I love LOST. There. I fucking said it. It’s one of my favorite television shows. It saved my life in a way, not literally, but in the way that you hate yourself so much and you think only crash landing on a mysterious island is a comprehensive enough metaphor for giving this life thing another go-round. That’s not really something a person should admit, but I have admitted it, and I will reiterate, LOST is one of my absolute favorite things despite it being very dumb and stupid in a lot of ways (but also really great and life-changing in more important and lasting ways, man, this LOST thing still confuses me). But few shows have given up on characters in such a jarring and (dare I say) slapdash fashion. The most tragic of all these submissions to “The Golden Temple of Giving In For Want Of A Decent Idea” is the case of Shannon Rutherford, as played by Maggie Grace.
As I said, I come not to bury LOST, but to acknowledge the work of Maggie Grace, the actress who portrayed Shannon Rutherford during those first two halcyon seasons, and to honor Shannon Rutherford (the fictional person) herself. When I tell people Shannon is one of my favorite characters they think I am joking, as if I was some jokester who holds nothing sacred but the yanking of proverbial chains. I’m yanking no one’s chain; I’m merely trying to shake some sense into a filthy world that doesn’t care to see a massive fuck-up of long term planning in the LOST writer’s room. If the central conceit of the show was indeed the salvation of its characters and not the myriad insoluble mysteries of the Island, then LOST was far too often doing a major disservice by jettisoning characters to the grave well before their time. For God sake, Walt was persistently built up to be the Island’s own Kwisatz Haderach but the show punted him to the curb because he went through puberty! Mr. Eko, Libby, Ana Lucia, Charlotte, and others seemed to die for no reason. Werner Herzog might approve of that, since nature is indeed a mixture of chaos, hostility, and murder, but it’s clear to me these characters weren’t killed off as a tribute to realism (on the magical island), but because the show time and time again didn’t make the necessary sacrifices to develop their stories, instead cleaving to more familiar fare like Jack and Kate and Sawyer chasing each other through the jungle three times per episode. And yes, many cherished or half cherished characters met untimely dooms, but as I said, the loss that hit me the hardest was one of the earliest, that of the luminous Shannon, the insufferable spoiled brat who seemed to be created merely to be destroyed.
In an ensemble cast of somewhat complex (some more than others) and flawed humans who had nothing in common save for the world kicking the shit out of them, Grace’s Shannon stuck out like a singularly underdeveloped and deliberately grating thumb. Sunbathing the day after the crash! Refusing to eat candy because of the calories! Tricking hapless heroin addict Charlie into catching her a fish! Having some hotel sex with her stepbrother! It’s kind of sad, but super clear, that she’s intended to be everyone’s least favorite survivor, the bitch of the group, if you will allow me the parlance of our times. That much is immediately plain, and that kind of deck stacked against her very existence loans some kind of sympathy to her arc, if there ever was to be such a thing.
Shannon’s an attractive blond rich girl, generally rude and aloof, more of an archetype, that is to say she is sort of an angry nerd’s version of all the girls who never paid much attention to him in school (in contrast with the beautiful but also brave and mysterious Kate, or the pretty and sweet natured pregnant girl Claire). She’s deliberately one dimensional for at least five straight episodes before given little slivers of depth, which Maggie Grace always nails with uncelebrated aplomb, though Christ, it’s little enough compared to the millions of close ups squandered on Kate or Jack, the two most boring people on the planet (any planet).
This is Shannon’s arc on LOST: annoy some people by being shitty and mean, translate a tiny bit of Rousseau’s message, have a pretty sweet romance with Sayid for a bit, be obviously wrecked and angry when brother bear is killed (he was the “sacrifice the island demanded”), take care of the dog for a few episodes, see Walt’s astral projection after he is abducted, and then get shot by the grumpy and unappealing Ana Lucia. She had only one flashback episode. Jack had like forty-five, one of which was about the ORIGIN OF HIS TOO STUPID TO CREDIT AS REAL TATTOO. In future episodes she would cameo as her past self a few times, before being completely forgotten by the rest of the survivors (she is not mentioned once in season five). In Season Six they find her inhaler on the ground and her name is mentioned to no great reaction. And that’s it really, until the finale.
Maybe the nubile blond American girl falling in love with a kindly Iraqi torturer was just too much for the network to sign off on long term. Maybe Damon Lindelof and Cartlton Cuse and the other nerd scribes just couldn’t see that arrangement being something that could realistically (haha, realistically) last and if she wasn’t Sayid’s foil then what other purpose could she possibly have? It’s not like she was Kate, who could read tracks and shoot guns! And by the end of Season 1, she is already heavy with grief over the death of her brother, Boone “Eyebrows” Caryle, so writing her out of the show entirely could have seemed like an easier prospect than creating a halfway realistic depiction of the mourning process in the middle of a sci-fi adventure about the Others and fate and that kind of stuff. Maybe it was her stubborn remoteness from the more mystical aspects of the island that doomed her. More accurately, given her (that is to say a fictional character) lack of agency in regards to those mystical aspects, it was laziness on the part of the LOST team by not imagining a world that Shannon Rutherford could be useful, despite their own half-hearted attempts to show some tiny and fleeting token feel-good Shannon moments.
In Season Six’s controversial (some would say awful) finale Maggie Grace reprises her role in the “sideways universe” and gets pushed into a pile of garbage so that Sayid can beat a guy up and thereby realize once again that he is a pretty decent dude. Her presence is strictly for his benefit. She is a prop. Sayid sees Shannon and they kiss and he instantly remembers all the shit that went down on the Island, though the show was obviously finished with the idea of a Shannon and Sayid romance, and so was Sayid, as he spent four seasons pining for his real true love, the beautiful and bold Iraqi dissident Nadia. And yet it was Maggie Grace, resplendent in purgatory, who accompanied Sayid to the Church, never mind Nadia, never mind the fact that nobody spared her a thought for four seasons. Not a lot made sense about that last episode, but it was especially annoying for me, as a Shannon supporter, to see her trotted out for the show’s finale in a feeble attempt at completing the puzzle they already fucked up several seasons past, giving her two entire lines, two lines in an episode over an hour long, to reacquaint us with the significance of Shannon Rutherford, and why we and/or Sayid should give a shit about her.
Those two lines were:
“Leave my brother alone!“
“Sayid.”
To her credit, Maggie Grace is a solid actor, and the look she gives Sayid when they both recognize each other and realize the enormity of what it means that they found one another again did indeed put some tears in my eyes, but Christ, THEY GAVE HER NOTHING TO WORK WITH and that was the problem with their entire approach to Shannon. Once they established that she wasn’t the piece of shit person she appeared to be in the first few episodes, they had simply run out of ideas.
Shannon, despite being a trust fund princess, is strangely one of the more relatable characters during the show’s early run. As certain personalities come to relish the charms of the island or are driven insane by them, Shannon remains someone just trying to survive and live her goddamn life. She’s not unduly interested in hatches buried in the jungle, or malevolent Smoke Monsters, and certainly she isn’t going to be hung up on things like Jacob and his nebulous omniscience. Shannon is us. Confronted with an insanely shitty situation and making the most of it, finding what happiness she can, slowly, through fits and starts getting the fucking hang of helping out her fellow man in whatever tiny ways she can for as long as she can. Jack fighting the Man in Black on the cliffs makes for a good cinematic purging, but the really moving moments of LOST were the quiet ones, like Shannon accepting responsibility for Vincent the Dog, something the Shannon of the first episode would never have done, could never have done. She’s not as immediately pleasant as Claire or Kate and this is good, this is proper, this is the way it ought to be, because Shannon’s journey was supposed to be an actual journey, not a lesson in stumbling disregard.
It takes all sorts, as they say, and Shannon was a sort the show could have used more of. She didn’t talk to ghosts and wasn’t some genius of astrophysics and the goddamn island didn’t talk to her. She was who she was. And who she was turned out to be perfect, had the show only realized that before they had to make room for a bunch of characters they’d be killing off at the end of Season 2 anyway. The underrated Maggie Grace did what she could with limited material, and she should be proud of the life and the light she infused into the doomed Shannon Rutherford, but it’s a shame nonetheless.
Pour a cold one out for Shannon Rutherford, may she rest forever in the hazy glow of precious counterfactuals and errant dreams.