The following description of Anna Grimsdottir was written by Richard Dansky, the screenwriter for Splinter Cell: Conviction and Splinter Cell: Blacklist, around the time he was writing Conviction.
"As much as we reinvented Sam, we also reinvented Anna. In the past, her job was to tell Sam where to go and what to do. Go left, steal that data, shoot that guy – she was a resource, built into this smooth-running machine with Lambert at the top and Sam out in the field.
Then, of course, we took all of that away and gave her the chance to get her hands dirty. After all, she’s tough, she’s smart, and she’s suddenly in this position where everyone she could rely on was gone. What are the choices she has at that point, how did she get to that point, and what – or who – is she willing to sacrifice to survive. These are the questions she made us ask.
In terms of the story, she occupies a very interesting place. She’s Sam’s one existing link to his old world, which is a world he never wants to be a part of again. She’s the person he had to trust in the old days, and she’s leveraging that trust as an asset. And most importantly, she’s someone whom Sam needed to stay alive, and now all of a sudden – because she’s still working for this new incarnation of Third Echelon – she’s someone whom he can’t trust at all. Their relationship goes into some very dark places, and her character is what drove a lot of that. It’s another case of someone with honorable intentions being asked how far they’re willing to go for the greater good, and the answer Grim gave us was surprising."
