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Lost Trivia
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Lost Shannon Rutherford Biography
Shannon Rutherford is a fictional character played by Maggie Grace on
the ABC drama television series Lost, which chronicles the lives of the
survivors of a plane crash in the South Pacific. Shannon is introduced
in the pilot episode as the stepsister of fellow crash survivor Boone
Carlyle (played by Ian Somerhalder). She is a series regular until her
death in the second season episode "Abandoned". On the Island, she is
unhelpful and spends much of her time sunbathing. She forms a
relationship with another survivor from the plane crash, Sayid Jarrah (Naveen
Andrews).
Shannon was written to be irritating and inconsiderate, but to also
have depth. During the casting process she was compared to Paris
Hilton. Her brother's death freed her up to develop her relationship
with Sayid, an idea which Naveen Andrews came up with, as he thought
they were an unlikely pairing. Critics found her to be an unsympathetic
character. Grace's acting was praised, earning a Teen Choice Award
nomination.
Arc
Prior to the crash
When Shannon is eight, her father marries Sabrina Carlyle (Lindsay
Frost), and she spends much of her adolescence with her stepbrother,
Boone.
She studies ballet and, as she gets older, teaches dance classes to
young girls. When she is eighteen, Shannon's father dies in a
car crash. He did
not have a will prepared, so all of his money and property goes to his
wife. Sabrina refuses to help Shannon financially, despite Shannon
winning a prestigious yet unpaid internship to the Martha Graham Dance
Company in New York. Unable to come up with the money herself, Shannon
moves to France for a short time as an au pair. Shannon forms a plan to
trick her stepbrother into giving some of her father's money to her.
Making it appear that her boyfriends abused her, Boone would pay them
to leave her, and Shannon would secretly take half the money. During
one con in Sydney, her "abusive boyfriend" ruins Shannon's ruse after
Boone cuts him a check. Boone storms off to his hotel room and plans to
return to the States. When Shannon's boyfriend takes off with all of
the money, Shannon goes to Boone's hotel room in Sydney. When faced
with Boone's anger at her betrayal, Shannon seduces him, playing on the
feelings she knew he had for her. After they have slept together,
Shannon tells Boone that things will go back to the way they had been
before. He expresses anger because, as always, they both know that she
is in control of their situation/ relationship. While at the airport,
Sayid approaches Shannon, asking her to watch his bag for him. She
deftly obliges, but soon leaves it unattended. Before the doomed flight
takes off, Shannon rummages through her hand-luggage for her asthma
inhaler, which Boone casually hands to her.
After the crash
Upon landing on the Island, she decides to join Sayid on a hike to
transmit a distress signal, after she and Boone have an argument about
her selfishness. When they discover a French looped signal already
being transmitted, Shannon's knowledge of the language is used to
translate it. Later, Shannon has an asthma attack, but her inhalers are
nowhere to be found. Sun (Yunjin Kim) cures her, by using eucalyptus
plants to help her breathing. Because of her selfish and manipulative
behavior, Boone brands Shannon useless. Sayid enlists her to help
translate the maps that belong to the French woman who made the radio
transmission, Danielle Rousseau (Mira Furlan). Shannon and Sayid soon
form a romantic relationship. After returning from a romantic night
along the beach with Sayid, she learns Boone has died after falling
from a great height. At his funeral, Shannon does not speak, but allows
Sayid to talk instead. Shannon holds Locke (Terry O'Quinn) responsible
for Boone's death, and asks Sayid to take action. When he refuses, she
steals the key to the gun case from Jack Shephard (Matthew Fox) and
holds Locke at gunpoint in the jungle. When Rousseau arrives on the
beach one morning to warn the camp of the Others' imminent arrival,
Shannon prepares to migrate to the caves with the rest of the group.
Before leaving on the raft the survivors have built, Walt Lloyd
(Malcolm David Kelley) gives Shannon guardianship of his dog, Vincent,
as a means to help her recover from her loss.
At the start of season two, Shannon loses Vincent in the jungle. Whilst
searching for him, she is shocked to find Walt standing before her,
dripping wet. However, when Sayid finds her, Walt disappears. Over the
next few days, Sayid builds Shannon a shelter on the beach. He brings
her to it and they soon decide to sleep together for the first time.
Sayid leaves to get a bottle of water for Shannon and in his absence,
Shannon again sees a vision of Walt, standing in the shelter with her.
Sayid brushes off her experience as a dream. She uses Vincent to try
and find Walt, only for him to lead her to Boone's grave. After a
while, she takes Vincent into the jungle again, with Sayid in pursuit.
As it starts to rain, Sayid and Shannon admit their feelings for each
other before both seeing Walt. Shannon runs after him, only to be
accidentally shot by Ana Lucia (Michelle Rodriguez), who mistakes her
for an Other. She dies moments later in Sayid's arms.
Personality
During the casting process, Shannon was compared to Paris Hilton, and
Lost producer Damon Lindelof described her as a "bitch." Eirik Knutzen
of The Repository found Shannon to be "a self-centered twit," and she
was also called a "spoiled daddy's girl." Boone describes her as a
"self-centered little bitch." On her first night on the Island, Shannon
is confident that they will be rescued, refusing to help the others
organize the luggage. She does not care that Rose (L. Scott Caldwell)
has lost her husband, and spends much of her time sunbathing. She
manipulates Charlie (Dominic Monaghan) into catching a fish for her,
after which Boone apologizes on behalf of Shannon for "using this poor
guy like she uses everyone else." In "Whatever the Case May Be," Boone
says to Shannon, "Don't you see the way they look at us around here?
They don't take us seriously. We're a joke. I'm trying to contribute
something. You're just – you're useless." This motivates her to help
Sayid translate maps he obtained from Rousseau.
Development
The producers were looking for someone who had a "Paris Hilton quality"
to play Shannon, but she could not just be shallow, as the storyline
would require more than that. A lot of girls were auditioned before the
producers finally settled on Maggie Grace. She was written to be a
bitch in the first season as the producers needed a character they
could use to create opposition and conflict. The producers thought it
would be interesting for there to be more to Shannon and Boone's
relationship than just Boone's possessive brotherly interest. They came
up with the idea for them to be unrelated stepsiblings, who have a
romantic encounter, which became the twist for their backstory. When
Boone is killed at the end of season one, it forces Shannon into a more
adult existence on the Island. Grace noted Boone is "the only person
that ever really knew and loved Shannon, in spite of herself. Of
course, losing him, especially with so much left unsaid and unresolved,
will change her irrevocably." This freed her up to develop her
relationship with Sayid. Naveen Andrews, who plays Sayid, came up with
the idea for Shannon and Sayid relationship. He thought, "What would
really shock Middle-America? What if Sayid was to have a relationship
with a woman that looked like Miss America? The most unlikely pairing…
to come completely from left field." This pairing made Shannon "less
flighty... more of a person to be reckoned with." According to Lost
producer Carlton Cuse, "The relationships [the audience] expect on the
show are not necessarily the ones that we [the producers] necessarily
are going to give you, but we want to try to find ways in which
characters that you don't expect to kind of connect to one another to
connect in ways that are kind of surprising."
Shannon's flashbacks in "Abandoned" were used to allow the audience to
get to a "really emotional level with the character, to finally
understand ... why she was the way she was."Her death was planned
before the start of season two, as the producers wanted the survivors
in the tail section of the plane, and the survivors of the fuselage to
be forced to come together under difficult circumstances. Her death was
also used to "spin
Sayid
off in another direction." Damon Lindelof commented "It's sort of
understood on Lost that that's what you sign up for. There's going to
be constant character turnover, because the stakes on the Island are
life-or-death." Lindelof felt an "intense, emotional sense of loss"
when watching her death. In her post-death appearance in "Collision,"
Maggie Grace was credited as "special guest star." She received the
same billing when she returned in season three, appearing in Nikki and
Paulo's flashbacks. Carlton Cuse noted "it was really fun for us to
actually have Boone and Shannon reemerge in the stories."
