Angela Robinson provided some more insight with Entertainment Weekly’s Mandi Bierly about the plot twists of last Sunday’s True Blood episode, Karma. She shares some rather interesting insight about Bill’s current storyline, as well as how she personally related to his scene in the attorney’s office.

Moving on to Bill: It’s karma that Sookie’s blood is what brought him to town, and now it’s what could kill him?

Yes. Thinking about the end—all they’ve been through together, all the terrible things he’s done, as well as all the good things he’s done, was it love or was it desire—that’s why this season Bill’s having different flashbacks to the Civil War when he was a human. We’re trying to wrap the whole thing around: What does this all mean? Not to get super metaphysical on you [Laughs], so there is the literal thing that it is Sookie’s blood, but it always comes back to Sookie and her blood.

Bill being Hep-V positive: I was like, why didn’t I think of that when he fed on Sookie? Of course she was infected that night in the woods. Why give Bill the disease?

We really wanted to try to get back to a feeling of the first season, and it’s difficult once you reach the seventh season of a series with this much carnage. We really thought about ways in which you could kind of remember why you love and care about these characters, and to tell the story in such a way that there were still emotional stakes for the audience—even after there’s been so much gore and death. I think the decision to give Bill the disease came out of that. There are real stakes for the characters, and also, there’s a lot of humanity to them. One of the things the show often revolves around is the notion of humanity, and whether vampires have it or not, and how that affects their lives. This idea of having to confront your mortality, again, is really at the heart of this show.
What was the inspiration for the lawyer scene, and the fact that Bill ends up killing her?

In the first draft I wrote of the script, Bill just went and told Sookie and Jessica that he was sick, and it was incredibly undramatic. [Laughs] It was a really, really boring episode of True Blood. And so I recrafted the episode so that Sookie and Jessica found out on their own, so we wouldn’t have to have that boring conversation about something the audience already knew. And then there was the question of Bill being in this purgatory, of what he would do in the meantime. I’m married to my wife, Alex Kondracke, and the idea came from practically, what he would do? And one thing was to get his affairs in order.

We always love it when it’s like the taxi or airline for vampires, the doctor from the first season. In seasons past, there were these fun vampire-only things that happened in the world that were offshoots. Somewhere along the line, we stopped doing those as much, and so I basically pitched, “Wouldn’t it be fun if there was an estate attorney who just dealt with vampires and the kind of minutia?” Because I’d gone through this whole thing of being gay: First we were domestic partners, and then we had a baby, and then I had to adopt him. But then the laws kept changing, and the Supreme Court said gay marriage was okay, and then we married. So over the last couple of years, there was a lot of these meetings with lawyer. The idea of your identity in a relationship to the state constantly changing just worked its way into the scene, which I thought was really interesting. There’s always the gay metaphor with vampires with them coming out, but the idea of whether someone’s alive, or dead, or not alive, and also the idea that all the vampires are dying and whether or not the government would take advantage of all of that property—usually you don’t have time to go into it. But then I just wrote that one scene, and I guess Bill just kills her at the end. [Laughs]

Your frustration coming out?

The pure bureaucracy of it, and also that she was so craven and trying to make a buck off it all. And the waiting room was kind of inspired by Brazil and Beetlejuice, when Bill goes in and there’s all those crazy characters. It was stylistically a little bit different from most episodes of True Blood but not outrageously so. That was really fun to do. Everybody who did the costumes and makeup did such incredible work. If you rest on any frame of that, it’s really fascinating to look in the background.

To read the rest of Angela Robinson’s interview, please visit the source.