In which I tie together Daniel Boone and Breaking Bad

There was an episode of Daniel Boone directed by the great B director, Joseph Lewis. Lewis had directed the movie Gun Crazy, filmed the first implied oral sex scene in Hollywood history and directed a lot of episodes of the Rifleman.

The original script for the Daniel Boone episode he directed called for a coincidence. Daniel Boone runs into some woman in town. She runs away. He meets her again in the country somewhere. Was she an escaped indentured servant? I don't know.

Lewis didn't like this. He changed the script. Daniel Boone sees her in town, she runs away. As he heads home, Boone uses his tracking skills to follow and find her.

Lewis didn't like having coincidence in his scripts. He wanted his characters to make things happen using their special skills.

And this was a weakness of some episodes of Breaking Bad. Skyler was being blackmailed by her boss. And how is this solved? Half by her actions, half by accident. She goes to Saul, for some reason Saul knows two goons who he sends to her former boss's house. They force him to write a check to the IRS. They Fed Ex the check. Then they plan to hold the guy until the check clears.

But the fellow panics, makes a run for it, trips and falls, and, strangely, the fall kills him.

There was the scene in the desert where Walt and Jesse are held in a house by Tuco, the violent, unbalanced local drug lord. Walt and Jesse are trying to figure out how to kill him. They want to poison him by coaxing him into taking some methamphetamine, but he won't do it. His elderly grandfather, sitting in a wheelchair unable to speak, keeps ringing his bell.

"Why are you ringing the bell? Oh my God! They're trying kill me!"

He starts beating up Jesse.

Walter sees Jesse has a rock in his hand.

Walter distracts Tuco. His grandfather was trying to tell him "THAT WE WERE GOING TO POISON YOU BECAUSE YOU'RE A PSYCHO AND YOU DESERVE TO DIE!"

And Jesse hits him with a rock.

But it's Hank, Walters DEA agent brother-in-law who pulls up, gets into a gun fight with Tuco and kills him.

I don't know. Should they have had Walter get out of it with his superior intellect alone? It would have meant they'd need another reason why the Mexican drug cartel wanted to murder Hank. Of course, it was Hank's skill as an investigator that led him there---THAT wasn't a coincidence.

Should Skyler have used her accounting skills to neutralize the threat from her former employer? The death in a freak accident was a bit much.