If you didn’t already know or haven’t guessed, Brandon Flowers is a Mormon. Here’s the whole segment:

I didn’t really care. I was mainly happy Doug didn’t leave the roof the same way. I couldn’t imagine the price of a new drill housing would be high, and it turns out it’s not. (They’re about $20, plus shipping.) However, the drill had broken quite cleanly, and I had some Sugru lying around that was approaching its best before date.

I decided to give the Sugru-fix a try, and I have to say it worked very well. I used an orange pack because I had two and thought I’d need them both, but in retrospect one was enough and I could have used the green packet (pictured above). No matter, the drill is more colourful this way. Here’s the after-shot:

This is very useful stuff. The drill has so far stood up to normal usage.

Sifting through the comments, I found an interesting objection: one commenter pointed out that a character in the show questions whether the pills would have the desired effect. For me, the jury is still out as to whether that would help make the viewer aware that morning-after pills aren’t effective at inducing abortions. (I’m leaning towards probably-not.) One of the less-interesting objections I found in the comments takes issue with the fact that Marcotte is picking on a matter of scientific factuality in a show about zombies. In the words of one of the many commenters making this weak objection: “perhaps that’s the reason the writers chose to stay out of the particulars of the science about it[:] It’s only a show about ZOMBIES, after all. Not a NatGeo documentary.”

If she had been decrying the ability of a dead guy to walk around and harass people, I’d say Marcotte was missing one of the show’s main points. But she is talking about a controversial, real-life issue. We really do hold people to account for what they portray in their fictional works. If an author takes as “normal,” or “everyday,” something that is morally wrong, we expect an answer for it. Imagine if, in The Walking Dead, all black zombies were hung in trees set and set alight, while all white zombies were quickly dispatched with a shot to the head and buried with reverence. (And all-else being equal: there wasn’t also some parallel-universe “race-war” happening at the time of the outbreak.) If not the cancellation of the series, we would rightly expect somebody to be fired. In this case, dismissal would probably be a bridge too far. But, as one presumably holds authors to account for other issues that affect our society, it is silly and dishonest to cast aspersions on the act of complaining about a point of scientific accuracy whose truth has a real effect on the well-being of our citizenry. Even in a show about zombies.

Look where the arrow is pointing. The four white marks jutting out from the larger white spot are the lander’s feet: