When “Breaking Bad” does a very special episode, the guy in the wheelchair imparts death. Grand-Guignol-style death, climaxing in one of the most shocking scenes ever to jolt this horror fan to the edge of her seat.

Throughout season four, drug kingpin, entrepreneur, and philanthropist Gustavo Fring has been portrayed as near-superhuman, a man of awesome psychological and physical resilience, a man whose discipline, resolve, and reserve make Captain Picard look like a Chevy Chase character. With cameras everywhere and plans within plans, Gus Fring is in control.

Until his ancient enemy Hector Salamanca, trapped in a wheelchair in the dismal “Casa Tranquila,” takes a last draw on his oxygen tank, stares into Fring’s eyes as his own fill with tears, and taps his finger — the only part of his body he can move voluntarily — on his call bell. Over and over, until the bomb beneath his chair is triggered, and Hector and Gus make their final bad break together.

Hector’s suicide bombing is his most shocking use of power, but not his only one. To lure Gus to Casa Tranquila, Hector sets up a meeting with the DEA. Gus is to think Hector is turning state’s evidence, but once the DEA meeting is set up, Hector’s nurse brings out his letterboard so that he can spell out his message to the agents clustered around the table. She reads each letter aloud, clearly and slowly, and Hector rings his bell when she hits the correct one. Her voice begins to shake with anger and humiliation as he forces her to spell out “S – U – C – K – M – Y ” before the agents stop her. When he begins again with ” F – U ” she is nearly in tears.

People who want power will find a way to get it.

That’s one special lesson “Breaking Bad” has to teach us: Everyone wants power. Control of the story. A seat on the hospital board. Money. Information. A bitchin’ car. Influence. An orderly, well-labeled mineral collection. Clues. A shoplifted tiara.

People with disabilities aren’t immune to the drive for power. They just might have to break a different way in order to get it.

Hector’s power lies in the capacity of the neglected and disabled elderly to shame, to embarrass the decent. It also lies in his capacity to bring out the sadism of the indecent. Gus, the most disciplined of men, cannot resist the chance to torment the man he believes is helpless. Gus gets about three seconds to absorb the life lesson that this was a mistake before the right side of his face is blown off.

Hector’s is not the only broken body on “Breaking Bad.” The series begins when chemistry teacher Walter White is diagnosed with lung cancer. TV-land tends to be populated by strong, beautiful bodies, bodies that eagerly bend themselves to seduce, to run, to work. On “Breaking Bad,” bodies often don’t help. Bodies get pregnant accidentally. Bodies get injured. Bodies become addicted. Every major character on “Breaking Bad” has been betrayed by their body or brain at this point. Walt’s cancer. Skyler’s unplanned pregnancy. Marie’s mental illness. Jesse’s addiction. Hank’s PTSD and spinal injury. Walt Jr.’s cerebral palsy.

Unlike the others, Walt Jr. was born with his disability. It doesn’t represent waning power, the way Hank’s paralysis or Skyler’s fading sex appeal does. Perhaps because of this, Walt Jr. comes across as one of the least neurotic characters on the show, the one most comfortable in his skin. Disability is relative; Walt Jr. has never known a life without his wrist canes. They don’t diminish his mojo — having to drive a PT Cruiser, Skyler’s idea of a hip hoopty for a 16-year-old male, takes care of that job. Even so, Walt Jr. reacts to the less-than-ideal birthday present with resigned grace. Walt Jr. can absorb an insult to his dignity better than any other man in the show, certainly better than his father can.

With his halting speech and matinee-idol features, Walt Jr. is kind of a Woobie. Is there anything a fan of “Breaking Bad” dreads more than the look in Walt’s anime-huge brown eyes should he ever realize the truth about his father? And yet, after four grueling seasons, it’s hard to believe that the child of two people as smart as Walter and Skyler White hasn’t begun to smell something rotten. We all seek power, we all seek control. Walt Jr. accepts his imperfect body. But he is unwilling to accept the hints that his family might be disrupted and corrupted. For the world to make sense to Walt Jr., his father must be a decent man. For his father to be a decent man, Walt Jr. must learn to rely more heavily on his powers of rationalization than on his powers of observation.

This is what gets people killed in the world of “Breaking Bad.” This may be the only true disability there is: willfully chosen blindness.

Which brings us to Hank Schrader. Originally portrayed as a blowhard and something of a bully, Hank’s abilities as a detective reach their peak when he is shot through the spine and forced into a bad-tempered convalescence. Walt Jr. was born with cerebral palsy, and Hector Salamanca’s near-paralysis was acquired over a long lifetime. Hank was brought down suddenly, in midlife, and wastes much energy on such pointless exercises in power as verbally abusing his wife and obsessing over a mineral collection. The Heisenberg case gives him reason to focus. When he goes to the DEA to present his findings, he takes care to use his cane rather than a walker — he’ll give away as little of his injury as he can. And yet, when he is ready to make his most theatrical pitch, to sell his former colleagues on the notion that Gustavo Fring, apparent friend of law enforcement, is in fact the man they are looking for — he uses that cane to point to the picture of Fring on the wall. Four prongs, nailing his story down. Without that cane, and the injury that necessitated it, Hank never would have seen the truth.

I don’t ever recall seeing an hour of television with three prominently featured characters with disabilities, in which the story itself was not about disability. “Breaking Bad” violates realism in many ways, but it is profoundly realistic in this: that disability is not a metaphor or a trope. It’s something that happens to people. Many people. Most. There are a lot of injured, sick, disabled characters on “Breaking Bad” because there are a lot of injured, sick, disabled people in the world. You can analyze the different ways disability plays out in the show’s themes of power and self-delusion, as I have. You can parse the semiotics of the cane versus the wheelchair, of the deep themes of mobility (physical, geographic, social) that gird the show.

Or, you can simply enjoy the novelty of seeing people with disabilities portrayed. As people. With disabilities. And rivalries, and egos, and loved ones, and memories, and secrets.

I identify hugely with Eliza Doolittle, but anyone who knows my commitment to upward mobility and cute straw hats could call that one. Back when I was a professor, none of my students were particularly surprised when I showed up on Halloween as Minerva MacGonagall, either.

But you know who else? You know who Mr. Improbable and I totally, totally identify with?

April and Andy from “Parks & Recreation.”

Yes, folks, this couple:

… holding flowers and meat, is for all intents and purposes, this couple:

… except with the addition of positive IQs and demonstrable work ethics. My Harvard-educated husband would not be mistaken for a character who, when commissioned to write a song “five thousand times greater than ‘Candle in the Wind,’” wrote a song called “Five Thousand Candles in the Wind.” Nor am I, the Woman of a Thousand Jobs, all that much like April, whose most valuable skill as a receptionist is a complete inability to take a message, therefore sparing her boss the task of returning his calls.

But the relationship? Yeah, that’s actually dead on. His optimism and faith in me. His remarkable ability not to annoy me, when almost everyone else on earth does. Our leap-of-faith wedding. My hatred of the outdoors and love of goth music against his cheerful, softball-playing self. The fact that Mouse Rat — excuse me, Improbable Research — really needs me as a manager.

Who’s your secret avatar?

The three of them seem rather ideally suited for a game of Marry, Fornicate, Kill, do they not? I’d kill Eric because he is the most dangerous — the strongest, smartest, and most self-interested. Also, I’m not into blonds. Fornicate with Bill because he’s attractive, but too neurotic and self-deluding for a relationship. And marry Alcide, because what would be more fun than a good-natured, incredibly hot guy who builds houses for a living and can give you a chance to study wolf behavior up close?

What would your choices be?

I can’t get with it.

This is a man who has damaged other people and himself multiple times. I’m not a clinical psychologist, and as noted I haven’t seen the interviews, but you can’t avoid hearing the quotes, and it’s obvious that Mr. Sheen is not in his right mind. The extent to which he is consciously driving his own downfall as opposed to being exploited by the media, doesn’t seem all that relevant to me. Either way, it’s not something I want to observe. Either way, it’s not something I want to participate in. Over the weekend, I posted a link to LOLcats captioned with Charlie Sheen quotes on Facebook, but I took it down almost immediately.

I’m not claiming some moral high ground here. Maybe I’m a deeply sensitive soul, maybe I’m too thick to get the joke. I try hard never to mistake the latter for the former. Some of the most compassionate and also media-savvy people I know are posting some of the best jokes.

What’s your take on it all?

The problem with Hulu, of course, is that there’s so many hidden gems on the site. Have you found anything particularly enjoyable or odd that you’d like to share? I recently found that the premium version offers the entirety of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” which I missed on its first run. They also have “Caprica,” the remarkable spinoff of “Battlestar Galactica,” which has all the complex personalities and moral dilemmas that marked the first two seasons of BSG, along with some of the most gorgeous sets you’ve ever seen (a real change from BSG’s dull starship interiors). If you never caught the original UK version of “The Office,” that’s on there as well. And an anthology series called “Masters of Horror,” with classic and modern stories directed by — well, masters of horror. The quality on that one is varied, but some of the episodes are quite good.

Have you found anything good on the site to recommend?

See? When it’s not just the “the idiot’s leaving, do we replace him with the Amish Klingon beet farmer, the Cornell falsetto, or the black dude with the Kindle,” it actually sounds like something worth thinking about, doesn’t it?

All of them have their plusses and minuses.

Dwight can clearly sell, which will give him credibility even if he isn’t liked. And it may be the case that for an company that’s having to fight to stay alive in its sector, the bottom line is that employees want someone who will keep the doors open and the lights on. People do tend to prefer authoritarian leaders in hard and uncertain times. While Dwight’s poor interpersonal skills would have made him a bad manager during boom times, he might be a surprisingly good “war president.”

Andy is an incompetent salesman; even a warehouse worker or two has outsold him. However, he has a Cornell degree, making him by far the most on-paper qualified, and has a network of alumni and former coworkers at high-profile (now defunct) corporations to draw on. He is well-liked in the office, and is quick to take good advice when it is offered.

Darryl, the former warehouse foreman, was recently promoted to administration. He has little formal education but is intelligent and hardworking, and committed to self-improvement. He also has a strong sense of organizational dynamics, and has been known to advise people much higher up in the organization to their benefit. He is respected and well-liked both in the warehouse and in the office.

Whom would you promote and why?

As a child, I found “Year Without a Santa Claus” to be a revelation primarily for its awesomely funky “Snow Miser/Heat Miser” sequence. (I have the Big Bad Voodoo Daddy version of this song on my iPod workout tunes playlist.) As a baby geek, I appreciated the way “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” filled in the blank spots of Santa’s history — years later, of course, I was to become equally fascinated with such burning questions as “What was Sarek and Amanda’s courtship like?” and “Why did McCoy join Starfleet, anyway?” I didn’t yet know what fan fiction was, but I knew it when I saw it, and I liked it.

But Rudolph … ah, Rudolph.

“Here Comes Santa Claus” just fills in some details. “Rudolph” creates a whole new world. A world in which everyone is either a rigid conformist or an exiled, despised outsider. The North Pole in “Rudolph” isn’t some happy workers’ collective: if you’re an elf, you make toys, and if you’re a reindeer, you fly, and you damn well know your place and don’t get fancy about it. And it doesn’t matter whether you have different ideas (like wanting to be a dentist) or if you only look different (with a shiny red nose) — if you are different, you are The Other.

It’s no wonder that watching “Rudolph” doesn’t make me feel weird. It’s pretty much about the most Jewish Christmas special there is.

It’s no wonder two of my favorite gay friends call their annual Christmas Party “The Island of Misfit Toys,” either. “Rudolph” is, for all intents and purposes, a story about growing up gay in a military family. Rudolph’s father, who forces him to wear a cap over his nose, is basically the Great Santini with antlers. The only thing keeping him from bouncing a basketball off his son’s head is that he doesn’t have opposable thumbs. Rudolph’s mother is a stereotypical beaten-down military wife — she accepts her son, but doesn’t have the backbone to defend him against her tyrannical husband. You know she’s got a secret substance-abuse problem and runs off to the Valium lick as soon as Donner goes to work in the morning.

So of course I had to watch that episode, and then I wound up watching the rest of the season, which has definitely been on an upswing. (And yes, Mr. Olyphant can act, as long as there are no guns around. As Anton Chekhov famously said, “If there is a gun in the first act, do not cast Timothy Olyphant, because all he will do is stare at it and clench his jaw meaningfully.”)

ANYWAY.

I thought last week’s episode, “The Christening,” was one of the best television episodes about church, and church people, and how non-church-people cope with church, ever. Television doesn’t do religion well, by and large; it’s either ignored completely or made the utter center of things in a way that doesn’t reflect most people’s lives. (“Six Feet Under” was a notable exception.)

“The Christening” was, perhaps obviously, about the christening of Jim and Pam “Halbert”‘s baby. (This is the one thing I found wrong. In my experience, no clergyperson at such an intimate, high-energy church would agree to christen a baby if she didn’t even know the couple’s last name. Clergy make mistakes, but they’re performers: they keep it fresh every time, remember names, and realize that babies aren’t reliable at ritualized events and have plenty of options on hand at naming ceremonies, christening, and brisses in case things go wrong. Regardless of how good your scriptural exegesis is, you don’t graduate preacher school without knowing how to handle a vomiting infant.)

But aside from that … it was about church. I grew up with church people, and that’s what they’re like. On the down side, they can honestly believe that going to a Mexican city for three months to build a school will make them “practically Mexicans.” On the plus side, they accept, and love, and have fun, and enjoy dorkiness. It was brilliant how even Michael Scott, a man who expects to be welcomed as a hero wherever he goes, is taken aback by genuine Christian hospitality. Deep down, he never really expected anyone to like or accept him — but Christians will. He is faced with people who are willing to believe in his goodness, in his capacity to transform himself, who believe in dreams and making them come true — and he is terrified, and runs from them.

William James described the two types of religious temperament as “healthy-minded” and “sick-souled.” Jim and Pam, the youth group — for people like this, religion is … calm. An ordinary part of life. Community, moral and emotional support, the beauty of the Scriptures, saying a prayer at night. No drama.

Michael, though, wants the drama. Religion can teach you the truth about yourself or it can bolster your self-delusions like no other power on earth, and for some of us sick-souled ones, it can do both with vertiginous speed and force. Michael yearns for an authentic life, at the same time as he clings desperately to the very delusions that keep him from having one.

And Toby? Toby, who wanders outside the church for almost the entire episode, unable to step over the threshold. Toby, who when he does, walks up to the altar and asks, simply, “Why you always gotta be so mean to me?”

A prayer for the ages.

Tough questions, but hilarious sitcom hijinks!

Such as … when I am walking around in the city, either with Milo or by myself, I sometimes like to play a game I call “‘Law & Order’ Intro.” You know how every episode of L&O opens with someone discovering a body? A couple of joggers are stretching when one of them notices a body by the side of the path. A woman walking her dog thinks that he’s pulling the leash to go after a squirrel, but it turns out that behind that tree is — a dead body. A busy executive talking on a cell phone during a noontime power walk goes to a dumpster to dispose of a plastic water bottle only to find — right.

So this is the game I play. Ooh, what is that in the reeds by the Charles? Tucked behind the dumpster at Chang Sho? Underneath a Harvard footbridge? It’s a mental game, I hasten to explain. I don’t do anything, I only try to imagine what kind of person I am, what my goal is, how I will react. Maybe I am a professor of criminology who has never actually seen a corpse. Maybe I am a stay-at-home MILF whose plans for a yoga-and-coffee date just got radically disrupted. Maybe I am a former junkie trying to stay clean and terrified of encountering law enforcement again in any context.

It’s a nice way to enliven a dog walk or an errand run. Thanks, ConductMom and father of blessed memory, for not having any other kids to disturb my imaginary games. Thanks for being big fans of crime dramas, too.

A decent summary of the first season of “The Office,” if I remember correctly.

I’ll keep watching, partly out of love for Michael C. Hall’s work, partly out of inertia, partly out of a desire to see if my secret theory is correct: that Dexter is actually not a psychopath at all, but was merely conditioned to believe he was by his stepfather Harry, a man who truly did lack all conscience.

In the meantime, though, here are the three great mysteries of “Dexter”:

1. How did Rita wind up unexpectedly pregnant anyway? If there’s anything we know about Dexter, it’s that a) he can damn well keep his DNA to himself and b) he wraps everything in plastic. I’m just not seeing this guy accidentally knocking someone up.

2. Why doesn’t Dexter have different ring tones on his cell phone? Considering how much time he spends in the car, and how compartmentalized his life is, you’d think he’d want to know whether it’s his clueless wife, his suspicious coworker, or his latest victim on the phone without having to look down in traffic.

3. How does Dexter stay in shape? Even under his grey Henley killin’ shirt, you can tell Michael C. Hall is cut like a diamond. Dexter has repeatedly been shown besting men larger and better trained than he is in hand-to-hand combat. Yet we never see him working out (he had a treadmill at his old apartment, but I only recall Deb ever using it), and the fact that he rarely has time to kill — literally — means we can’t assume he’s hitting the gym during offscreen time. The only foods we ever see him eat are donuts, pizza, waffles, pot roast, Cuban sandwiches, and other child- and officemate-pleasing treats. Does serial killing burn that many calories?

If so, I sure as hell hope Meme Roth never finds out.

Going on the Paxil coincided with cutting way back on drinking, and the two together did a real number on my dreams. Drinking alcohol before bed — even a seemingly modest glass or two of wine, if it’s a regular habit — can suppress dream sleep, which means that when you quit, you may get a bounceback effect. Add to that the fact that SSRIs intensify dreams, and things got quite exciting for a while.

After graduate school, I worked for a while with Alan Hobson on the psychology of dreams. As I’ve written about before, one of Alan’s ideas is that we solve problems in our dreams much as we do in real life, we simply don’t question the bizarre. Alan also believed that Freud and psychoanalysis had led people to focus too much on the symbolism of dreams. When you stop trying to figure that out, and instead focus on the story and the emotions, what the dream “means” will usually become quite clear.

The power of a dream lies in its story, and in how that story affects you. The set and props are just whatever your unconscious mind could most quickly grab: images from the day’s business; random memories that floated up in response to this color or that smell; faces or places you watched on television before bed. This is why there’s no point to “dream dictionaries” that purport to tell you what the various symbols in your dreams mean. Dream symbols are at once universal (ever go through a computer training with co-workers, and discover afterward that many of you dreamed of the program you were learning that night?) and idiosyncratic (a cigar may be merely a cigar to Sigmund, but it might symbolize the Cuban embargo to Rosalita, or her father’s cancer to Dora, or even a penis to James).

Anyway, about a month or so after I’d been on the medication, I had a dream that nicely illustrated both the principles above and the effect that Paxil had had on on my problem-solving style.

I’d been over to a friend’s house that night to catch up on some Tivo’ed episodes of “Big Love.” (It’s a fun show to watch in batches — when you watch several episodes back-to-back, you realize that every time someone smiles, something horrible happens within 10 seconds.) Unsurprisingly, that night, I had the classic Actor’s Nightmare: I’d been cast as Bill Henrickson’s fourth wife, but no one had bothered to give me a script.

Was I anxious or worried? Oh, heck no. I have a fair amount I’d like to say to those characters, so until the directors put a script in my hand, I was going to say what I thought. (I recall telling first wife Barb, “Listen to how Bill yells orders at you! My boss doesn’t talk to me that way, and he’s my boss! A person’s spouse certainly shouldn’t bark at them like that.”) And if the director or other actors didn’t like what I had to say, well, give me the script, already, and I’ll stop improvising and say what you want.

Have you ever had a dream that used to make you anxious, but doesn’t anymore? Or a kind of dream you stopped having once certain problems in your waking life got resolved? Or a dream that makes more sense to you now that I’ve talked about the “story, not symbolism” principle?

Poor Jorge! He loved that dog. His life must feel so strange now, with “Lost” over, living back on the mainland, with Nunu dead. This is one of the pains of the death of a pet — not only the loss of a companion, but the end of an era. We often get pets at times of transition in our lives, and when those pets die, that chapter in our life feels even more definitively closed. Mr. Garcia has shut down his “Dispatches from the Island” blog and started a new blog, for this new phase of his life. The Nunu years are over. Have you ever had a pet whose lifetime coincided with a particular phase of your life, whose passing seemed to be the end of one chapter of your story?

Before we all leave the island for good, I suppose I should reassess my earlier criticism of how Hurley’s alternative universe was played out. Since the alternaverses were only mental constructs, or purgatory, or a bardo, or some damned thing or other, the emphasis on Hurley’s weight in his alternate-universe story reflected his own insecurity, not the writers’ fat prejudice. I think there’s still room for criticism — was Hurley’s primary reason for insecurity really his weight? He seemed to not trust himself because of his earlier bouts with mental illness and his lack of education and acknowledged leadership capabilities — but I think a lot of character development got sloppy toward the end there, so I don’t feel Hurley got a particularly raw deal.