Kleiner's Lab



Kleiner's Lab was a location in City 17 seen during the chapters "A Red Letter Day" and Entanglement in Half-Life 2. It was a small laboratory hidden in a decrepit warehouse, and was home to Doctor Isaac Kleiner for some time until the uprising in and eventual destruction of the city. The lab also housed Kleiner's teleport, which he had been developing as an alternative and safer route to Black Mesa East.

Half-Life 2
After a number of setbacks, Dr. Kleiner and Alyx Vance finally completed the teleport shortly before Gordon Freeman arrived in the city. This was clearly no coincidence, the G-Man having planned it this way. Alyx and Gordon were to travel through the newly completed teleport to Black Mesa East. Alyx did so, and Gordon was about to do the same when Lamarr inadvertently damaged the teleport, causing it to malfunction. Gordon ended up being teleported to and fro between several random locations such as the Wasteland, a lake where an Ichthyosaur is swimming, Black Mesa East and even Breen's office in the Citadel. With the teleport out of order, Gordon journeyed to Black Mesa East by more conventional means.

The lab is seen once again much later in the game in chapter 9a, Entanglement, when Alyx and Gordon teleport out of Nova Prospekt seconds before its teleport explodes, and arrive at Kleiner's Lab a full week later to find City 17 has been engulfed by a full-scale conflict. The lab, albeit it apparently remains undiscovered by the Combine, has suffered some battle damage and seems to be serving as an impromptu base of operations. There are also pieces of destroyed Manhacks on the table next to the mini-teleporter. As long with City 17, the lab was destroyed when the citadel destruction.

As in Black Mesa East later in the game, some plot informations and Easter Eggs can be found in the lab. Some post-its show "find more watermelon for Lamarr", "Ask Eli - RE: manifold parameters" or "Massless field flux MUST self-limit!!!". A cork board hanged on the door to the teleport also shows some newspaper clips, such as one from The New York Times titled "End is Near" and another showing a picture of Eli and Azian Vance. There are also things like a possible receipt for an "Indescribable Salad", a blueprint for the teleport, a portrait of Kleiner made by Alyx when she was a child, and the cover of the magazine Popular Scientist, where Kleiner can be seen at a younger age, with brown hair and sideburns.

Behind the scenes

 * The earliest known scripted version of the Kleiner's lab presented the current lab, but longer, with another bigger room containing the original teleport. The room was accessible through a door located behind the teleport in the final version. The player was to reach the lab from the sewers, starting in the industrial part of City 17, called the Combine Factories. That bigger room was partially recycled in Half-Life 2: Deathmatch, in the map "dm_steamlab".
 * Strangely enough, the lab is extremely close to the City 17 Trainstation introduced in the first chapter of Half-Life 2. Obvious security precautions would have rather placed the lab very far from a very crowed and security-enforced place like a train station. An explanation for this choice is that several levels originally set between the train station and the lab were cut from the final version, such as the Manhack Arcade and the Combine Factories. Therefore the original lab was originally much farther to the train station than it is now.

Trivia

 * A working mini-teleport situated near the entrance can be operated by the player, capable of teleporting a cactus (or similarly-sized objects) in between two teleportation pads. In The Orange Box for the Xbox 360, an achievement can be unlocked by breaking it.
 * A video for E3 2003 depicts an early version of the introductory scene with longer dialog, no Barney and ending with City Scanners discovering the lab and a Strider blowing up the wall.