“Breaking Bad’s” Walt White (Bryan Cranston) may be the Zeitgeist’s poster boy for 2008: Bedeviled by mistakes that didn’t seem like mistakes at the time and an epic bad-luck streak, he’s weary, beleaguered and left for dead by American society at large. A once-brilliant chemist who in his halcyon days contributed to research that won a Nobel Prize, he’s now stranded in a crushing job in Albuquerque teaching high-school chemistry to bored, uninterested students who don’t respect him, and now he learns he’s dying of lung cancer. He doesn’t want to be a burden to his family – in fact, he wants to leave them in good financial shape when he’s gone – but how?

“Breaking Bad” offers solace in the form of cold comfort to the downtrodden, to those who have given up, to those resigned to lives of quiet desperation and misery: It’s not too late, the show tells us. You can still turn your life around. Of course, you’ll have to commit a major felony to do so, but …

Walt’s putting his mad chemistry skills to work, cooking up the purest, finest crystal meth New Mexico has ever seen. The series’ first three episodes were filled with manic action and awful violence, as other drug dealers encroached upon Walt’s turf, resulting in a spectacularly gross sequence in which his inept partner-in-crime Jesse (Aaron Paul) experienced complications while trying to dispose of one body, and Walt endured a protracted attempt to murder the other in an astonishing scene that recalled Paul Newman’s exhausting efforts to knock off that Commie in “Torn Curtain.”

So now, it’s time for the show to take a breather and reflect upon what has happened, which it does in the next couple of episodes, beginning Sunday.

Inconveniently, Walt’s brother-in-law Hank (Dean Norris) is a DEA agent (shades of the “Weeds” storyline in which Mary-Louise Parker’s Nancy dated, then married, Martin Donovan’s DEA agent) who informs his colleagues that he thinks a new drug kingpin is in the area. Walt’s not a bad guy, just an inappropriately blustery one whose high levels of self-confidence probably aren’t justified. At a family barbecue, Walt’s wife Skyler (“Deadwood’s” Anna Gunn) blurts out their little secret: Walt has cancer. Hank’s wife Marie (Betsy Brandt) lands Walt a consultation with a respected specialist – treatment, thanks to Hank’s lousy HMO, will set his family back $90K that they don’t have, and with no guarantees.

So this week and next, the family embarks upon a great debate as to what Walt should do: He imagines his weakened, diminished self, bedridden and hacking his way to the finish line, and says, “That’s how you would remember me. That’s the worst part.” His son (RJ Mitte) is appalled that the fight has left his father: “Just give up and die, already.”

And here’s where “Breaking Bad,” created by Vince Gilligan, lives: In eviscerating our nation’s health-care crisis and contemplating the controversial quality-of-life debate. Conservatives want to make sure you’re born, but then they don’t have a whole lot of use for you afterwards (the recent Draconian bankruptcy law doesn’t even forgive those with catastrophic illnesses, and don’t even mention universal health care), while some progressives support assisted suicide for the terminally ill.

Aside: So I hereby offer a plan that’ll please both sides: The “THX-1138” Health-Care Initiative. “THX-1138” was George Lucas’s first film, set in a dystopian future where each law-enforcement mission was given a strict budget; the second the mission had spent its allocated funds, it was aborted. Under my plan, the government examines how much money the sick person has to devote to medical attention, and once s/he has frittered it away on trying to stay alive, they’re immediately disconnected from their IV, taken off their meds and driven out to the desert where they can die in peace. No muss, no fuss, no post-mortem debt for the family – what’s not to love? Since universal health care is a pipe dream, at least this program’s virtue is that it offers an honest reckoning of the high esteem in which the government holds its citizens.

Back to business: Sunday’s episode also offers some poignant backstory on Jesse, Walt’s sidekick. At a low moment in his life (well, an even lower moment; they’re all pretty low where Jesse’s concerned), he returns to the not-so-loving embrace of his family, a stolid bunch who has tried again and again to help him, only to have their hearts broken. Jesse makes an effort – he even helps set the table for dinner – and a journey to his childhood bedroom forces reflection on the promise he once may have had but has since squandered.

Next week, however, introduces some prickly complications, so here’s a spoiler alert – read no further if you don’t want a revelation or two exposed.

Walt and Skyler attend a birthday part for one of Walt’s former colleagues, a man whose career trajectory has soared just as decidedly as Walt’s has plummeted. They relive some good times and the guy offers him a job, pointing out, “We have excellent health benefits, the best.” Walt, realizing that Skyler told his old friend about his cancer, is suddenly imbued with some bizarre sense of honor, is offended, and turns him down. He tries to justify his decision when kvetching, “My whole life, I’ve never had a real say about any of it.”

The end of the episode indicates that there’s more than meets the eye here, some sort of messy glitch in the relationship, but still: Does Walt really consider having “a real say” in cooking up crystal meth more honorable than accepting a borderline-charity position from a friend? Isn’t that what friends do for one another? I know that if a friend were to offer me a cushy gig, I wouldn’t let pride get in the way, but then, I don’t have any friends, so that’s a moot point.

Walt’s decision to embrace his inner criminal was provocative when the series began, but giving him an out like this only for him to (at least at this point) decline it undercuts “Breaking Bad’s” “desperate times call for desperate measures” aspect. Here’s hoping they can clarify this in future episodes, but here’s also not getting my hopes up too much – they only have two episodes left, and apparently two went unproduced due to the writers strike. Gee, I hope this show doesn’t let me down.

- “Breaking Bad:” AMC, 10 p.m. Sunday.