Ok, now that you know the whole Portal story, it’s time for the good stuff! SPOILERS! And there’s a lot of them to digest here so NOM NOM NOM NOM NOM
Here are my favorites!
Singing Turrets
In Chapter 3, Chamber 16, you can find a Rat Den through a the grate a turret is behind. Use your portals to line up the laser in that direction and use a reflective cube to point the laser at the turret. The turret will blow up, as will the grate and give you access into the den.
There’s some Rattmann artwork to see here, but towards the right you can look down and see an adorable quartet of turrets singing to themselves. If you didn’t already know the ending, it gives you sneak peek that turrets like to sing ❤
You can see a video of the test chamber and hear the cute singing here.
Vitrified Doors
For the Door Prize achievement, you need to find six vitrified doors and listen to the audio clips next to them. The first three are towards the beginning of the chapter The Fall. After you soar through the Aperture logo, you’ll see a tall elevator emerging from some gross water. When you make your way up there, towards the left you can see the doors. Use portals to get over there and listen to those first three. You can see a video of the area and hear Cave’s hilarious recordings here.
For the last three doors, continue through the game for a bit until you get into the 1970s era of Aperture. You’ll see a building labeled Control Room in big yellow letters, and above it is a small office building, and that’s where you want to go to complete this achievement. When you get into the office, go to the back left corner. There’s a door partially blacked by a cabinet. Wiggle your way back there and you’ll find the last three doors, as can be seen here. You also find the achievement Ship Overboard back here, which I’ll follow up with next.
Ship Overboard ACHIEVEMENT
While you’re in the area, go to the back of this hidden hallway and to the right, one of the vitrified doors is busted open. Go in and you’ll be at a ship dock. Head to the left and go towards the life preserver labeled Borealis and you’ll get the achievement.
Beyond the achievement, this is an Eater Egg connecting the worlds of Portal and another one of Valve’s successful franchises, Half-Life. First off, why the hell is there a ship dock this far underground?? And what is the Borealis?
In the Portal/Half-Life universe, the Borealis is a legendary ship that was worked on at Aperture, only to mysteriously disappear one day. The Borealis is intorodiced in Half-Life 2: Episode 2 by scientist Isaac Kleiner. Isaac explains that the project aboard the Borealis was promising, but because Aperture was in constant competition with Half-Life’s company, Black Mesa, safety measures were overlooked and the project got out of control, causing the ship and even part of the dock to disappear. A common theory is that the project on the Borealis likely had to do with portals, but only more powerful and on a larger scale.
Final Transmission
In the first Portal, there’s an achievement ‘Transmission Received’, with a full walkthrough here. In Portal 2, there is a ‘Final Transmission’ achievement with one radio in Chamber 6. When GlaDOS clears out a bunch of garbage, there will be a radio. Grab it and take it to the Rat Den shown here.
The transmission can actually be decoded and you’ll see this image:
You can see that it’s a companion cube on the moon. Is it Rattmann’s companion cube? And did he take this picture on the moon??
prometheus
This is one of those spoilers that’s trickled throughout the whole game. You don’t even notice these details during your first playthrough, but then you read the spoiler and it seems much more obvious.
But first, learning time! The spoiler won’t mean much if you don’t know the story of Prometheus, and honestly, I had to brush up on Greek mythology myself for this.
Even though Prometheus was a Titan, he sided with Zeus in a war between Titans and Olympians. He chose to live around people rather than on Mount Olympus. He saw that people were cold and suffering, and because Zeus would not share fire with the people, Prometheus stole it. When Zeus found out, he was pissed. Zeus spared Prometheus from Tartarus (a part of the underworld where the worst criminals were banished and tortured) since he had helped the Olympians in the war, but he condemned Prometheus to an eternal torture of being chained to a mountain and have his liver (or heart, depending on where you’re reading the story) pecked apart every day, only to grow back over night so that it could be pecked again the next day. That’s better than Tartarus…I guess?
So, back to Portal 2.
During The Escape, you’ll see a turret (referred to as the Oracle Turret outside of the game) on the redemption line saying “I’m different”. If you choose to pick it up and save it, it will tell you a few things, but most importantly to this spoiler; “Prometheus was punished by the gods for giving the gift of knowledge to man. He was cast into the bowels of the Earth and pecked by birds.” Why does the Oracle Turret tell you this, and how does it correlate to the Portal 2 story? We can break it down and replace character names where needed: “Prometheus (GLaDOS) was punished by the gods (Wheatley) for giving the gift of knowledge (the Portal gun) to man (Chell). He was cast into the bowels of the Earth and pecked by birds.” During The Fall, Chell and GLaDOS fall 4200 meters, the same distance Prometheus fell when cast into the bowels of the Earth (the measurements can be see on the walls as you fall). As for the being pecked by birds? After you fall, you see GLaDOS being pecked by a bird and carried away. When you find GLaDOS later, she’s being pecked by the bird again. After the fall, you can see a large building labeled TARTAROS 09, another connection to the Prometheus story.
Though this detail isn’t tied directly to Prometheus’ story, it is another tie to Greek mythology…At the end of the game, after GLaDOS sends you up to the surface, Chell walks out to a field of wheat. In Greek mythology, the Elysian Fields is a paradise where heroes the gods gave immortality to lived. The wheat fields are just a simple nod to that paradise and is symbolic of Chell’s freedom.
Caroline and Cara Mia Addio
Ooooooh this is a juicy one, and a long one so buckle up.
To fully appreciate this spoiler, it’s important to know who Caroline really was. We can start at the beginning, with the founder and CEO of Aperture Science, Cave Johnson. Aperture Science has it’s own interesting history, it wasn’t even Aperture Science to begin with, but right here we’re more concerned on the Caroline connection.
Caroline worked as Cave’s personal assistant until he passed away in the 1980s. While Cave was terminally ill, he urged the scientists of Aperture to develop an AI that his consciousness could be transferred into. It was his dying wish that should he die before the technology was ready, that Caroline be the one who’s imported into the AI and run the Enrichment Center.
There are unused audio files you can find of Caroline saying in a scared tone “Mr Johnson, I don’t want this” and “No, listen to me. Sir I do not want this”. It’s clear that Caroline didn’t want to be uploaded into the AI, a recording of Cave even mentions that she would likely refuse. But clearly, she ended up there.
When GLaDOS (Genetic Lifeform and Disc Operating System) was activated, the AI was unstable, unleashing deadly neurotoxin into the facility each time she was activated. Somewhere along the line, GLaDOS lost access to her memory of Caroline, being completely unaware of her own origin. Even though she can’t remember Caroline, it’s possible that the violation and hatred she (Caroline) felt towards the scientists that went against her wishes and placed her into the AI could still manifest itself in GLaDOS. Maybe that’s why she wanted to kill everyone.
It’s highly implied that Caroline wasn’t just a personal assistant to Cave Johnson. Cave clearly holds her in high regard, and the relationship that he and Caroline had was likely a romantic one. Every portrait that you come across is only of Cave, except in the one Easter Egg/Achievement “Portrait of a Lady“, (seen above) where you see Cave with a woman. Nothing outright says that the woman is Caroline, but who else could it be?? Potato GLaDOS even says “Those people…in the painting…they look so familiar”. Cave wouldn’t of had just anyone in a painted portrait with him. It was the woman he loved, and the one he was the closest to. Of all the scientists and great minds that he had to choose from to run the facility in his stead, he chose her. And that speaks volumes! Not saying that Caroline wasn’t also brilliant, she was! But despite the fact that she didn’t want to be uploaded into an AI, Cave chose her as his successor, I believe, because he loved her. I don’t doubt that there could have been other competent scientists that would have offered to be GLaDOS.
It’s a debated topic, but it’s possible that Chell was a lovechild conceived by Cave and Caroline, and in order to protect Cave’s reputation, was consequently put up for adoption. Whether you choose to hop on that bandwagon or not (I’m totally on it!), the potato experiment from Bring Your Daughter to Work Day does prove that Chell was at least the daughter of SOMEONE at Aperture Science.
Speaking of that potato experiment…Chell’s potato is much, much bigger than everyone else’s, it’s even grown up into the ceiling! Why is that? It’s likely that Chell used some sort of chemical on her potato, as her Materials section states that she used a ‘special ingredient from Dad’s work’. No ordinary scientist would have access to a chemical like that, only someone pretty high up would. Someone like Cave Johnson, perhaps?? Given the fact that his experiments cause people to grow a bunch of tumors, we know he’s not the most ethical guy. Surely, he wouldn’t care about helping his kid cheat in a potato experiment.
Some will argue that the adoptive parent could have been Doug Rattmann, the man who leaves drawings and messages throughout Aperture to help you escape. I love the theory, but at least for me, I don’t think Rattmann is her adoptive father.
The the ‘Lab Rat’ comic, Rattmann sees Chell get dragged back into Aperture and chooses to go back in to help her escape. It’s a noble gesture, but he never mentions anything about saving his daughter. His companion cube even asks why he’s go back in when he’s finally free. If that were his daughter, I don’t think there’d be any question. Rattmann also explains to the companion cube why he chose Chell to face off with GLaDOS in the first place…when he saw her file, she was actually failed as a potential test subject because her tenacity was in the 99th percentile and had a note that she “Never gives up. Ever“. I just doubt that he would have to go through any of her files to know that if he had adopted her. He believed that she was the best person to beat GLaDOS and get them out of there, so he found the list order of test subjects and moved Chell from #1498 to #1 so that’d she’d be the first to wake up.
It isn’t until GlaDOS is in the potato that she starts to remember Caroline, and it isn’t until GLaDOS remembers that she’s Caroline that she realizes that Chell is her daughter, not her enemy. What triggers her memory is hearing the recordings of Cave Johnson and having a response to them. That leads to GLaDOS becoming more compassionate towards Chell as the game progresses, even calling Chell her best friend at the very end.
The first time I played through this, I kept waiting to be tricked by GLaDOS in the end…there are so many times that you think you’ll finally escape Aperture Labs, only to find yourself falling into another pit. When you beat Wheatley and are grasping onto him so that you don’t get sucked into space, GLaDOS says “I already fixed it, and you are NOT coming back”. She reaches through the portal, breaks Chell and Wheatley apart, and pulls Chell back to safety. I won’t lie to you, I didn’t trust GLaDOS when she was reaching through.
Then GLaDOS gives you a goodbye after deleting Caroline from her brain, or at least says that she did. GLaDOS says the name Caroline after ‘deleting’ her, so how would she remember anything about Caroline if she were really deleted? There’s also a line in the Want You Gone song, “Now little Caroline is in here too”. As stated on theportalwiki.com/wiki/Caroline, even the voice actress of GLaDOS, Ellen McLain ‘stated on a panel at Anime Midwest 2011, that to her belief, Caroline is not deleted at all’.
Anyway, she sends Chell back up to the surface on an elevator saying, “It was fun, don’t come back”. The elevator stops, opens, and you see four turrets aiming at you. Now I’m thinking, Ok! Here’s the trick! But I was fooled again, the turrets turn off their lasers and start their adorable singing. They begin humming the tempo the Cara Mia Addio song coming up. The elevator continues up a bit and slows down as you look into an atrium full of turrets, and they all begin their cute singing.
I’ll start with the lyrics themselves:
Cara bella, cara mia bella!
Mia bambina, oh ciel (Chell)!
Ch’ella stima!
Ch’ella stima!
O cara mia, addio!
La mia bambina cara…
perché non passi lontana?’
Si lontana da Scienza!
Cara, cara mia bambina…
Ah, mia bella!
Ah, mia cara!
Ah, mia cara!
Ah, mia bambina!
Oh cara, cara mia…
Beautiful dear, my darling beauty!
My child, oh heavens (Chell)!
How I adore you!
How I adore you!
Oh my dear, farewell!
My dear child…
Why don’t you walk far away?
So far away from Science!
My dear, dear baby…
Ah, my beloved!
Ah, my dear!
Ah, my dear!
Ah, my little girl!
Oh dear, my dear…
Holy shit, right?? This to me is the strongest implication that Caroline was Chell’s mother. Once you see the lyrics translated into English, it’s pretty clear. Another cool fact is that the song is sung by no other than the voice actress for GLaDOS herself, Ellen McLain. She actually improvised the lyrics to this song in her ‘bad Italian’ she learned in high school. The lyric “Why don’t you walk far away? So far away from science!” sticks out to me a lot. We know that Caroline was essentially married to science, but her dedication to Aperture made he give Chell up for adoption. It’s because of science that Chell ended up a test subject and Caroline ended up as GLaDOS.
Chell gets out of the elevator and finds herself in a field. She hears some loud thumps, turns around (I’m still feeling like this a trick) and a burned companion cube bursts through the door ❤
It’s said that this is the same companion cube that Chell had to incinerate in Portal 1, and I believe it! Seeing that cube at the end gave me a huge smile. That detail really felt like a cherry on top of the cake that definitely isn’t a lie.
Bonus
A picture of my cat Chell, named after the badass heroine of this game, with her little sister, Ellie, named after the badasss heroine from The Last of Us.
BizzBirdNerd 