Conversion (2005)

The third part of this series is where it starts hotting up. The story does exactly what it says on the tin. It’s all about Conversion. We are not treated to a cliffhanger reprisal like in a normal Doctor Who adventure but instead a flashback which sees Paul Hunt breaking out of the processing unit. Then the story moves a bit when Karen uses the teleportation unit to travel to the Scorpius base. Finally it moves back to the present. The beginning scene with Paul Hunt was quite an important one. It mans that the listener goes from despising him to actually warming to him. This may have been the intention because when we go to present day Paul Hunt I had a different opinion of him. The Cybermen become more and more involved in this story as their plan is starting to take shape. Paul Hunt is manipulating Karen more and more and it even gets to the stage where Karen knows something is dodgy is going on. I really like the Hunt/Brett combination. I think that Barnaby Edwards is superb as Paul Hunt. It’s a credit to him that he can sound like a Bond villain without going overboard. Also Sarah Mowatt is brilliant as President Karen Brett, she is slowly starting to become more and more unbalanced.

Unfortunately this episode does show massive flaws in the plan. I can’t quite understand why the Cybermen went through all the trouble of forming an alliance with the Earth Alliance in the Orion Wars. Why didn’t they just go in and wipe the human race out? All these do slightly weaken the story but it’s not until I finished listening to this story that these points came to mind. The story has been put together so that you don’t really have time to take in properly what’s happened.

It all leads to a fascinating conclusion. As the saying goes “We Have Nothing to Fear!”