A production problem: the opening Earth scenes are set on Lanzarote - and the planet Sarn scenes are filmed on Lanzarote. It is so obvious that they are at the same location. The opening section should have been filmed somewhere in the Home Counties, so that the Sarn scenes made more of a visual impact once the TARDIS moved there. With the previous two trips abroad, City of Death was set wholly in Paris, with only a few studio-bound prehistoric sets and Florentine interiors, whilst Arc of Infinity juxtaposed studio-bound Gallifrey with Amsterdam.
Peter Grimwade was not invited to the Lanzarote shoot, or its recce, thanks to JNT falling out with him. (He felt slighted that he wasn't invited to a meal which Grimwade arranged as a thank you to the crew who had prepped the cancelled Season 20 Dalek story which he was due to direct).
Grimwade said that he could have better matched his scripts to the locations had he been able to experience them. As it is, he made use instead of his Greek holidays, though a lot of that local colour didn't make it into the finished story.
JNT had also fallen out of love with Anthony Ainley, and for a while this really was going to be the Master's swan song - in this incarnation at least.
He and Saward thought seriously for a time about having the Master confirm his blood connection with the Doctor, but decided to drop it in the end - thankfully.
Turlough's history seems odd. Why should he be sent off to live on Earth whilst his brother gets to stay on the planet on which they crashed? Why not send both to other worlds? What exactly was so bad about his past that Turlough kept it secret from the Doctor? There's nothing shameful about being a political prisoner, especially when he must have been very young at the time of his exile. Indeed, he could have got the Doctor to help him, if Trion is under some sort of oppressive regime. (Maybe his family were actually the dictators, ousted in a popular uprising).
After rescuing Peri, why does Turlough bring her into the TARDIS? Why not simply carry her to the beach and summon help, so she is dealt with in a conventional manner - rather than have her wake up in a bigger-on-the inside space-time machine, where she might want to ask an awful lot of questions?
Where has Kamelion been all this time? He came aboard the TARDIS in The King's Demons, and hasn't even been referred to since. Surely Saward could have dropped the odd line in to explain where he was and what he was doing or, as I previously suggested, have him take on a humanoid form and have an actor in to play him for a story or two.
Kamelion reacts when he senses the psychic shock of the Master's mishap with his Tissue Compression Eliminator, so takes the TARDIS to Sarn - but there's all this business with the Trion artefact which doesn't quite fit with the rest of the narrative.
What was a Trion beacon doing on a Roman or Greek ship in the first place? Have they been using the Earth as a depository for exiles for centuries? The script introduces elements then (in)conveniently forgets all about them.
How exactly did the mini-Master manage to build a whole control room if all of his equipment is of gigantic proportions in relation to his diminished status? Was the whole room shrunk around him? (If so, why no doors?). Bit of luck that it just happens to house the device which enables him to control Kamelion.
How did he come to end up on Sarn? Because of his accident, or was he going there anyway? Bit of a coincidence if he was.
If the numismaton gas is on record in the TARDIS databank, then surely the Master must have known about it himself long before this. Surely it would have been a lot simpler coming to Sarn, instead of his convoluted schemes on Gallifrey and Traken.
And once the flame begins to turn into a conventional one - i.e. a wee bit burn-y - why not simply jump out? He stands there blabbing when he ought to be saving himself.
The Doctor's a bit too brutal in this story as well - far too readily accepting that Kamelion is irredeemable, and then doing nothing as his old enemy is seemingly burnt to a crisp. And they call Davison the bland Doctor...
Finally, Peri is on Sarn purely by accident, and the Doctor has hardly had any interaction with her throughout the story, so what makes him think she is companion material?
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