In the episode, Kate Austen (Evangeline Lilly), Karl (Blake Bashoff), and James "Sawyer" Ford (Josh Holloway) continue to journey back to the beach camp, while Jack Shephard (Matthew Fox) and Alex (Tania Raymonde) must save Juliet Burke (Elizabeth Mitchell) from execution.
In flashbacks, Jack is in Phuket, Thailand, where he meets a local woman named Achara (Bai Ling); the two soon enter into a relationship.
Sawyer and Kate begin the episode on Alex's canoe with an unconscious Karl, paddling away from Hydra island.
Sawyer tells him that love is worth the risks of getting caught by the Others and lets Karl go into the jungle to find Alex.
Later, Isabel (Diana Scarwid), the Others' "sheriff," arrives at the cage and discusses Jack's tattoo with him, as she can read the Chinese.
When Juliet later asks Jack why he helped her, he replies that it is because Ben said he would let both of them off the island and he wants to make that happen by working together.
[3] According to Assistant Professor Xinping Zhu of Northeastern University, the tattoo is made up of four Chinese characters from a poem written by Mao Zedong in 1925.
[9] Bai Ling, who played Achara, recalled that when shooting the sex scene between her character and Jack, she was "kind of nervous" because she did not know Fox very well.
[11] This was an increase in viewers from the previous episode, making Lost the number one scripted television series in the adults 18-49 category for the third consecutive week.
The episode garnered more viewers than other television series' showing at the same time on other networks, including Criminal Minds and CSI: NY.
Carabott felt that although it was "a necessary evil in episodic television like Lost", it did not "excuse the poor execution and uninteresting story".
Spiegel went on to write that although previews for "Stranger in a Strange Land" promised that three questions would be answered, they were not the mysteries he had been worried about.
[17] "Stranger in a Strange Land" is widely considered amongst Lost fans as the worst episode of the series, and was even recognized as such by show runner Damon Lindelof in an interview.