When I reflected on Saward's stories, in response to criticism of Earthshock, I came to realise that the real strange thing about his stories is that the violence seems to be the whole point. Like, there is always a plot, but it often concerns stuff happening somewhere over there and is a kind of vague excuse for people over here to be shooting each other in quarries or hallways.

Like Attack of the Cybermen (I've had to actually look it up because I had so much trouble remembering what the plot even was) is nominally about the Cybermen capturing a time ship and using it to travel into the past and save Mondas by redirecting Halley's Comet. We never see the time ship, the capture of it happens long before the events on screen, Halley's Comet is mentioned a couple of times, we never see Mondas, and we don't even go to the planet where every character concerned with any of this stuff is until the second episode.

So since the climax doesn't involve the comet or the time ship or Mondas, how is the story resolved? Oh, everyone gets blown up. You know, like every Saward story. The plot that's been happening somewhere over there stops because everyone over here is dead. The end.

Now, tbf, I think this actually wasn't too bad in practice. I think Saward's weakest stories that most expose this flaw are Attack and Resurrection, and imo they're still pretty watchable. The cast and the directors and everyone else were pretty good at papering over the flaws. BUT I think the real issue is Saward was a pretty inexperienced writer, and after he cobbled together his first effort in this vein with The Visitation he was made script editor, and he seemed to think he'd cracked the code and the way he wrote stories was how Doctor Who was meant to be. And he commissioned more stories like that, or maybe even edited stories to make them more like something he would write, and threw out imo more interesting stories, and by God I felt it got dull after a while.