Notes on "The Ballad of Ben and Annie"

[stefanie_bean]

Annie only appears in "The Man Behind the Curtain" (3x20), the Ben-centered episode which goes into Ben's back-story, when he's brought to the Island as a child by his father Roger. We never find out in-show what happened to her.

General fanon maintains that Ben became obsessed with solving the Island pregnancy problem because his mother Emily died giving birth to him. I wanted to make Ben's motivations more personal and immediate.

"Ballad" was also a vehicle for putting down some thoughts about the 1950s Pacific atomic test programs, as well as speculation on my part how Dharma got all those bunkers and buildings. (Some of the sites like the Tempest Station were actually filmed at old World War II bunkers on Oahu.)

When I watched a host of youtube videos on the Pacific test programs, the barracks-like housing, the bunkers full of equipment, the radio towers: all strongly suggested that the Joint Task Force actually could have built a lot of what Dharma ended up using.

I took some artistic license and transposed some of the earlier Nevada tests (radiation experiments which exposed caged animals to the blasts; fake "villages" set up and then bombed to see what kind of damage would ensue) to the Island. I could be wrong, but I don't think that they did those kinds of survivability tests in the Pacific. It served as a good explanation for the creation of the Barracks, though.

Another bit of artistic license made the Joint Task Force build the Barracks, even though in "Follow the Leader" 1977-Eloise tells Jack & Kate that they were built by the Dharma Initiative. To me, the settlement looked way more like atomic-test-site buildings, or military housing. So I went with that.

* * * * *

I struggled with the ending. Ben needed a motivation to take infant Alex, one that went beyond losing Annie. He needed some brutal revelation that would hit him like a bomb; take him down to the nadir, where he was ready to do something absolutely crazy. In this case, it was blaming Charles Widmore and Richard Alpert for Annie's death, based on the chance speculations of a couple of the men of the Others. (In a way, they were kind of like speculating fans.)

Alex wasn't only a substitute for the baby he'd lost: she gave him something to live for.

* * * * *

I also wanted to tie this in with how Ben and the Others wound up living in the Barracks after they killed the Dharma Initiative people. They were doing fine in the woods, but Alex wouldn't live but a few days.

Ben would have had an urgent need to find a way to feed her. That would mean powdered infant formula or the home-made evaporated milk and corn syrup recipe commonly used in the 1930s-1950s. Nowhere but the Barracks would have them, including the bottles and a way to sterilize them.

A side note about how to keep infant Alex alive. The date of the Purge is disputed by LOST fans, with most leaning towards 1992 instead of 1987.

One reason I favor the early Purge date is because it just doesn't seem in Ben's young-adult flashbacks (in "Man Behind the Curtain") that he is living with and raising Alex for the first four years of her life in a house with Roger. (It's clear that he lives with Roger in the pre-Purge flashback.) To me, it made more sense that Ben participated in the Purge; went to live in the woods with the Others (which was his dream all along); kidnapped Alex and *then* returned to the Barracks to raise her.