Prior to the crash, Ana Lucia Cortez is an officer in the Los Angeles Police Department who becomes pregnant, but loses the baby after being shot by a suspect at a burglary scene.

[2] In a brief flashback in the first season finale, she flirts with Jack Shephard (Matthew Fox) at a bar at the airport, unaware he is Christian's son.

[3] During the flight the plane splits in half, with the two parts crashing on different sides of an island;[4] Ana Lucia is one of the tail section survivors.

[5] Suspecting fellow survivor Nathan (Josh Randall) as a traitor, she moves everyone inland, digs a pit and throws him in it until he confesses.

[5] Fellow tail section survivors Libby (Cynthia Watros) and Cindy (Kimberley Joseph) bring Jin (Daniel Dae Kim) to her after discovering him washed up on shore.

[1] She is invited into a bunker the fuselage survivors found to interrogate a man claiming to be Henry Gale (Michael Emerson), and manages to receive a map to his crashed balloon.

[8] She takes Sayid and Charlie (Dominic Monaghan) with her, and eventually discovers the crash site, and the body of the real Henry Gale.

[13] Anna Johns from AOL's TV Squad felt Ana Lucia is "abrasive and lacking common sense or civility".

[18] In February 2005, Lost producers began looking for a Latina woman in her mid-thirties who would be the leader of the tail section, and a romantic interest for Jack.

[18] In her early appearances, Ana Lucia is shown to be very tough, so the flashbacks in "Collision", where it is revealed she lost her baby, were used to show a softer side to her.

Lindelof further described the character's intentional role as a "persona non grata in our society for some time to come" as a result of Shannon (Maggie Grace)'s death and becoming integrated into the fuselage camp.

"[21] The producers planned for her character to develop a romantic storyline with Jack (Matthew Fox) as part of a "love rectangle" with Kate and Sawyer.

In a February 2006 GQ interview, Fox described the Jack-Ana Lucia coupling as potentially going into a darker direction, such as committing killing sprees in the same vein as the film Natural Born Killers (1994) or Bonnie and Clyde.

After the character was killed off, producers Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse claimed that Rodriguez was only interested in one season during their first meeting with her (alongside co-creator J. J. Abrams) because she was a "nomadic spirit", but would like to do one "kickass arc" as she called it.

[23] Later, in a 2020 podcast, Lindelof amended this and revealed Rodriguez expressed interest in continuing the role beyond her one-season deal midway through the season (shortly following the DUI charges), but he informed her they had already planned her death storyline.

Melanie McFarland from Seattle Post-Intelligencer described Ana Lucia as "one of the most intensely hated characters on television [in the] fall [of 2005]", due to her being "hostile" and a "bully".

[13] McFarland found this makes "the creation of her character, and Rodriguez's hire, strokes of brilliant writing and casting on the part of Lost producers J.J. Abrams and Damon Lindelof", and described her as a "hero stewed in pathos".

[31] On the second season DVD, supervising producer Leonard Dick says "Michelle brought real strength, a dynamic element, to the role".

[16] In 2006, Michelle Rodriguez co-won the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Drama Series with the cast of Lost.