‘True Blood’ season 7: Writer on big reveal for Anna Camp’s Sarah Newlin
Don’t you love it when “True Blood” gets poetic? There was at least a moment like this during this past Sunday’s episode “Karma,” when it was revealed that Sarah Newlin, the same person responsible for bringing about the H-Vamp outbreak, ironically may also be the same person who could actually stop it. This will be a hard pill for many characters to swallow, since you are relying on the redemption of a terrible person for you to survive. Sometimes, we wonder whether some of them (see Eric Northman) even want to.
So what went into the choice to make the entire fate of vampires depend on this woman? Speaking after “Karma” aired to Entertainment Weekly, the episode’s writer/director Angela Robinson went through the process that got Anna Camp back to the show:
“We really wanted to bring Anna Camp back, and Sarah Newlin was still out there. We didn’t really want to create a whole new Big Bad for this season. Instead of having the story spiral out, we wanted to bring it in and center it around Bon Temps and all the characters we already knew and loved. So the idea was to continue her story, and then there’s this really fun development that she hid out at an ashram and decided that she’s gonna be a Buddhist. We were trying to figure out how to follow through on the plot of Eric and Pam searching for Sarah, and then I don’t know who came up with the brilliant idea that Sarah had drunk the antidote and was in fact the antidote—but it came up when we were breaking story in the early part of the season, and everybody loved the idea. How great was Anna Camp in her crazy scene?”
There is a part of us that doesn’t quite understand the whole yakuza and Gus Jr. part of the show, and we wonder whether or not we desperately needed the Buddhism angle of it all. Still, we’re glad to see Sarah back, and with the potential to stir up some more trouble in Bon Temps. Without her here for the final season, the show would definitely be a little more boring.
Photo: HBO