I was absolutely as spoiled as a person could be for the last season of Lost, and when I first heard about the return of Danielle Rousseau—as a potential love interest for Ben Linus—the following thoughts went through my head:
1. That’s messed up.
2. And yet… totally awesome!
3. God, do they have enough time to do that right?
I have to confess, for me, the jury’s still somewhat out. I think, in some ways, they held back on this pairing because it’s understandably controversial. However, in that case, I wasn’t sure why they did it at all then. I mean, it comes out of nowhere, in the penultimate episode of the entire series, and we basically get maybe five minutes of total plot. By the end of The End, I remember thinking--in between the repetition of ‘wait, what just happened?’—‘so what exactly was the point of Danielle Rousseau then?’
Thus this article was born—me trying to get my head around the whole last-minute Benielle thing and trying to make some sense of it. I’ll come right out at the outset and say that I shipped this pair hard (and I was never a shipper with this show), in large part because I thought the storyline had some serious dramatic potential and opportunity for a big payoff at the end. Did we get that? I’m not sure. But, by reading the five-minute scene between them with close attention to subtext, we get a lot more than initially meets the eye. In sum, I think they brought her back because she ultimately is the soulmate that Ben needs to eventually move on, and after the jump I’ll lay out why (and how the show has explicitly and convincingly shown this), and furthermore, why it matters in the big picture of the series.
(Before I get going, I should note that I write LONG posts. This is the radio edit of the original extended dance remix of this theory, which went to some 19 pages. I’ll spare you the full version here, but it’s still going to be long. I’m a retired academic; this is what I do. To quote Aqua Teen Hunger Force: “This could take a while. You might want to grab a snack.”)
With that in mind…let’s see if we can figure out what’s going on here.
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The first question is, why don’t they just tell us what happened? Why do we have to read between the lines?
The easiest (and most likely correct answer) is that they probably didn’t have time to do more than they did. We had to address crucial issues like Zoe and the Temple throughout the season, after all, and then during the finale we had to see Sun and Jin and Desmond and Penny (all of whom I like, by the way) each reunite for the 95th time, so we couldn’t spare 30 seconds to get a straightforward epilogue on whether or not there was a next time for less onions [sarcasm intended].
But there’s another answer, and while perhaps not intentional, it makes the vagueness of the story a bit more profound. If we’re operating under my previously-posted rules of the alt, then everything happening there is layered with subtext and hidden meanings that need to be unpacked to be appreciated, and that the entire story is not immediately apparent from first glance.
It makes a lot of sense that the story of a relationship that was formed and exists exclusively in the alt would be told in a symbolic way.
FIRST COMES DANIELLE WITH THE BABY CARRIAGE…THEN COMES LOVE
Just as everything in Ben’s alt appears to be the inverse of his life, his soulmate relationship is formed in reverse as well. Usually the child results from the relationship, but here, the relationship results from the child. For a show that always emphasized parents and parenting, there’s something poetic about a soulmate relationship being formed precisely around mutual love for a child.
Alex was the love of both Ben’s and Danielle’s lives. Danielle’s separation from Alex is so profound that it drives her to madness. Ben’s love for Alex is immediate; in the midst of an armed standoff with Danielle, he actually takes time to comfort the distressed infant, his voice seamlessly shifting from threatening to cooing and back. His house on the Island is a shrine to that child, the walls peppered with large portraits of her at various stages in her life.
Ben’s love for Alex is so powerful that it ultimately drives him towards the light. Alex herself is an inversion of a classic conceit in Western literature, assuming the role of spiritual guide and mentor to her father. Whereas this character is usually an older male (think Virgil in The Inferno or Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings) mentoring a younger male, here the young girl guides the older male. During her brief life, she is the one person this twisted man ever truly loved, and after her death, she continues to guide him on an erratic but steady path to redemption. Alex even continues her guidance after his death when they reunite in the alt. She is the one who introduces him to her mother; she is the one who suggests the invitation to the meal where his soulmate connection will be forged. In sum, Alex inspires Ben to do what he needs to do to eventually get his black, miserable soul to commune with the divine.
THE 400-YEAR-OLD VIRGIN?
But it’s not enough for the soulmates to share a deep emotional bond. Under my alt assumptions, that bond has to manifest in some kind of erotic physical expression. And for Ben in particular, we can quickly appreciate that handholding just isn’t going to be enough. We all know about Ben’s need to be special, his guilt about Alex’s death, his daddy issues, his longing to win the Island’s favor. But we can also discern something else from his alt: guy is, um, needy. As in sexually frustrated. And it’s a big reason he can’t move on.
Think about his initial alt storyline, where he’s tempted to make the power play on the principal but ultimately chooses Alex’s well-being instead. He’s primarily working through his actions with respect to Alex’s death (and re-enacting his power play on Widmore as well), but the situation here is revealing. What did the principal do? He’s having an extramarital sexual relationship with the school nurse (evocative of Widmore’s downfall via the off-island affair with Penny’s mother). While schools certainly aren’t immune to sexual misconduct, it’s not terribly common. There’s a lot of other things that the imaginary principal could be up to. We can’t lay the subject of the scandal entirely at Ben’s feet, since it’s Alex who divulges it to him in confidence (and as she was on-Island, she’s real here, so she’s not a puppet of Ben’s imagination).
What we can smirk at, however, is the way that he thoroughly reads through the emails—“pretty lascivious stuff”-- that prove the affair. Given that the affair involves a nurse, for crying out loud, this is a stock pornography scenario. (Interestingly, the same episode shows Island-time Ben finding Sawyer’s reading-material stash and pointedly holding up a porn magazine.) He’s prudishly revolted, and yet, bless his heart, he just can’t help himself.
It’s not surprising that sexual frustration makes up a big piece of Ben’s psychology. He was told from childhood that he killed his mother, and then saw firsthand (from the socially-significant age of 13, the traditional age of sexual maturity) that indeed, pregnancy killed women. Sex led directly to death. So it’s not stunning that he learned from an early age to stuff that genie back down into the bottle. And when he finally dared to let it escape (significantly, he was middle-aged, the time when fertility begins to simmer down a bit), he’s utterly unable to perform; his courtship of Juliet is pretty horrifying, marked by jealously, control, confinement and death, and needless to say it went nowhere.
THERE’S A MARVIN GAYE SONG IN HERE SOMEWHERE
Danielle Rousseau is just as lonely as Ben is, and in a specifically sexual way to boot. Others have noted the phallic copper lobster mold that appears on her wall right next to Ben; she serves him ‘coq au vin,’ a regular meal in her house; go run ‘coq’ through Babelfish to see what it means in English. The seemingly-polite dialogue between the two—again, bearing in mind that this is all a function of their subconscious minds—quickly reveals a sexually-charged subtext:
DANIELLE: It’s so nice to cook for somebody other than Alex. (“I haven’t had a man—like, say, you-- in this house in a looooooooong time.”)
BEN: If you don’t mind my asking, where is her father? (“So, you’re saying you’re available?”)
Bit by bit it starts to add up. I won’t go into more detail here—this isn’t that kind of site, after all—but suffice to say that Ben and Danielle each easily satisfy the other’s requirements for the physical-expression aspect of soulmatehood.
SO WE’RE LONELY, AND WE BOTH LIKE ALEX, SO…DONE?
Not quite. The physical and emotional elements have to intersect somehow. They both like Alex, but it’s a bit essential that they have to like each other (on that emotional level) as well.
The fact is, Ben and Danielle have always been pretty well-matched. They’re both ruthless, cunning, willing to kill to achieve their aims, intelligent. And yet they also share a deep longing for the home and family neither of them had; I’m struck by how their paths cross in the alt in part because they have both placed themselves squarely in suburbia.
The physical/emotional intersection for these two occurs almost immediately. In their initial meeting, Ben and Danielle clasp hands. It’s telling that not long after he begins to awaken during a beating by Desmond, he runs into three characters from his lifetime: Locke, Alex, and finally Danielle. Only when he meets Danielle, and joins hands with her, does he express that sense of deja-vu that other waking characters have shown: the gaze that says “I know you from somewhere.” Neither Locke nor Alex trigger this reaction in him. Although the camera is trained on Alex, Ben is visible in the foreground; his gaze is fixed on Danielle. Then you can see his shoulder move, a few beats in time after the handshake ended; this is when he finally lets go and drops his arm. He shook Danielle’s hand and then held it. We don’t see Danielle, because she’s still in the dream state, but Ben’s blurry inclusion in the shot suggests that he’s slowly coming-to, and this awakening is furthered along by physical contact with Danielle.
The intersection happens a second time at the dinner table. We return to the infamous ‘coq au vin,’ a chicken dish simmered in red wine, a component of the dish that is fraught with both sacred and profane symbolism. Red liquids evoke female sexuality, symbolizing the power of a woman’s fertility. This is sexuality as elevated stuff, as the source of life, as the means of creation, spiritual as well as literal. Danielle is specifically French, and Ben has styled himself specifically as a doctor of European history, so a Eurocentric read of this scene is appropriate (compared with, say, Sayid, who doesn’t come from, and doesn’t assume, a Eurocentric worldview).
The European literary tradition (particularly in Renaissance literature) often features a male protagonist seeking spiritual, erotic union with a specific female. This union opens a window by which the male can catch a glimpse of heaven and know redemption and salvation. (The Renaissance euphemism for orgasm, ‘little death,’ refers to the connection between sexual ecstasy and salvation; to be reborn, first you have to ‘die.’) Red liquids (wines in particular) also carry a religious association: the Blood of Christ, which is consumed as a means to…yep, communion with the divine. So Alex has invited her father to this particular meal, where her mother proceeds to serve him a dish infused with a primary ingredient that symbolizes the unity of the sexual and the spiritual solely found in the soulmate relationship.
The third intersection (three times is the charm, after all, and three indicates the divine) happens after Danielle bestows upon him the title that only she, as surviving parent, can give: successor father. This title accomplishes the dual task of 1) finally granting Ben permission to claim Alex as his daughter and 2) creating a specific-- and very intimate-- bond between Ben and Danielle. Ben then reacts to her declaration with subtle, but joyful tears. Tears are how a character’s awakening manifests in the alt; significantly, while his awakening is accompanied by memories of Alex, Danielle’s words are the catalyst.
Still being in a dream state, Danielle doesn’t realize the full implication of Ben’s tears. What she does know is that this man has shown her just how much he loves her child—which is as much as she does—and now she’s grinning like an idiot because she is utterly in love with him. For the first time, they’re framed together in the same shot. Then she touches him a second time by placing her hand on his arm (his injured arm-- her affection will be the cure for what ails him). The love for her child that he manifests elevates him from mate to soulmate; the gift of fatherhood she gives him likewise elevates her in his eyes, and you can see that in the gaze that he fixes her with at the very end of this sequence.
The effect isn’t immediate; the series finale opens with a shot of Dr. Linus the next day making a cup of tea. He’s still wearing the sling; he’s still stuck in alt-mode. (Come on, man!) But something happens during that day that transforms him from the awkward would-be academic to the elegant and serene creature we see seated outside the church at the end. It’s not clear what that is. Was it getting his daughter back? Was it being summoned to the church for the Move On? Was it the magical musical stylings of Faraday and Driveshaft? Was it remembering his years as Island advisor? Was Ben this guy by his death? Perhaps, but then it’s odd that he would have assumed the awkward persona he has in the alt. Without venturing into fanfic, I would suggest that the one thing that’s really different here (the variable, as it were) is Danielle, and that his final-scene persona is the result of some new connection with her forged during that pivotal day. Put it this way: that guy outside the church is not somebody struggling with sexual frustration. “Helloooooo, Hugo!... I don’t think I’m coming in!”
YEAH, WELL, WHEN SHE WAKES UP, BEN’S MAKING A BEELINE FOR THE TREELINE!
Actually, no, he’s not. The characters’ dark joint history was the biggest issue for me (and is understandably a dealbreaker for many people), and I was pretty surprised the writers just left this all hanging unresolved. But I think there’s some compelling evidence that it was, in fact, dealt with, and furthermore—extraordinarily--all is forgiven.
Significantly, the last act in life between Ben and Danielle signaled the beginning of reconciliation (mind, an uneasy one). Alex resists Ben’s request to flee to the Temple for her own safety; despite being at odds with Ben herself, Danielle seconds his plan. Ben describes the Temple as a sanctuary, one that is “for us (the Others)…not for them (the Oceanic survivors)”; by sending Danielle there with Alex, he is implicitly including her as one of “us.” The freighter folk are dangerous, Ben says, “but your mother will protect you.” He says this primarily to reassure Alex; however, this is also a hell of a compliment to Danielle, and Danielle reacts with surprise. As she leaves, Danielle keeps her quizzing gaze on Ben the whole way out the door. So when she died, Danielle’s last interaction with Ben was marked by 1) his concern for Alex and 2) his confidence in Danielle, priming her for an eventual reconciliation.
Alt-Ben knows that he has something to work out with respect to Danielle and Alex. Napoleon references abound, both in his lesson plans and in his conversations with Alex, indicating not only issues with islands, exile and power, but also a lingering sense that he needs to examine his own ‘French history.’
For her part, alt-Alex isn’t angry at him. In fact, she wants whatever time with him she can get, subject to the boundaries that he has imposed. She’s in the History Club he sponsors, and when he doesn’t show for the meeting, she seeks him out that evening at home, and then begs him to meet her before school (earlier than he would normally see her), which he agrees to do. The interactions between these two are actually quite touching; they’re trying as hard they can under the circumstances to be together again.
Danielle is likewise operating on two levels, and when her daughter comes under the tutelage of Benjamin Linus, I guarantee that Danielle subconsciously knew exactly who he was. But by making himself Alex’s teacher in the alt, Ben demonstrates the following: 1) he wants a relationship with Alex where he can help guide and shape and nurture her, yet 2) he understands and accepts that he is, in fact, not her father, and by casting himself as teacher, he announces that he is relinquishing any parental claim to her.
In doing so, Ben has convinced Danielle of his good faith. Alex also clearly feels affection and longing for him. And as Alex is clearly paramount in her mind, Danielle is going to do what makes Alex happy.
With this in mind, it’s a fair interpretation to see that when Danielle smiles, practically executes a Dukes of Hazzard-style butt-slide across the hood of the car, and clasps Ben’s hand, she’s manifesting her forgiveness. (And an extraordinary act it is, too; we learn a lot about Danielle’s strength of character here.) Ben is tentative, initially deferring the invitation, but she’s not having it. “We insist! Even if we have to kidnap you.” While this line is obviously a nod to sweet, delicious irony and LOLs, I think it’s also her subconscious acknowledgment of the white elephant in the parking lot, a bleed-through of lifetime events akin to Jack’s persistent neck wound.
This forgiveness manifests again at the end of their onscreen interaction. During the kitchen sequence, they’re standing on opposite sides of the island. Their Island history stands as a, yes, physical and emotional barrier between them. Now, however, his clear love for her child motivates her to walk around the island so that now they’re on the same side, literally putting the Island behind them.
So it’s okay if she wakes up; she’s over what he did to her. (Is she ever.)
BUT WAIT A MINUTE. DIDN’T THIS KID ALREADY HAVE A FATHER?
Oh yeah, poor Robert, right? “He died when Alex was two.” This is all she says, and she clearly doesn’t want to talk about it, but given what we know about the alt, these six words give us a lot of information.
Robert was on the island. Ergo, the real Robert showed up in the alt. According to Danielle, he and Danielle and Alex found each other and made a go for it as a family. But it didn’t take. Robert ‘dies’ when Alex is only two. I think this suggests that Robert somehow woke up and moved on—without Danielle and Alex. And Danielle is subconsciously aware of this and is furious. For whatever reason, Robert didn’t feel the need to wait for his daughter.
Contrast that with Ben, who has seemingly structured his entire alt to nurture Alex (within appropriate boundaries). In fact, Danielle makes this specific comparison, holding up Ben as the example of what a father should be: “The interest you’ve taken in her? All the help you’ve given? You’re the closest thing to a father she’s ever had.” The unspoken end of that declaration is “more so than her own actual father.”
AND WHAT ABOUT ANNIE?
Without more information, we can only assume that she left the Island during the evacuation of DHARMA families in 1977. As she was still only a kid then, it’s unlikely that she and Ben were ever romantically involved, and furthermore, under my rules of the alt, she’s a kid in the alt too, so…yeah. Ew.
AND WE’RE SURE DANIELLE WASN’T JUST A HALLUCINATION?
Hey, it’s possible. Ben might have just been fantasizing that his daughter’s mother wanted to date him. But given how much growth this guy underwent this past season, to have this whole story just be a head game seems a bit harsh. It’s an alternative, but a cruel one. Of course, if you hate Ben, you can always assume this is what happened. But given that other non-815ers in the alt are real, why wouldn’t Rousseau be real as well?
FAIR ENOUGH. AND WE SHOULD CARE WHY?
Did we watch this show for six seasons so that we could learn that the sociopath leader of the Others finally got some action? Was this just an attempt to pair everybody off?
It was, but I think that was the point. Fact is, there’s somebody for everybody—even %$#@ing Benjamin Linus! The best illustration of a theme is often the most extreme example, and here they showed a series villain finding love. You have to forge that ultimate, unique bond with another, and your soul will be parked in limbo until you do. In short, this connection is the most important thing you will do with your life. Your communion with the divine absolutely depends on it.
This storyline is just another underscoring of that theme, but told in a different, symbolic, less-obvious way, absolutely befitting the relationship at the heart of it, the nature of the alt realm, and the series itself.
