Wheatley

"He's not just a regular moron. He's the product of the greatest minds of a generation working together with the express purpose of building the dumbest moron who ever lived."

- GLaDOS

Wheatley, or referred to as an Intelligence Dampening Sphere by GLaDOS, is a loose Personality Core in Portal 2. He was one of the many cores seen awakening at the end of Portal. Of masculine programming and an English West country accent, he was Chell's sidekick and guide during the first half of the game. In a plot twist, he eventually becomes the game's main antagonist.

Background
Wheatley was originally created as a stupidity core, made to hamper GLaDOS' decision making process, as one of the Aperture employees many attempts to make her behave. At one point, Wheatley almost got a job at manufacturing, but the foreman instead decided an exact duplicate of himself, and gave Wheatley what he considered the worst possible job, to attend to the humans in the Relaxation Center.

Portal 2


Several years after Portal, Wheatley awakens Chell from stasis in the Relaxation Center, as he has become concerned of the detoriating state of the facility. He then promises to help Chell escape, in order to escape himself.

The duo then takes on a journey throughout the defunct and heavily damaged facilities, while Wheatley babbles incessantly. However he proves to be a very useful asset, as he can be plugged into various ports found throughout the labs, allowing him to access the mainframe and bypass obstacles. At some point on their journey they reach a massive cylindrical room populated with breaker switches, and filled with debris often blocking their path, containing what appears to be an escape pod to the outside. There Wheatley warns Chell that only the switch to power the escape pod should be flipped, so she leaves her Core friend to find the right one. Almost instantly, the neglected equipment malfunctions, and the floor below them reveals itself as an elevator that begins ascending, flipping all the switches on the periphery in the process. Acutely aware of the damage the malfunctioning has done, Wheatley scrambles to find an abort password while turning his face plates on themselves and moving the diaphragm of his unique eye, forgoing a practical algorithm for a sequential brute-force strategy: "AAAAAA? No, that's not it. AAAAAC? Wait, did I do B? Have you got a pen? Start writing these down!".



The climb halts as the platform comes flush with a door leading to an overgrown courtyard now housing the soulless shell of GLaDOS. Having failed to find the abort password, Wheatley fears to be punished by her. As the duo approaches, she awakens, and immediately recognizes Chell. After a short monologue, GLaDOS sends Chell back to the Test Chambers to resume her tests. GLaDOS crushes Wheatley (although he survives) with a robotic arm while forcing Chell to resume her tests.

Despite being killed, he is reactivated, and is seen removing panels to have a glimpes at Chell. Eventually, he reveals himself to GLaDOS, and helps Chell escape into the back rooms of the facility. Eventually, after some running, he and Chell sabotage the turret production line and neurotoxin filter. Knowing that they have shut down GLaDOS' two main weapons, Wheatley and Chell head to GLaDOS' lair to shut her down and replace her mind with Wheatley. Once Wheatley gets attached to GLaDOS' body, he gains control of the entire facility and calls an elevator to the surface for Chell, and attaches GLaDOS' brain to a potato battery as revenge for insulting him. But right before sending Chell to her freedom, he quickly becomes corrupted and insane with power, and in a fit of rage sends GLaDOS and Chell down into the forgotten bowels of the facility. After ensuring that the two are gone, he rebuilds the entire facility in his own image, renaming it Wheatley Laboratories, combining turrets with cubes, and rebuilding test chambers.

When GLaDOS and Chell return, the resulting lab is in chaos, and in danger of a nuclear meltdown from Wheatley's incompetence. Despite this, Chell manages to access the core room housing Wheatley. After a brief fight, Chell corrupts Wheatley with cores provided by GLaDOS, causing a core transfer. However, Wheatley had booby-trapped the core transfer stalemate button (used when the substitute core and the corrupt core have a conflict over the transfer) and destroyed it. Chell is not without other options though: a hole in the ceiling reveals the night sky outside, and she shoots a portal at the Moon. Once the portal opens up on the moon, a powerful vacuum is created, and Chell and Wheatley are sucked out into space through the other portal, with Chell desperately clinging to Wheatley, both of them being held on by a single wire. GLaDOS quickly uses a grabbing arm to snag Chell's hand, pulling her back to safety and sending Wheatley flying into the depths of space.

In a post-credits scene, he is shown floating aimlessly in space (along with the Space Core, who's orbiting around Wheatley), remarking on all the terrible things that he had done, and wishing he could "say sorry".

Personality
Wheatley is talkative and friendly at first, although his main motivation in befriending Chell seems to be obtaining her help in escaping. He frequently second guesses his own decisions, and is not especially assertive, always trying to persuade Chell to go along with his plans rather than demanding that she do anything. He will occasionally ask Chell to look away while he does something difficult, such as hacking. He is patient, and when his actions lead to unpleasant consequences he is quick to take responsibility and apologize - although usually as a lead-in to asking Chell to go along with another of his plans.

GLaDOS claims that Wheatley was designed as an "intelligence dampener" whose function was to render her less dangerous by generating an endless stream of stupid ideas to distract her. Early on, it quickly becomes obvious that Wheatley tries to act smarter than he really is. His attempts at "hacking" are generally inept or misleading; when sabotaging turret production, for example, he asks Chell to look away so he can "hack" the door by breaking the glass. While the general outline of the plan to defeat GLaDOS was Wheatley's, he generally proved useless at solving tricky problems that came up, with Chell constantly having to step in. Once he takes over the Enrichment Center, his stupidity becomes more apparent: he attaches turrets to weighted cubes to create self-guided cubes as an ill-devised replacement for actual test subjects, then tries to correct their deficiencies by shouting at them; he ignores alarms warning of an imminent reactor core meltdown, shutting the alarms off rather than addressing the actual problem; he can only manage to build absurdly simple test chambers, which he gets around by stealing and crudely merging those built by GLaDOS; and when he attempts to imitate GLaDOS' style of motivation, the best insult he can come up with is "fatty fatty no-parents."

GLaDOS generally finds it easy to goad and manipulate him - except when he manages to actually foil her by being too dumb to notice the bait. However, on rare occasions he manages to do display some truly remarkably cunning, such as booby-trapping the core transfer override button, or rigging an Aerial Faith Plate to unexpectedly send Chell flying in the wrong direction. He seems profoundly insecure about his intelligence, reacting with rage whenever GLaDOS refers to him as the "moron core." Although not speculated, his short attention span and/or stupidity saved him from being destroyed by GLaDOS' paradox at the beginning of Chapter 8.

After seizing control of the facility, Wheatley is overwhelmed by the power and becomes corrupt almost immediately. He betrays Chell, claiming that he grew tired of doing all the work while she ordered him around (in fact, the situation was almost exactly the opposite). This was encouraged by GLaDOS, who suggested that Chell had made all the effort. He is clearly far weaker-willed than GLaDOS, quickly becoming a slave to "the itch." He also seems to aspire to be the perfect 'villain', making terrible jokes about his supposed 'surprise' for Chell and GLaDOS, and tries to one-up GLaDOS as a final boss by modifying his control room. Even with his newfound power, he still shows signs of his old cowardice and general lack of intelligence, especially as Chell draws closer to his 'lair'. Floating in space after his defeat, he expresses remorse for his actions and says he wishes he could apologize to Chell.

Behind the scenes

 * Wheatley was first introduced during the Portal ARG, in one of the ASCII art images given by the BBS, that later appeared to be a screenshot of him being held by Chell. He was first described in the April 2010 issue of Game Informer, then seen animated for the first time in a gameplay video titled "Meet Wheatley" showcased by Valve during E3 2010.


 * Video game-wise, Wheatley appears to be an upgraded version of GLaDOS's Intelligence Core (the one telling the cake recipe), with a blue "eye" and three dots, though Wheatley has dots only on his right side. From early screenshots and the Portal 2 E3 teaser trailer, the model also appears to have been greatly improved and more detailed, with a wider range of emotions.


 * Wheatley's Cockney accent heard in the "Meet Wheatley" video shown at E3 2010 uses a placeholder voice provided by Valve animator Richard Lord. Due to very positive feedback, Valve considered at some point making the voice official. Later Lord himself emphasized that his voice was temporary, saying that "theres no way you will be dissapointed with the final voice - im over teh moon with who it might be." [sic], until it was announced that Stephen Merchant, who also has a British accent, would provide the final voice.


 * Valve originally intended for Wheatley to have Richard Ayoade voicing him, but found Stephen Merchant more fitting in the voice, and asked if he was interested first.


 * Wheatley's original model was a plain white core with few details.


 * The reasons behind the deaths of the other test subjects in stasis is unclear. While originally it was believed it was all due to Wheatley's incompetence, he claims during the final boss fight that he'd previously tried to escape with several test subjects before Chell, all of whom died trying to reach the portal device.

List of appearances

 * Portal
 * Portal ARG
 * Portal 2