Russell T Davies helmed the rebooted Doctor Who through the Christopher Eccleston and David Tennant years. Current showrunner, Steve Moffat addresses working in a universe established by his predecessor.

It can be a tricky thing, writing in a universe to a certain degree established by someone else. Where is the line on what you take or what you change? In an interview with Hit Fix, Steven Moffat talks about where his vision and Russell T. Davies’ meet.

There do seem to be certain other recurring themes from your episodes in the Davies era that keep coming up now that you’re in charge. Is it just the case of, because you’re responsible in some way for every episode, the things that you enjoy doing with the character come up more often? Or is it just, “Hey, this works, I’d like to do it as much as I can”?

I don’t think it’s even authorship. I’ve talked with Russell about this. There are certain ideas that become prevalent in the series, because everyone thinks of them at once. When Russell was doing it, he said that one year, everybody was talking about breeding planets. Frequently, you find a bunch of people who, with no confab at all, are going on about the same thing. And maybe just because we’re all living in the same world, absorbing the same news stories, we all tend to think of the same things. It’s just a bunch of ideas being informed by the same preoccupations.

One of the things you talked about in the press conference is that each set of writers can change the mythology and do whatever they want. One of the major changes you made was to get rid of the paradox rule. The Doctor can cross his own timeline and change things a little bit.

I didn’t get rid of it. It’s changed throughout the history of the series. He’s always changing time.

Well, in Russell’s era, there was always a specific point about how, “I can’t go back to this place I’ve just been and do it differently.”

That’s not quite it. He says there are fixed points, like Pompeii is fixed. But otherwise, he’s changing time all the time. Can he go over his own timestream? He does it in “Smith and Jones,” he does it every time he meets himself. Are we really saying there’s a rule the Doctor isn’t going to break? The fact that he says it’s a rule doesn’t mean he’s going to stick to it.

When Toby (Whithouse) was at Comic-Con, he says he loves that “wibbly-wobbly-timey-wimey” phrase because it gives him license to not even worry about that sort of thing.

It’s a joke line, but the truth is it’s just as useful as saying, “It’s the inter-fantastical nature of the sub-space continuum.” It’s all gobble-dy gook.

See the rest of this interview including a detailed discussion on the evolution of River Song, on Hit Fix.

What do you think are the pro’s and con’s of the Steven Moffat storylines as opposed to the ones helmed by Russell T. Davies?