The episode sees Boone Carlyle (Ian Somerhalder) experience a vision quest, believing his stepsister Shannon (Maggie Grace) to be dead.

At the same time, they wanted to use the relationship to bring Boone and Locke closer together, and decided on a vision quest to make this happen.

Critics tended to view Shannon and Boone's story as uninteresting, but expressed appreciation for John Locke's (Terry O'Quinn) "darkly mysterious" actions.

While Boone is speaking to the officer, James "Sawyer" Ford (Josh Holloway) is brought to the station handcuffed and shouting in anger.

On Day 24, October 15, 2004, Boone sees that Shannon Rutherford's (Maggie Grace) relationship with Sayid Jarrah (Naveen Andrews) is getting more personal.

Boone and John Locke (Terry O'Quinn) have been trying to open the mysterious hatch, but tell the other survivors they are hunting for boar.

The monster takes Shannon, and a distraught Boone later finds her mutilated body by a creek and watches her die.

Meanwhile, Kate Austen (Evangeline Lilly) shows Jack Shephard (Matthew Fox) to a garden that Sun-Hwa Kwon (Yunjin Kim) has started.

"[4] The episode's guest stars included Charles Mesure as Bryan, Adam Leadbeater as Malcolm, and Kelly Rice as Nicole.

[6] According to Cuse, the plot twist had become a Lost characteristic so they wanted to surprise the audience by having the Shannon-Boone relationship be sexual in nature.

The idea for the two came from an observation that their bickering resembled an older married couple; to support this, they made the characters step-siblings as it had not yet been established what their sibling bond exactly was.

[3] Initially, it was conceived that Boone would be convinced into eating Locke's drug, but director Rod Holcomb and the writers thought it would have made the hallucination easier to guess, and changed it into spreading the concoction into a head injury.

[3] Many future plot points are introduced into the episode, such as Sayid observing a magnetical anomaly, main characters crossing paths (Sawyer is being arrested in the police station where Boone is filing a complaint) and Michael's box of drawings, which sets up the following episode, "Special".

Vary graded the episode with a B+ and praised Somerhalder for bringing "some real pathos to his conflicted feelings for Shannon; he also found Locke to be "at his best when his motivations are darkly mysterious.

"[7] In her 2006 work Finding Lost: The Unofficial Guide, Nikki Stafford critiqued the writers for having some of the characters act inconsistently with the events of previous episodes, citing Jack and Kate's "jokey and sweet" interactions as an example.

[15] Robert Dougherty, author of the 2008 book Lost Episode Guide for Others: An Unofficial Anthology, compared Shannon and Boone's relationship to that of a soap opera.

She called it "profoundly weird",[17] and described it as a "transition episode", noting that on her original viewing she found it irritating, eager for the story to advance, but upon re-watching it enjoyed it more, praising the "lovely exploration of Boone's character".