Portal 2 - The Moron Theory

[Music] over the years i've tried a few times to write a video on portal 2. i've searched the game far and wide for that seed the core idea that i could use as a foundation to write an entire video but i've never really found anything that was worth the video it's kind of obvious what makes this game so fantastic well not too long ago me and my friend decided to run through the game simultaneously and talk about what we saw as we went along when we were discussing everything afterwards we came to a conclusion that there really isn't a single smart character in the entire game we jokingly call this the theory that really interested me this gigantic insane place that is aperture science is the culmination of 100 of the most intelligent people in the world working under the close command of a billionaire who sits somewhere between lunatic and who held them back so much that none of these amazing inventions ever saw the light of day outside of this facility it's like willy wonka's chocolate factory if the candy never actually made its store shelves all because every named character in the series is well a i don't really like the idea of this being a lore channel but this is basically a lore video think of it as a way for me to expose this really clever and unique writing stunt that valve pulled with this game anyways you've probably got a couple characters in your head who you think aren't morons but geniuses don't worry i'll debunk those but first let's just go over some of the history of aperture science that we learn over this game basically in the 50s cave johnson was leading aperture fixtures a military contractor producing shower curtains he took his fortune that he earned from this and hired a ton of the world's top scientists and basically had them working around the clock just doing science at all costs hoping to find some breakthrough invention around him and his company the next windfall until eventually the whole company fell apart doing science at all costs that's pretty much the basis for everything we see in aperture science from the early early days to what wheatley does when he takes over the facility to what happens between gladys and the co-op robots after shell leaves let's start with the cave johnson era before glados was ever created like i said this guy got a ton of money selling shower curtains to the military and used it to buy salt mines where his company aperture science would experiment and develop new technologies hoping of course to become rich off of them these scientists managed to invent the portal gun the most amazing invention ever but even after 50 years of serious refinement it never made it out of the testing phase even though the portal gun was obviously the route to follow if he wanted to make a fortune cave continued having his lab boys just test everything seemingly his business model was to just do as much science as is physically possible and then just wait for money to appear in his bank account he'd take all of these people these pillars of human achievement and break their bones replace their blood with gasoline give them tumors only to cut them out later get them to solve puzzles involving his technologies inject mantis dna into them just doing science stuff with no real goal in mind this line right here sums it up just a heads up we're gonna have a super conductor turned up full blast and pointed at you for the duration of this next test i'll be honest we're throwing science at the wall here to see what sticks no idea what it'll do probably nothing a lot of great people died for the sake of seeing what happens when humans have their blood replaced with gasoline because somehow that was meant to generate a profit after a decade or two of astronauts war heroes and olympians running these often fatal tests cave didn't have the money to keep it up so instead he started offering 60 bucks to homeless people in exchange for letting him perform science on them basically the same sort of experiments i guess it's just less expensive to kill a homeless person than it is to kill an olympian by this point cave is getting even more desperate for that scientific breakthrough that'll save his company and he still isn't focusing on just selling the portal gun again all you gotta do is let us disassemble you we're not banging rocks together here we know how to put a man back together so that's a complete reassembly new vitals spit shine on the old ones plus we're scooping out tumors frankly you want to be paying us literally anything scientific just do it he'll get his lab boys to perform a heart transplant on you and you'll get another 60 bucks because who knows maybe aperture science is one heart surgery away from figuring out something profitable about heart surgeries after another 10 years cave had totally ran out of money he couldn't afford to experiment on homeless people anymore so instead he started mandating that his own employees be test subjects while aperture was starting to develop ai technologies so that cave could cut costs further on human labor and human test subjects one last hail mary from cave was to buy seven million dollars worth of moon rocks seemingly for no reason other than it's the moon of course it's going to be scientific well it turns out that that much moon dust is incredibly toxic and so cave and probably a lot of aperture employees were lethally poisoned by this uh experiment however unlike most of aperture's history there actually was a small scientific breakthrough here turns out moon rocks act fantastically as portal conductors so basically all of these white portable walls we see in the later phases of aperture science are basically just covered in paint made from moon rocks cave was about to die but he had one last theory to test jumping in and out of lunar poison these of a man's bloodstream when life gives you lemons make lemonade this absolutely random and baseless theory of course didn't work so cave told his team to start developing brain mapping technology so that he could be put in a computer and live forever and if they didn't get the technology in time to save him to put carolyn his assistant or wife or something into a computer instead thus creating on a glados disc why can't we store a man's intelligence and personality on one cave johnson devoted his entire life to doing scientific things not actually following the scientific method but doing things that are just science adjacent surgeries microchips in the brain messing around with moon rocks stuff like that and puzzles you know something that i always wondered about portal was how exactly solving a bunch of puzzles was supposed to help in the scientific process like i get that we're testing the portal gun and the repulsion gel and all of that stuff but why puzzles like if the portal gun works it works why bother testing how intelligently people are able to use it it's because again cave johnson is a puzzles have something to do with science right after all it's not like we can sell the portal gun until we know whether or not this one homeless guy is able to use it to spray paint all over the place right cave johnson spent his entire life looking for the next huge scientific breakthrough even though his company created a world-changing product half a century before anyone else was even close to that and then just didn't tell anyone about it because he's a some of my friends fight me about this but i'm not aware of a single piece of evidence in the game that cave johnson is anything more than a who got lucky selling shower curtains once seriously i can't name a single smart or well-informed decision he's ever made in canon or a single time he seemed to actually understand what his own company was doing and yet because his moronic patterns led him to spending money in a very particular way such as employing genius scientists he basically became the most important person in the entire fiction of half-life i'm gonna go on a little tangent here for a moment really this video is meant to just expose how funny and clever the general plot structure of portal 2 is and this tangent might be the funniest thing about the game to me so half-life may very well be the most important game series of all time in terms of its impact and how it's advanced the whole concept of game design so many times over it's known for its fantastic story its grim dystopian setting and its commitment to dense and consistent world building however in an incredibly bold move by valve they introduced the absolutely stupid world of portal into the canon of their incredibly serious flagship series while all of these dramatic world-changing events are happening on the surface just below in some random salt mine in a destroyed michigan the most ridiculous story ever is unfolding and absolutely nobody has any idea it's happening only like six people even know what aperture science is by the time of half-life 2. so i'll try to keep the half-life part of this video brief but basically in half-life the combine are able to teleport from their home dimension into ours but once they're in our dimension they rely on local transportation no more teleporting the only reason the combine don't just completely wipe out humanity while harvesting earth is because a couple humans are on the cusp of developing that local teleportation technology exactly what they're looking for if the combine had access to localized teleporting they would just kill every last human without a second thought eli judith kleiner and alex aren't really on the cutting edge of teleporter technology as it turns out aperture science figured out teleportation about 70 years earlier only cave johnson was such a that he spent the rest of his life refining this already incredible civilization reshaping technology rather than just getting it in people's hands as soon as possible and so only a few portal guns actually exist and nobody left alive after the combine got here has any idea that localized teleporting has already been a thing for 70 years so long story short if cave johnson wasn't one of the biggest morons in all of fiction humanity would have gone extinct long before the events of half-life 2. awesome before we move on to glados i think it's important that we talk for a moment about what exactly aperture science does after cape johnson dies well basically the exact same thing because gladys is both a and a computer designed per cave's instructions she just uses aperture science to do sciencey things basically aimlessly we've already talked about how pointless the actual puzzles are puzzles which she's designed to endlessly crave to the point of getting withdrawals when nobody's solving puzzles in front of her but then we got to what might be the most pointless and cruel thing that aperture science does it's something that's surrounding us throughout the entirety of both games so i don't know if this reading of the portal series is the most widespread or not but basically the way i see it almost everything in aperture science is sentient if you want some evidence of this in portal 1 you can watch an old crusty video i did on that game called portal cracks in the system but looking just at portal 2 i mean we've got the sentient nanobots that are repairing this elevator shaft at least alive enough to be talked into hiring wheatley we've got these wall panels who very much look frustrated when they're jammed in place glados refers to some parts of the test chambers in a way that seems to recognize their sentience calling the door mainframe he instead of it saying he won't be living anymore she says that this faith plate is letting out a distress code rather than an error code we see that certain turrets have distinct personalities and we even hear gladys say this i think that one was about to say i love you they are sentient of course we just have a lot of them like i said i've covered some more of the first games evidence for this in a different video and i don't want to spend all day treading old ground but portal 1 even subtly hints that the portal gun itself is sentient and at this point if aperture science is all about just doing as many scientific things as possible why not just make every single thing with a computer in its sentient if you have that kind of processing power i mean screw it maybe we'll learn something about artificial life if we make sure that these boxes destined to be abandoned for thousands of years can feel boredom so next up we've got glados i'm sure a lot of you are thinking glados isn't a she's a genius but just insane well to talk about glados first we've got to talk about carolyn frankly i don't know what the wiki might say about her maybe there's some cut line that actually goes against this idea but as with cave i don't see any evidence in this entire game that's actually in the game that carolyn is anything more than well basically a ditsy trophy wife at best or a hot assistant to keep cave company at worst carolyn she is a jump really the closest thing we get to evidence of the contrary is gladys saying that the itch didn't bother her because she was always in it for the science personally i attribute that line to the personality cores that she had in the first game noting the fact that she acts a lot differently in portal 2 without them but anyways we never hear cave say anything like carolyn says that the moon rocks yada yada it's always the lab boys say that the moon rocks you get my point so wife or just assistant it really seems like carolyn is just well a that cave fell in love with well what happens when a totally stupid person is put into a supercomputer and suddenly has access to all of human history miles worth of machinery and millions of mips worth of processing power [Music] they go insane gladys that is to say carolyn's dumb ass mind put into a super computer almost immediately started killing everybody the moment she was center with a activated neurotoxin and funnily enough we see this exact same thing happen in portal 2 with wheatley he's an absolute by design and the moment he's put into a supercomputer he starts acting just as erratically and violently towards chell as glados did so hey that's something that glados and wheelie had in common they were both morons that were suddenly given petabytes worth of information and immediately started acting violently the only difference is that glados had personality cores attached to her which help to nullify the violent inside of her and make her act more rationally i mean god look how childishly rude she's being to chill over the course of this game now that she doesn't have the personality course keeping her head on straight remember before when i was talking about smelly garbage standing around being useless that was a metaphor i was actually talking about you and i'm sorry you didn't react at the time so i was worried it sailed right over your head which would have made this apology seem insane that's why i had to call you garbage a second time just now wheatley though he never had the crutch that is personality course needless to say wheelie is a massive this is literally explained to us glados minds of a generation working the product of by together with the express purpose of building the dumbest who ever lived although as a side note so that i have something interesting to say about this little guy as far as i can tell this scene where he's trying to get his new invention the franken cube to complete a test seems to be the only instance in either portal game of somebody actually performing a scientific experiment which is just genius that reminds me of one other hilarious detail that isn't really relevant but that i'd be remiss not to bring up when glados tries to fry wheatley's mind with the logical paradox wheatley is too stupid to understand that it even is a paradox but all of the franken cubes are instantly destroyed meaning that these boxes with legs are smarter than wheatley is paradox um true i'll go true yeah that was easy anyways we've got one last name character to cover chell the player character she's an interesting one all she really does over both games is prove her intelligence by solving puzzles it doesn't really feel right to call her a but well she does have brain damage as this fantastic fourth wall breaking joke in the beginning shows us just tell me just say yes okay what you're doing there is jumping uh you just you just jumped but never mind say apple apple okay you know what that's close enough just hold tight it's my personal head cannon that shell from this moment on thinks that speaking is the same thing as jumping and so every time a puzzle demands that she jump she just tries to speak but enough about that the point is while the world is being harvested and humanity is fighting tooth and nail with its last dying breath on the surface somewhere underground a didn't realize that he should start selling the most incredible invention ever and instead he went on to build a facility so incredible that it could be considered the eighth wonder of the world so that he could get his ditzy wife to go into a supercomputer where her and a million other tiny ais would develop their own culture without humans and collect centuries worth of practically useless data that no human would ever even get a chance to glimpse at save for a single brain damaged mute lunatic who put history's greatest in charge of a dozen or so nuclear reactors resulting in the facility falling apart and her teleporting the ultimate onto the surface of the moon half-life has some of the most discussed and analyzed lore in the history of gaming but somewhere out there within that lore there's just this one little space where one of gaming's most ridiculous stories is unfolding and that's just genius really 40 kids all doing potato batteries for the bring your daughter to work day science fair is just the perfect metaphor for everything that aperture science did from the 1950s to whatever distant future this game takes place in nobody's proving or disproving anything but well building a potato battery is kind of like science right let's spend our whole life building potato batteries over and over again and wait for the scientific breakthroughs in the military contracts and the money to flow in right cave [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] now before i close out today's video i'd like to just verbally thank my patrons especially those who are donating ten dollars or more monthly such as ada avery almost dead again anatoly von love andrew melnick ben n benny big time jim bobby blitz celadon colin gaijin cornelius nelson darius fazier demise dennis foshakimer dominic johan fralem george rosenbaum ijk kenneth endfinger laffy mixer rules neurofilter of lucian pj raxvan robert bauting silo shayno yemen she zoe and zyrable i'd also like to extend these things to just everybody who decided to stay subscribed after my announcement a couple days ago needless to say i've been horrified about it so hopefully things are going okay so far but with that i hope you have a great february

Channel: Leadhead

Views: 1,909,538

Keywords: analysis, explained, essay, review, portal, chell, cake, moron, glados, caroline, aperture, science, innovators, fixtures, cave, johnson, lore, history, cannon, theory, canon, story, moon, rocks, gel, gun, wheatley, space, cube, potato, potatOS, bring, your, daughter, to, work, day, fair

Id: 531Wsv5Igtk

Length: 19min 9sec (1149 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 07 2022