Source: https://combineoverwiki.net/wiki/Wheatley
Archived: 2026-11-02 (the page's wikitext, through the wiki's API)
{{Article|p2}}
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{{Character Infobox
| name = Wheatley
| image = Wheatley model.jpg
| imagesize =
| homeworld = [[Earth]]
| birth =
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'''Wheatley''', once an '''Intelligence Dampening Sphere''' attached to [[GLaDOS]], is a loose [[Aperture Science Personality Construct|Personality Construct]] and was briefly the [[Wikipedia:Deuteragonist|deuteragonist]] in the single-player campaign of ''[[Portal 2]]''. He is one of the many cores seen awakening at the end of ''[[Portal]]'', although he had previously been awake before [[GLaDOS]]' takeover of the [[Aperture Science Enrichment Center]].
Speaking in a masculine voice with an [[Wikipedia:West Country dialect|English West Country]] accent, he is [[Chell]]'s sidekick and guide during the first half of the game.{{IA|20100505051703/http://gameinformer.com/mag/portal2.aspx|GameInformer's Portal 2 Hub|Game Informer (April 2010)}} He assumes control of the [[Aperture Science Enrichment Center|Enrichment Center]] during the game's second half and is immediately driven mad with power, becoming ''Portal 2''{{'}}s main antagonist.
== Overview ==
=== Background ===
According to [[GLaDOS]], Wheatley was originally designed by the [[Aperture Science|Aperture]] technicians as an "intelligence dampening sphere". His intended function was to render GLaDOS less dangerous by generating a constant stream of bad ideas, thereby distracting her and hampering her decision-making process. Wheatley states that at one time he almost got a job in the manufacturing department, but the foreman instead chose an "exact duplicate of himself" for the position. The only known duty that Wheatley has over the Enrichment Center is what he considered the "least desirable job available" — attending to those "smelly" humans in the [[Aperture Science Extended Relaxation Center|Extended Relaxation Center]].
=== Appearances ===
==== ''[[Portal 2]]'' ====
Many years after the events of ''[[Portal]]'', Wheatley finally decides to awaken [[Chell]] from stasis in the [[Aperture Science Extended Relaxation Center|Relaxation Center]], as he has become concerned of the slowly deteriorating reactor core. Unaware of Chell's history with GLaDOS, he chooses her because she is the last surviving test subject and suggests that they help one another escape.
[[File:Wheatley close-up.jpg|thumb|left|200px|Wheatley on his Management Rail in a broken entrance to Test Chamber 08.]]
The duo journey together through the defunct and heavily damaged facility as Wheatley babbles incessantly. Although Chell does most of the work and has to figure out how to bypass many obstacles on her own, Wheatley does prove to be a useful asset. He can be plugged into various [[Aperture Science Core Input Receptacle|Personality Core input port]]s, allowing him to access the mainframe and open doors and [[Aperture Science Panel|wall panels]].
After reuniting, he explains to Chell that the only known exit to the surface is through the Main Breaker Room within the [[Central AI Chamber]]. Although it is unclear what sort of experiences Wheatley has had with GLaDOS, he appears to be well aware of how dangerous and vindictive she is, and regards her with well-justified fear.
[[File:Wheatley cracking glados.jpg|Wheatley attempting to deactivate [[GLaDOS]] in the [[Central AI Chamber]].|thumb|200px]]
After getting across the remains of GLaDOS in the [[Central AI Chamber]] to find an escape pod, they eventually reach a massive cylindrical room underneath, populated with breaker switches and containing what appears to be an escape pod to the surface. Wheatley warns Chell that ''only'' the switch to power the escape pod should be flipped, so she searches for it. 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, before finally being brought in front of an awakening GLaDOS. Acutely aware of the damage that has been 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 [[Wikipedia:Brute-force search|brute-force]] strategy: "''A-A-A-A-A-umm.. A? Okay... A-A-A-A-A-C? Wait, did I do B? Do you have 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 dormant remains of GLaDOS. Having failed to find the abort password, Wheatley rightly fears her reaction. As the duo approaches, she rises and immediately recognizes Chell. After a short monologue, GLaDOS lifts up the duo with several robotic claws and crushes Wheatley. She then has Chell sent back into the [[Testing Track]]s through the [[Incinerator Room]]. Wheatley survives in an unexplained incident involving a bird, as he later attempts to tell Chell but is interrupted.
[[File:Wheatley escape rail.jpg|Wheatley guiding [[Chell]] through the facility for the sabotage plan.|thumb|200px]]
During Chell's tests, he can be seen lifting panels to observe her from outside the testing areas. Eventually, he helps Chell escape from the testing course. After some running, he unveils a plot to sabotage the [[Turret Manufacturing|turret production line]] and [[Neurotoxin Generator|neurotoxin filter]]s. Having shut down GLaDOS' two main weapons with Chell, they return to the [[Central AI Chamber]] to dismount her and replace her with Wheatley. Once he is attached to the body of the Central AI, he gains control of the entire facility and calls an elevator to the surface for Chell.
Gloating in triumph, Wheatley shows signs of going mad with power almost immediately. He humiliates GLaDOS by attaching her personality core to a potato battery and quickly changes his mind about giving Chell her freedom. GLaDOS eggs him on, exploiting his insecurities by revealing his origin as a profoundly stupid "intelligence dampener" and pointing out that Chell did all the work in engineering their escape. In a fit of anger and paranoia, he accuses Chell of ordering him around and taking advantage of his hard work. Thrashing about in rage, he punches the elevator several times and accidentally sends GLaDOS and Chell plunging into the forgotten bowels of the facility. After the two are gone, he begins rebuilding the entire facility in his own image, renaming it "Wheatley Laboratories", [[Frankenturret|combining turrets with cubes]] and plagiarizing GLaDOS' testing tracks as his own.
When GLaDOS and Chell return, the resulting lab is in chaos and the reactor core is 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 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."
==== ''[[Moondust]]'' ====
[[File:Wheatley moondust.jpg|Wheatley orbiting the Moon.|thumb|200px|right]]
In the ''Space Station Construction'' part of the techdemo ''Moondust'', Wheatley can be seen orbiting the Moon, facing the player.
== Personality ==
[[File:Wheatley in tubes.jpg|thumb|200px|left|Wheatley and Chell in the [[Aperture Science Pipe Network|Tube Network]]s.]]
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 own 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.
GLaDOS claims that Wheatley was designed as an "intelligence dampener" whose function was to render her less intelligent, and therefore less dangerous, by generating stupid ideas. 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 repeatedly 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 southern accent, which he claims (on the basis of no evidence whatsoever) lies outside her hearing range.
[[File:Wheatley after takeover.jpg|Wheatley in the Central Core body, after dismounting GLaDOS' personality core.|thumb|200px|right]]
Once he takes over the Enrichment Center, his stupidity becomes more apparent. He crudely attaches turrets to weighted cubes to create [[Frankenturret|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 "[[Frankenturret]]s," 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 [[Aperture Science Aerial Faith Plate|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.
It is unclear to what extent Wheatley's hostility after taking over Aperture can be attributed to the mainframe's programming rather than his own personality. He shows no signs of aggression or ill will before being attached to it, and after his defeat and disconnection from GLaDOS' "body" he expresses remorse for his actions and says he wishes he could apologize to "her" (presumably Chell). GLaDOS herself also becomes noticeably kinder while disconnected from it, although there are other possible explanations for her change in personality. However, there are hints early in the game that Wheatley's apparent friendliness is at least partially a ruse: a few stray comments during his travels with Chell reveal that his true attitude toward humans is mildly contemptuous. Furthermore, during the final boss fight (while still attached to the mainframe), he claims that he fully expected Chell to be killed in their escape attempt from the very beginning, as he says several previous human test subjects with whom he tried to escape have been.
==Related Achievements==
{|class=wikitable style="vertical-align:center;" width=50%
|-
!colspan="2" style="text-align:left"|''[[Portal 2 Achievements and Trophies|Portal 2]]''
|-
|rowspan=2 width=64px|[[File:BREAK OUT.jpg]]
!style="text-align:left"|SaBOTour (10G)
|-
| ''Make a break for it.'' |
|---|
| rowspan=2 width=64px |
| !style="text-align:left" |
| - |
| ''Press the button!'' |
| - |
| rowspan=2 width=64px |
| !style="text-align:left" |
| - |
| ''This is that part.'' |
| - |
| } |
== Behind the scenes ==
==Trivia==
==Gallery==
===''Portal 2''===
====Pre-release====
File:Wheatdos turrets.jpg|Concept art for WheatDOS defending himself with flame-throwing turrets during an early version of the final showdown.
File:Wheatley battle concept5.jpg|Ditto, without flames.
File:Wheatley battle concept3.png|Ditto.
File:Wheatley battle concept6.jpg|Ditto.
File:Wheatley battle concept7.jpg|Ditto, without turret.
File:Wheatley battle concept8.jpg|Ditto.
File:Wheatley battle concept9.jpg|Ditto.
File:Wheatley fight diagram.jpg|The first diagram created by Phil Co for the final battle with Wheatley.
File:Wheatley catwalk.jpg|Wheatley being held by Chell on a catwalk near a [[Aperture Science Pipe Network|Pipe Network]] pipe after [[Test Chamber 08]].
File:Wheatley held.jpg|Ditto, in an E3 2010 gameplay video, with an improved Wheatley model.
File:02303171.977.png|ASCII art image of Wheatley being held by Chell.
File:Wheatleyfull.jpg|Original image, featuring an early Wheatley model.
File:Wheatley floor Test Chamber 08.jpg|Wheatley lying on the floor of a ruined [[Test Chamber 08]].
File:Portal 2 beta ruined chamber 7.jpg|A ruined Test Chamber 07, with Wheatley attached on the upper right.
File:Wheatley hanging.jpg|Wheatley before disengaging himself.
File:Wheatley E3 2010.jpg|Wheatley plugged into a computer in the ''Portal 2'' E3 2010 teaser trailer.
File:Wheatley plugged.jpg|Ditto, in an E3 2010 gameplay video.
File:Wheatley close-up.jpg|A close-up of Wheatley.
File:Wheatley AAAA.jpg|Wheatley attempting to crack the password in an early [[Central AI Chamber]].
File:Sp wheatley chamber.jpg|Early prototype of the final battle with Wheatley.
File:Sp a4 finale4 01.jpg|Ditto
====Retail====
File:Wheatley model.jpg|Wheatley's model.
File:Wheatley intro crashing.jpg|Wheatley having crashed [[Chell]]'s [[Aperture Science Extended Relaxation Center|Relaxation Chamber]] into [[GLaDOS' testing track (Portal)|GLaDOS' Testing Track]]s.
File:Wheatley portalgun search.jpg|Wheatley looking for a [[Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device|Portal Gun]].
File:Wheatley opening panels.jpg|Opening a [[Aperture Science Panel|wall panel]] from a [[Aperture Science Core Input Receptacle|Core Input Receptacle]].
File:Glados awakens.jpg|Wheatley grabbed by GLaDOS, moments before being crushed.
File:Wheatley model damaged.jpg|Wheatley's model after being damaged by GLaDOS.
File:Wheatley escape help.jpg|Wheatley guiding Chell through a blackout of the [[Turret Manufacturing]] department.
File:Glados wheatley tubes.jpg|Wheatley rolling into the neurotoxin ventilation tubes.
File:Potatos wheatley.jpg|GLaDOS uploaded to a potato, as Wheatley controls the Central AI body.
File:Chell facing wheatley.jpg|Chell facing Wheatley's monitor screen.
File:Portal2 Wheatley Boss.png|Wheatley in the Central AI body.
File:Wheatley angry centralbody.jpg|Wheatley in his configuration of the [[Central AI Chamber]].
File:Wheatley finale lair.jpg|Ditto, swaying the body around.
File:Wheatley all cores.jpg|Wheatley with all three corrupt cores connected to him.
File:SpaceCore.jpg|First corrupt core plugged into Wheatley, the Space Core.
File:Rick.jpg|Second corrupt core put onto Wheatley, the Adventure Core; Rick.
File:FactCore.jpg|Final corrupt core attached, the Fact Core.
===Other===
File:Steamemoticon p2 wheatley.png|Steam emoticon.
File:Lego wheatley.jpg|Wheatley in the ''[[Lego Dimensions]]'' trailer.
File:Portal Tabletop Wheatley.jpg|''[[Portal: The Uncooperative Cake Acquisition Game]]'' Wheatley card.
File:ASCDT wheatley.jpg|''[[Aperture Science Collaborative Disposition Test]]'' Wheatley art.
File:Steam20 2018ChellWheatley.png|Steam 20th Anniversary artwork parodying the "[https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/this-is-so-sad-alexa-play-despacito This Is So Sad Alexa Play Despacito]" meme.
====Steam badges====
File:Steambadge p2 l1.png|''Level 1'': I'm A Potato!
File:Steambadge p2 l2.png|''Level 2'': Chamber Champion
File:Steambadge p2 l3.png|''Level 3'': Bloody Brilliant
File:Steambadge p2 l4.png|''Level 4'': Neurotox-ome
File:Steambadge p2 l5.png|''Level 5'': SPAAACE!
File:Steambadge p2 foil.png|''Foil'': Aerial Foil Core
==List of appearances==
===Main games===
*''[[Portal 2]]''
===Other===
*[[Portal ARG|''Portal'' ARG]] {{1st}}
*''[[The Final Hours of Portal 2]]''
*''[[Portal Pinball]]'' {{Nc}}
*''[[Portal: The Uncooperative Cake Acquisition Game]]'' {{Nc}}
*''[[Lego Dimensions]]'' {{Nc}}
*''[[Moondust]]'' {{Nc}}
==External links==
==References==
{{Quotecat|Wheatley}}
{{Imagecat|Wheatley images}}
{{Characters}}
{{Technology}}
[[Category:Allies]]
[[Category:Aperture Science Personality Constructs]]
[[Category:Aperture Science technology]]
[[Category:Bosses]]
[[Category:Enemies]]
[[Category:Males]]
[[Category:Portal 2]]
[[Category:Technology]]
[[Category:Testing supervisors]]