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

Moffat absolutely clears RTD on this one, no debate. 

Under RTD, the TARDIS functions as a mode of transport. It drops the Doctor and companion somewhere (probably Cardiff) and the story unfolds – very rarely will the TARDIS or time travel serve the plot in any important way. The TARDIS set doesn't feel like a home, or a safe space, and in general is far less dynamic – less of a motorhome and more just a car.

On Moffat's watch, the show really started to lean into time travel. The TARDIS wasn't just used as a taxi – time travel itself became a frequent part of the narrative structure. Straight off the bat, in fact, as The Eleventh Hour utilised time jumps as a core concept. Moffat was no stranger to this, with stories like The Girl in the Fireplace and Blink having time travel woven into the narrative.

He would go on to lean into this even more heavily, with stories like The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang, The Impossible Astronaut, A Christmas Carol and Before the Flood. The man with a time machine actually thinks to use his time machine to solve problems. Fancy that! We start to play with concepts like paradoxes, time loops, time dilation, and Moffat's personal favourite: non-linear timelines. Enter River Song, a truly fascinating character that would only have been possible in Moffat's wibbly-wobbly run.

The net result is that 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 depth, 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.