"Rolling Stone" Alan Sepinwall praised Lindelof's vision for the episode, remarking on how his previous work on "The Leftovers" helped to influence this, and that the episode "fills in a huge chunk of the mythology, while also doing that thing that both Alan Moore and Damon Lindelof do so well: looking at an utterly outrageous sci-fi/fantasy construct and wondering how a very real and fragile human being might respond to it."