5 Ways Steven Moffat's Doctor Who Is BETTER Than Russell T Davies' (And 3 It's Worse)

7. Worse: RTD Built a Much More 'Lived-In' World

This is, in my opinion, the most significant area in which RTD trumps Moffat. In RTD1 (this approach sadly fell to the wayside the second time around), RTD painstakingly built a picture of the universe in which the show exists.

His version of planet Earth is always central to the plot. We spend a lot of time, both in the main show and spin-offs, with other factions such as Torchwood, UNIT, and the Bannerman Road Gang, and the writing goes to great lengths to show us the ways in which their approaches to defending Earth differ. RTD's world has politics, media reactions, and consequences that carry between episodes. Stories like Love and Monsters and Turn Left both do a fantastic job in showing us what living through various alien invasions is like for your average joe.

We also have a sprawling secondary cast with characters like Mickey, Jackie, Francine, Wilf, and even Harriet Jones getting enough focus to really explore their characters. RTD reaps his reward when all his groundwork culminates in his finales. The Stolen Earth is the perfect personification of this - four years of carefully building connective tissue between stories led to an Avengers-level crossover that felt more than earned. Something like this could never have happened in Moffat's era.

Moffat’s world, by contrast, was far smaller. We never really spent time with companion's families, and any time spent on present day Earth was often as part of a UNIT story, where the experiences of everyday people were swept under the rug.

Entire Cyberman invasions felt like they vanished from public memory, and it really hurt the sense of continuity. It's clear Moffat wanted a world where the average person was unaware of aliens, and he tries to explain this away with the cracks in time, but it doesn't really work and often it leads to stories without consequences. This style of course complimented Moffat's 'fairytale' style, but cohesion was certainly lost in comparison with the worldbuilding masterclass of RTD.