Wheatley (Portal)

Wheatley was the deuteragonist for the first half of the single-player campaign of Portal 2.

Wheatley, formerly an Intelligence Dampening Sphere attached onto GLaDOS, is a loose Personality Construct. 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 English West countryaccent, he is Chell's sidekick and guide during the first half of the game. He assumes control of the Enrichment Center during the game's second half and is immediately driven mad with power, then becoming Portal 2's main antagonist.

Overview
According to GLaDOS, Wheatley was originally designed by the Aperture technicians as an "Intelligence Dampening Sphere." His intended function was to render GLaDOS less dangerous, by generating a constant stream of stupid ideas, thereby distracting her and hampering her decision-making process in hopes of her not trying to kill them. At some point though he was separated from GLaDOS though and he was moved to different facilities to do different jobs. 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 the "smelly humans" in the Extended Relaxation Center.

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 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 dampening sphere" 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 accent, which he claims (on the basis of 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, he survives by failing to even notice the contradiction while even the "Frankenturrets" seize up at it. 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.

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 genuine 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.

Trivia

 * 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 was cut, but Wheatley's comments were left in. Whether the deaths of the previous test subjects actually happened, or whether the story was merely a fabrication by Wheatley intended to upset Chell, is unclear.


 * The Spanish line Wheatley says just before making the escape lift in The Escape go up translates to "You are using this translation software incorrectly. Please consult the manual." In the Spanish and German language versions of Portal 2, this line can be heard spoken in English.


 * After the Hard Light Surfaces course in the co-op campaign is completed, GLaDOS makes an indirect reference to him, referring to him as "an imbecile that I had to destroy."


 * Wheatley makes an appearance in LEGO Dimensions as an NPC. In the main story he helps Batman, Gandalf, and Wyldstyle escape GLaDOS' testing track and into the maintenance area. In the Portal 2level pack, he and Chell are teleported back into Aperture Science and he is fitted with anti-gravity. As they make their way thorough the test chambers they resolve their differences and escape the laboratory once and for all.


 * 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. He would eventually do so in the form of the "Ap-Sap," an item featured in the game Team Fortress 2.