The End of Time (Part One)

Back in the dim and distant past I was running a never entirely successful roleplaying game in which the characters were acting as caravan guards during a long journey. Sensing, perhaps erroneously, that they were a bit bored with lots of description and no choices I threw in an entirely random troll attack. I was a bit surprised some weeks later to discover that the players were still trying to work out why the trolls appeared.
I say this because I can't shake the feeling that Russel T. Davis writes Doctor Who in my the same way that I once wrote bad roleplaying games.
The End of Time is a perfectly servicable Doctor Who story, complete with a pointless and incomprehensible action scene in the middle. It features The Master, who was quite comprehensibly Dead with no hope of regeneration at the end of his previous appearance, and so the first job is to ressurect him. This done he falls into the clutches of a somewhat mad chap who hopes to rule the world via a price of dubiously explained alien tech, but horror of horrors, The Master turns the tables on his captor and conquors the world on his own behalf!
That being the classic Master storyline I have no real complaints. In the middle of this though there is the random troll attack. Or rather the classic bit of RTD throw something in that makes little sense. A fight scene in which The Doctor confronts The Master, and it transpires that The Master has developed super powers, including flight and the ability to fire lightning bolts. Does this add to the story? Does the subverting the alien tech in some way relate to these new abilities? Does it heck.
Does it fit neatly into the middle of an episode, in which the writer thought 'this has too much narrative, we need an action sequence to spice things up?' Probably.
While I'm not a subscriber to the 'everything RTD does damages Who' thesis, it can't be denied that he throws in random trolls, and they generally help his stories about as much as they helped my game all those years ago.
Still. One more of his stories and he's gone.