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

3. Better: It Actually Felt Like A Time Travel Show

This is where Moffat absolutely clears RTD, no debate. 

Under RTD, the TARDIS functions as a mode of transport. The TARDIS would drop the Doctor and companion somewhere (probably Cardiff) and the story would happen - very rarely would the TARDIS or time travel serve the plot in any important way unless someone was trying to steal it or blow it up. It was a means of getting from A to B, and fairly often, we didn't even see that happen. The TARDIS set didn't feel like a home, or a safe space, and in general was far less dynamic - it was less of a motorhome and more of a car. 

Under Moffat, the show really started to lean into time travel. The TARDIS wasn't just used as a taxi to take us anywhere in time and space, time travel itself became a frequent part of the narrative structure. In typical Moffat fashion, things got a bit timey-wimey (straight off the bat, in fact, as the Eleventh Hour utilised time jumps as a core concept). Moffat was no stranger to this, even in RTD's era - stories like The Girl in the Fireplace and Blink have time travel unavoidably woven into the narrative.

Throughout Moffat's own era, he leaned into this even more heavily. We get stories like The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang, The Impossible Astronaut, A Christmas Carol and Before the Flood - stories that centred on time travel. The man with a time machine actually thinks to use his time machine to resolve problems. We start to play with concepts like paradoxes, time loops, time dilation, and Moffat's personal favourite: non-linear timelines. Nowhere is Moffat's love of playing with time seen more prominently than in the character of River Song, a truly fascinating character that would have only been possible in Moffat's wibbly wobbly run. 

As a result of this, time travel in Moffat's universe feels stranger, more mythical, and far more dangerous. His approach to the TARDIS - treating it like a home, giving it a sense of space, giving it some warmth and allowing the set to actually breathe also fed into this in a major way. His version of Doctor Who embraced the idea that travelling through time should fundamentally distort how stories operate. Did it get a little convoluted occasionally? Yes. But compared to RTD's space opera, Moffat's era felt decidely more like science fiction. Stories about time travel in a time travel show? How novel.