Warning: this review contains spoilers

****

This was just as chilling and effective as the other installments, but I downgraded it half a star because there was a LOT of smooching. The only reason there was smooching in the first place was that in Part 2 (Fear), Liam and Samantha had been injected with neural dampening fluid as part of the Cyber-conversion process, and Samantha (an android) figured out that Liam (a human) could be shaken out of the stupor by her smooching him (he was attracted to her despite knowing she was an android). It got kind of annoying after a while, especially because it was right in my ear. Ew.

That said, I still thought this was a great story. The neural dampening fluid freaks the hell out of me, and the plot point with Karen being turned into a Cyberman worked very well. ( )

Conversion is, as you might imagine, about conversion. Not Cyber-Conversion, but conversion-- a change of sides, viewpoints, or perspectives. Like Fear below it, it doesn't open by directly continuing from the previous story's cliffhanger, but instead of jumping ahead even more, it actually jumps backwards. Some of the questions I had after listening to Scorpius and Fear are answered, and I went from despising Paul Hunt to feeling quite sorry for him; Barnaby Edwards's performance does a lot in a small space here.

We eventually do pick up from Fear's cliffhanger, and unfortunately I think the way it was resolved was a bit lame. The end of Fear was so chilling, that to find out that the conversion process was seemingly randomly stopped partway through is rather disappointing. But what we get here is a subtly different story than what we've gotten previously in the Cyberman series: interstellar political intrigue in Scorpius, a paranoia thriller in Fear, and now a tight action story as Barnaby and Samantha work to escape from the clutches of the Cybermen. And it works. The Daleks have their screeching hate, but what I've always liked about the Cybermen (and I have always liked the Cybermen, ever since I first encountered them in Sword of Orion) is their sense of seeming inevitability. They don't gloat, they just come, and there's nothing you can do about. You see, someday you too will become a Cyberman. And this feeling pervades the sequences with our protagonists trying to escape their fate. There's nothing they can do. Briggs and the actors bring this all to life in a very real way. I very nearly forgave them for the poor cliffhanger resolution.

Perhaps my biggest problem with the play is that now that we're finally coming to see what the Cyberman plan is, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Why did the Cybermen need to work on behalf of the Earth Alliance in the Orion Wars? Why did they send a ship full of half-converted refugees into space? Why is it a risk to accelerate their invasion plans, given how secure their position already is? And why have they waited until this point in the story to make their Big Move? It seems like something they could have done from the beginning of Scorpius.

All of these questions add up to make up something a bit less satisfying than Fear, but that's hardly the worst you could say. Not great, just very good. And I'm really looking forward to Telos, both because it might address my misgivings, and because it ought to bring the events of the Cyberman series to a suitably excellent conclusion.

You can read a longer version of this review at Unreality SF.