Quark is a 1977 American science fiction sitcom starring Richard Benjamin. Broadcast on Friday nights at 8:00–8:30 p.m. on NBC, the pilot aired on May 7, 1977, and the series followed as a mid-season replacement in February 1978. The series was cancelled in April 1978. Quark was created by Buck Henry, co-creator of the spy spoof Get Smart. Plot The show was set on a United Galaxy Sanitation Patrol Cruiser, an interstellar garbage scow operating out of United Galaxy Space Station Perma One in the year 2226. Adam Quark, the main character, works to clean up trash in space by collecting "space baggies" with his trusted and highly unusual crew. Quark draws heavily from Star Trek: The Original Series as a source of parody. In its short run, specific episodes also satirized such science fiction as Star Wars, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Buck Rogers, and Flash Gordon. Three of the episodes were direct parodies of Star Trek episodes. Characters Adam Quark (Richard Benjamin) is a Commander who longs for a glamorous, important assignment and ends up collecting trash instead. He is skilled and competent, but extraordinarily unlucky. Betty I and Betty II, a.k.a. The Bettys (Cyb and Patricia Barnstable) are the navigators and pilots of the ship. They are completely identical, with identical red-hot passions for Quark. One of them is a clone of the other, but each claims the other one is the clone. They have a tendency to speak in perfect unison and have exactly the same thought at exactly the same time. Quark, when describing his crew, explains that he is in love with Betty, but he is not sure which one. Gene/Jean (Tim Thomerson) is a "transmute", a humanoid being with a complete set of both male and female chromosomes. He/she serves as the ship's engineer. The gender confusion manifests in a split personality—when Gene's macho male side is in control, he is gung-ho, angry and violent with a pathological hatred of the Klingon-like "Gorgons", while the much more mild-mannered Jean personality is stereotypically feminine and demure, pacifistic and a bit of a coward. He/she will frequently switch personalities with no warning, and usually at the worst possible time. Ficus Pandorata (Richard Kelton) is Quark's Spock-like science officer and is a "Vegeton", a member of a race of sentient plant life (Ficus pandorata or pandurata is better known as Ficus lyrata, the fiddle-leaf fig). He is