Shannon Rutherford is a fictional character played by Maggie Grace on the ABC drama television series Lost, which chronicled the lives of the survivors of a plane crash in the South Pacific.
Shannon was introduced in the pilot episode as the stepsister of fellow crash survivor Boone Carlyle (Ian Somerhalder).
When Shannon is eight, her father marries Sabrina Carlyle (Lindsay Frost), and she spends much of her adolescence with her stepbrother Boone.
Unable to come up with the money herself, Shannon moves to France for a short time to work as an au pair.
[2] Shannon later forms a plan to con her stepbrother, Boone Carlyle, into giving her some of the inheritance she rightly deserved.
Boone pays Brian to leave her, and Shannon plans to secretly take half the money.
Six hours into the flight, only moments before the crash, Shannon and Boone are momentarily seen as Charlie Pace stumbles through their row.
[4] 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.
Sayid enlists her to help translate the maps belonging to the French woman who made the radio transmission, Danielle Rousseau (Mira Furlan).
[8] After returning from a romantic night along the beach with Sayid, she learns Boone has died after falling from a great height.
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.
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.
[14] In the series finale "The End" Boone is being attacked by someone outside a local bar, with Hurley and Sayid watching from afar.
[15] During the casting process, Shannon was compared to Paris Hilton,[16] and Lost producer Damon Lindelof described her as a "bitch.
"[17] Eirik Knutzen of The Repository found Shannon to be "a self-centered twit,"[18] and she was also called a "spoiled daddy's girl.
[7] 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.
[16] She was written to be unlikable in the first season as the producers needed a character they could use to create opposition and conflict.
"[26] 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.
"[26] 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.
Well, Maggie Grace is given an opportunity to shine and she does an acceptable job as the distraught sibling who is now looking for someone to blame for Boone's death.
"[35] Maureen Ryan of the Chicago Tribune felt fans echoed this view, describing their reaction as "muted," as they were more angry at Ana Lucia for shooting Shannon.
[36] Maggie Grace co-won the 2005 Screen Actors Guild Award for "Best Ensemble - Drama Series.