What The Flux going on, Doc?

THE return of Doctor Who was terrifying – for all the wrong reasons.

Last series, the show’s ratings fell like a ton of Judoon droppings.

Writer Chris Chibnall’s response was to throw everything the budget could stretch to at the hectic opening episode, hoping something would stick.

The noisy bombardment of rapidfire story threads felt like being screamed at in a warzone.

We had Weeping Angels, savage Sontarans and an orange cosmic dust cloud called The Flux, which devoured planets like Marvel’s Galactus after a 1,000-year fast.

There was an ancient alien called Swarm who looked like he’d been stung repeatedly by one.

And John Bishop, inset, played a saintly version of John Bishop called Dan who was kidnapped by Karvinista – a dog-alien who looked roughly as menacing as Bungle from Rainbow. (For Zippy see the Doctor.) The overgrown Yorkshire terrier was a Lupari, a race who vowed to stand by humanity in our darkest hour… but hadn’t bothered to show up over six doom-laden decades of Daleks, Cybermen and Barrowman. Seven billion paw people came to save us. Each travelled alone, presumably to stop them wasting time sniffing other dog-aliens’ nether regions along the way.

Somehow, they had developed Fluxresistant technology and protected Earth with their vessels.

Meanwhile, 19th Century Scousers were doing something dodgy down a mineshaft and the Sontarans were “30trillion light-years away” – which is further than the entire known universe.

Confused? You should be. It all felt busier than a Dalek stag party on an extermination weekender.

Yet the defining qualities of great science fiction are simple stories well told with smart twists and characters viewers can invest in.

This was just an over-complicated mess.

How William Hartnell’s calm, slightly grumpy Doc turned into Jodie Whittaker’s shouty scatter-brain escapes me.