Theodore Joseph Wells

Theodore Joseph Wells is a human from the live-action film continuity family.

Together with his partner and longtime friend Walter Simmons, Theodore Joseph Wells is a gentleman adventurer, and an investigator of the fantastic and the otherworldly. While he enjoys a good mystery as much as anyone, and accepts with remarkable incredulity that there are more things in heaven and Earth than are dreamed of in his philosophy, he's a lot less inclined to look for supernatural or extra-terrestrial solutions to the cases that they investigate than his partner is—something of an innate defense mechanism, perhaps, that prevents him from becoming consumed, as he often fears Walter may be, by the terrifying possibilities that their many weird and wonderful journeys open up. In a similar vein, he is not a man given to rumination: where Simmons will take the time to think and reason his way out of any trouble that might befall the pair, Wells favors just shooting at the problem.

Simmons went on to become one of the First Seven, a founding member of the super-secret government organization, Sector Seven.

Contents 1 Fiction 1.1 IDW movie comics 1.1.1 Transformers: Beginnings 2 Notes

Fiction

IDW movie comics

While exploring a cave system beneath the Sierra Nevada mountains on New Year's Day 1898, Wells and Simmons discovered a race of inhuman monsters, and Wells promptly opened fire on the creatures when they growled at him. His shots did little to phase the monsters, and the two adventurers were forced to flee outside, where Simmons's ingenuity allowed them to collapse the cave entrance and entomb their pursuers. Mere seconds later, the pair found themselves approached by agent Billy North of the United States Secret Service, who had come to draft the pair on the orders of the President. Original

Wells and Simmons were brought to the Boston Secure Hospital, where they were presented with patient Archibald Witwicky, a ship's captain who had returned from an expedition to the Arctic Circle blind and mad, claiming to have discovered a giant metal man frozen in the ice. Movie Prequel #2 Wells dismissed the man's ravings as insanity, but this earned him the ire of Witwicky's first mate, Reginald Danco, who seized him and was about to pummel him before Simmons defused the situation. Much to Wells's disdain, Simmons actually believed Witwicky's tale, and had Danco lead them, North and three other men—explosives expert Philippe Bowen, geologist Theodore Grant and metallurgist Jack Arden—to the site of the metal man's discovery. There, in the frozen depths of the Arctic, Witwicky's claims proved true: a fact that Wells took in his stride, but which amazed Simmons so that Wells cautioned his friend against becoming too consumed by the enormity of the discovery.

As misfortune would have it, the team's entrance into the cavern stirred the frozen giant, causing it to send out a signal that summoned another of its kind to the Arctic. When Agent North began shooting the newcomer, it responded in kind, but Wells and Simmons were able to distract it long enough for Bowen and Grant to blast the ice out from underneath it, dispatching it to the ocean depths. Original

While he continued to operate as part of Simmons's group, investigating the metal "Mega Man", Wells also returned to a life of roaming adventure, taking jobs on the order of the President. One such mission led him to Tianjin, China, at the turn of the century, where he was to recover an ancient scepter from a mysterious cult, and use it to stop something called the "Shangdi". Although he did retrieve the scepter, Wells then found himself caught up in the middle of the Boxer Rebellion, and would have met his end at the hands of Chinese rebels if not for the intervention of American intelligence operatives Lou and Herbert Hoover, who were also trapped in the country. When word came in 1902 that Simmons's team had discovered a mysterious metal cube in the Colorado River that seemed to have some connection to the Mega-Man, Wells brought the Hoovers into the organization, that their mining and metallurgical skills might be of some use in excavating and analyzing the find.

The diversion of the Colorado River took a further eleven years, during which time Simmons's wife Clara and daughter Margaret were moved to an isolated house in the Nevada desert nearby, notionally to be close to him. But as Wells had feared, Simmons had become utterly consumed by the Mega-Man and the cube, and he took it upon himself to tend to the needs of the Simmons women, providing food, company and excuses for Walter's continuous absence. By 1913, however, Wells was out of excuses, and Clara was out of patience. After a particularly fraught visit to the house, Wells headed to the excavation site to give Simmons a piece of his mind, arriving just as the cube was at last being excavated. A glimmer of hope was offered Wells when the entrance to a cave system was discovered below the cube, containing the same strange glowing material that had found in the caves from their 1897 adventure. Believing Walter's old spark of adventure had been reignited, Wells headed down into the caves with his old partners, the Hoovers and Roy Thompson. Before going far, however, the group was attacked by the second robot that they had faced in the Arctic years beforehand, which had been searching through the caves ever since. Fleeing to the surface, Simmons ordered the cube dropped, willing to leave Wells trapped underground with the robot; thankfully, Wells moved fast enough to avoid that grisly fate. Subsequently, the cube gave off a surge of energy that brought several machines to life, including Thompson's gun, which shot Wells in the leg. More worrying was the giant crane that had come to life, which forced the Hoovers to break open the dam diverting the river. Wells was forced to drag a mesmerized Simmons away from the cube as the river swept in and “drowned” the robot, but he could not forget that his old friend had been willing to leave him.

Soon after, Wells returned to the Simmons household. Having seen what Walter had become, he gave into his feelings, and appealed to Clara to leave her husband and run away with him. Irreplaceable

Transformers: Beginnings

Voice actor: Unknown

Transformers: Beginnings

Notes

• Wells and Simmons first appeared, unnamed, in IDW's Movie Prequel comic (seen at right). When the characters were reintroduced for the Sector 7 comic a few years later, some of the details were fudged together for clarity's sake. The second prequel issue had depicted the dark-haired, bespectacled, mutton-chopped character (Wells) as the one with the family and the growing obsession with the Mega-Man, but the third issue then placed the silver-haired, moustachioed character (Simmons) in that role in a scene where he wistfully returned to Hoover Dam in 1935. Sector 7 united these elements in the singular character of Simmons, and gave Wells his own, different role to play.
• Wells's name is a bit of mess. When he and Simmons are first introduced in the first issue of the Sector 7 comic, it is as "Joseph Simmons" and "Walter Wells". This mistake was amended later in the issue, but the page of author's notes at the issue's end then presented Wells's name as "Theodore", rather than Joseph. He remained Theodore for most of the second issue of the comic, until the last page, where he became Joseph again. A blurb added to the interior cover of the third issue apologized for the mistakes and clarified that his first name was Theodore; at the same time, a summary printed on the same page tried to harmonize the errors by giving his full name as "Theodore Joseph Wells", so that's what we've gone with.
• First name troubles aside, Wells gets his surname from H. G. Wells.