she would get there. And there isn't much hint as to how she gets there in the story itself: The original Kitty Winter is more a collection of characteristics than a character. But, Doherty said, "Kitty Winter jumped out at me because she was one of the most active female characters I'd ever come across in the canon" — unlike the Kitty in Elementary, this earlier Kitty simultaneously punishes her attacker and saves Sherlock Holmes, making her a hero. In Arthur Conan Doyle's stories, "women come across a certain way, for the most part, and Kitty was this really fascinating exception." She's violent, full of anger, and self-determining.

As Kitty became more violent in the Jan. 22 episode — torturing someone for information — Lovibond played Kitty "doing it very reluctantly, and that wasn't how I was seeing it," Doherty said. Once Kitty finds out that her rapist is in New York City, Doherty began imagining "someone who is rage-filled and coiled and ready to snap," he said, but Lovibond took a different tack.

"Kitty's not an evil person," Lovibond said. "When she does do the wrong thing as a means to an end, it's very reluctantly."

This part of her story — this burning off the face of a sadistic serial rapist-murderer — is, of course, not without its doubts.