Wheatley

"Most test subjects do experience some cognitive deterioration after a few months in suspension. Now you've been under for... quite a lot longer, and it's not out of the question that you might have a very minor case of serious brain damage."

- Wheatley

Wheatley, referred to as an Intelligence Dampening Sphere by GLaDOS, is a loose Personality Construct and a main character in the single player campaign of Portal 2. He was one of the many cores seen awakening at the end of Portal.

Of masculine programming and in possession of an English West country accent, he is Chell's sidekick and guide during the first half of the game, but eventually becomes the game's main antagonist.

Background
According to GLaDOS, Wheatley was originally designed by Aperture scientists as an "intelligence dampening sphere". He was intended to render her less dangerous by constantly suggesting idiotic ideas, therefore hampering her decision-making process. Wheatley says that, at one time, he almost got a job in manufacturing, but the foreman instead chose an exact duplicate of himself. In cut dialogue found in the game files, Wheatley also claims he was the assistant to the person in charge of the neurotoxin release button, and suggests he once accidentally pressed said button. Instead, Wheatley received what he considered the "least desirable job available": attending to the humans in the Relaxation Center.

Portal 2


Many years after Portal, Wheatley awakens Chell from stasis in the Relaxation Center, as he has become concerned of the deteriorating state of the facility. Although he is unaware of Chell's previous exploits and chose her at random, he suggests that they help one another escape.

The duo then takes a journey throughout the defunct and heavily-damaged facilities while Wheatley babbles incessantly. 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. Eventually, 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. Wheatley warns Chell that only the switch to power the escape pod should be flipped, so she leaves him to find the right one. Almost immediately, 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 rightly fears her reaction to awakening. As the duo approaches, she rises and immediately recognizes Chell. After a short monologue, GLaDOS sends Chell back to the Test Chambers to resume her tests. GLaDOS crushes Wheatley with a robotic arm, although it is soon revealed that he survived.

During Chell's tests, he is seen removing panels to observe from within the walls. Eventually, he helps Chell escape into the back rooms of the facility. After some running, he and Chell sabotage the turret production line and neurotoxin filter. Having shut down GLaDOS' two main weapons, they 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, attaching GLaDOS' brain to a potato battery as revenge for insulting him.

Wheatley becomes insane with power almost immediately. GLaDOS goads him, taking advantage of his insecurities by pointing out that Chell did all the work in engineering their escape. In a fit of anger and paranoia, he suddenly changes his mind about sending Chell to her freedom, accusing her of ordering him around and taking advantage of his efforts. As he thrashes about in rage, he bangs into the elevator several times and accidentally sends GLaDOS and Chell plunging into the forgotten bowels of the facility. After 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 due to 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), destroying it. But Chell is not without other options: 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. Despite his general indecisiveness, he shows initiative in seeking out Chell to act on his escape plans. 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. However, his apparent friendliness is at least partially a ruse from the beginning. A few stray comments early on reveal that his true attitude toward humans is mildly contemptuous, and at the end of the game, he reveals that he fully expected Chell to be killed all along, as several previous human test subjects with whom he tried to escape had been.

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 he 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. He proves incapable of solving easily foreseeable problems that come up during his escape with Chell, forcing her to work out the details. At one point, he unsuccessfully attempts to evade GLaDOS' detection simply by speaking with a poorly faked American accent, which he claims (based on no evidence whatsoever) lies outside her hearing range.

Once he takes over the Enrichment Center, his stupidity becomes more apparent. He crudely attaches turrets to weighted cubes to create self-guided cubes as an ill-conceived replacement for human test subjects, then tries to correct their deficiencies by shouting at them; he ignores signs of an imminent reactor core meltdown, shutting the alarms off rather than addressing the problem; he can only manage to build absurdly simple test chambers, such as a button which drops a cube onto another button when pressed, except when he steals ideas previously implemented by GLaDOS; and when he attempts to imitate GLaDOS' methods of antagonizing her test subjects, 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 foil her by not being smart enough to spot the bait; when she presents him with a simple logical paradox which she says will disable any AI and even affects the "Frankenturrets," he survives by failing to even notice the contradiction. He seems profoundly insecure about his intellect, reacting with fury whenever GLaDOS refers to him as a moron.

In contrast to his general lack of intelligence, however, Wheatley occasionally manages to come up with genuinely clever ideas. After GLaDOS puts Chell back into testing, he successfully rescues her. He correctly identified the defenses that would need to be shut down before confronting GLaDOS, although he has no plan for actually doing so. Perhaps most impressively, he manages to trick both Chell and GLaDOS by rigging an Aerial Faith Plate to send them flying in the wrong direction so that they land in a death trap. Finally, when Chell reaches his lair, he has the room set up to counter every trick Chell used to defeat GLaDOS before, even rigging the stalemate button to explode when she reaches it.

After seizing control of the facility, Wheatley is overwhelmed by the power and becomes corrupt almost immediately. He is clearly far weaker-willed than GLaDOS, quickly becoming a slave to "the itch" (a euphoric response to test chamber completion hard-wired into GLaDOS' "body" to encourage testing). He 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, especially as Chell draws closer to his "lair."

Once attached to GLaDOS' mainframe, Wheatley begins to display an increasing degree of paranoia and resentment toward Chell. Goaded by GLaDOS, he betrays Chell almost immediately after their victory, claiming that he grew tired of doing all the work while she ordered him around (in fact, the situation was almost exactly the opposite). During the final boss fight, he complains that Chell maliciously chose not to catch him when he detached himself and deliberately deceived him by not telling him she was the one who defeated GLaDOS; furthermore, he says, Chell never wanted to share in his success. He also suggests that Chell and GLaDOS were allied against him from the beginning.

After his defeat and disconnection from GLaDOS' "body," however, he expresses remorse for his actions and says he wishes he could apologize to Chell.

Behind the scenes

 * In early stages of Portal 2 ' s production, Wheatley was originally to be named "Pendleton".
 * 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.
 * Wheatley bears a slight resemblance with the Cake Core from Portal, with a blue eye and three dots, though Wheatley has the dots only on his right side.
 * 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. This dialogue is brought up in the single player commentary, as it was a suggested part of the story that as cut, but Wheatley's comments where left in (possibly to force a reaction out of Chell rather then indicate that this is actually what happened).
 * 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 an English accent, would provide the final voice. (Possibly even hinting to Wheatley's downfall)
 * Wheatley's placeholder texture was a plain white plating with few details.
 * Valve originally intended for Wheatley to have Richard Ayoade voicing him, but found Stephen Merchant more fitting for the character, and asked if he was interested first.
 * Stephen Merchant stated in a phone interview that he would be interested in reprising the role of Wheatley again if Valve asked him in the future.
 * The subtitle and filename for the Developer commentary discussing Wheatley's takeover of GLaDOS' body refers to him as "WheatDOS".
 * In unused final boss battle dialogue, it shows that Wheatley is trying to fix the facility.

List of appearances

 * Portal ARG
 * Portal 2
 * The Final Hours of Portal 2