“It’s smaller on the outside.” 

Deconstruction is when you take a trope, or established type of story, and change the mechanics. Say, the Prince saves the Princess, that’s the construction. The Deconstruction would be “The Princess saves the Prince,” or “The dragon saves the Princess from the Prince.” Something like that. 

An example of deconstruction in the works of Steven Moffat, primarily in Doctor Who, is the bits where people say something other than “It’s bigger on the inside.” This was the thing most companions and characters said when entering the Tardis. It’s one of those iconic lines at this point. The deconstruction being “The character isn’t really surprised, and thinks it’s just okay” like Rory does, or they react by saying “It’s smaller on the outside” if they hadn’t seen the outside before. 

None of these are bad. They’re perfectly good writing tools that have been around for centuries. 

But, bear with me for a moment… Not everybody has seen ALL of Doctor Who. A lot of people I know have probably seen more of the show when it got re-continued in 2005. And we had 4 seasons of “It’s bigger on the inside.” At this point, there have been 5 seasons of “It’s smaller on the outside.” 

What I’m getting at here is that Steven Moffat likes to take established mechanics in Doctor Who, (The Tardis, the Sonic, the Doctor’s tendency to not tell people stuff” and deconstruct them. But he tends to go about this in the way of somebody who has seen Doctor Who from the first Doctor. A LOT of his audience, and the audience Russel T Davies brought in with Seasons 1-4 of the 2005 show have probably never seen William Hartnell crying his eyes out. (William Hartnell is fantastic by the way. He really did set the standard high.) 

So, Moffat has spent roughly the better part of 5 seasons deconstructing Doctor Who, while there have only been 4 seasons to set up the construction. One could argue that the deconstruction has been going on longer than the construction. 

This doesn’t mean Moffat is the worst thing to happen to Doctor Who since it got canceled in the 80′s, but it does tell you why so much of the audience who was brought in via the first 4 seasons are leaving. (This is not the only reason, and of course there are ALWAYS people who prefer Moffat’s writing to RTD’s, but I figured I’d give some insight on Moffat’s deconstruction of the show.)

TLDR: Moffat has been Deconstructing the mechanics of Doctor Who since Season 5, and has currently kept doing that up to season 9. So he’s been taking the mechanics apart longer than the mechanics have been put together.