QUARK revisited: The Old and the Beautiful
Space baggies, space viruses and space bangin'
Quark was a half-hour science fiction comedy series created by Buck Henry which aired on NBC 1977-1978. I was eight years old when it aired, and thought it was the greatest thing ever. More than four decades later, I dare to ask the question, “Does it hold up?”
SPACE PLOTS! On Perma One, the various captains are given their orders and Adam Quark, accustomed to the repetitive task of collecting space garbage (he commands a garbage scow, after all) is surprised to learn he is to travel to the planet Camamore for “an extended romantic interlude” with Princess Carna in order to, ahem, consummate at treaty bringing Camamore into the United Galaxy and denying the planet and its resources to the dreaded Gorgons. En route, the garbage scow stops to collect a rogue space baggie, but the garbage hatch fails to close. Quark dons a space suit and spends five hours working in the hold to close it. When he returns to the bridge and removes his space helmet, the crew is shocked to see their commander has apparently aged 10 years.
Quark has contracted a space virus that causes him to age two years ever hour, putting his mission to romance Princess Carna in jeopardy. Fortunately, Transmute blood has strong antiviral capabilities, so a transfusion from Gene/Jean would clearly help the commander. Gene/Jean outright refuses however, so Ficus uses a Vegeton nerve pinch to stun the Transmute and conducts the transfusion without consent. Fortunately, the transfusion fails to work so no ethical dilemmas were injured in the making of this episode. Ficus next tries to electrocute the virus out of Quark’s system. This gambit also fails.
The crew receives a transmission from Princess Carna from a bubble bath, where it appears she’s already started in on the foreplay. She reveals she requested Quark personally, as she was impressed by a tryst the two shared when Quark was 25. Camamore women are so hyper-sexual that Camamore men have a high mortality rate. Quark confesses their tryst years before almost killed him. Increasingly senile, Quark delegates command to the Bettys when two Gorgon warships attack to try and stop the treaty. The Bettys ineffectually squabble among themselves while Gene/Jean and Ficus are equally useless. With his ship in danger, Quark regains his senses and destroys the attackers. Reaching Camamore, increasingly dottering, Quark beams down into Princess Carna’s bathtub in a final, desperate effort to salvage the treaty. Rather than taking offense, Prinncess Carna is excited—she’s never had a “romantic interlude” with a man older than 25. Quark sacrifices himself, but returns to the ship the next day fully restored to his youthful self. Ficus surmises that the change in his body chemistry as the result of his exhertion with the princess reversed the effects of the virus. Quark saves the day with a sexually eradicated virus.
SPACE BAGGIES! Y’all, I’m not going to sugar coat it—this one’s dumb. It’s juvenile and sophomoric and I’m sure the writers were giggling to themselves about the absurd sexual euphenisms they crammed in here. This is not an episode I remember seeing on its first run. There’s so much here to hate… and yet I don’t. I find myself accepting it for what it is, a big, dumb sex joke that fifth graders would find amazing but anyone older than, say, 13 would think lame.
From a science fiction perspective there is so much to hate. Quark contracts the space virus in a vacuum while wearing a space suit. I mean, what the hell? The whole blood trainsfusion bit with Gene/Jean is so blithely egregious in its violations of bodily automony that it is actually funny for all the wrong reasons. And the influence of Star Wars rears its ugly head when the Gorgons attack. Look, from the pilot episode on the recurring narrative from Palindrome and The Head has been that Quark is an inept, incompetent commander overseeing an inept, incompetent crew on an obsolete, decrepit garbage scow. Yet when the Gorgons attack—supposedly with the most powerful warships the United Galaxy has ever faced—the garbage scow takes multiple hits without sustaining any damage, and then promptly blows the enemy up once Quark musters enough wits to order “Fire the lasers!” Either Quark’s an incompetent commander or he isn’t. Either the ship is a helpless garbage scow or it’s not. I get that the swooping, pew! pew! pew! is an attempt to appeal to the Star Wars fanbase, but all of this is just terrible writing, inadvertently funny, yes, but terrible writing all the same. To rub salt in the wound, they apparently lacked sufficient budget to create new models for the Gorgon ships, so they used stock footage of the garbage scow to represent the attackers. I mean, even Jason of Star Command had higher standards.
And then Quark just abandons all pretense of being its own show by stealing both the Vulcan nerve pinch and transporters from Star Trek in the same episode.
But lest you think it all bad, can I get a shout-out for the costume designer? I think we can all agree this obvious moonlighting gig in between Wonder Woman episodes may be the high water mark for fashion on Quark, but also forshadows the distinctive wardrobe Princess Ardala would wear a few years down the road in Buck Rogers.
SPACE JOKES! Being a prime time series in the 1970s means there are no penis or boob jokes here, which actually might’ve improved this episode had they gone blue. The conceit of adding “space” in front of random nouns continues to be unfunny but that’s baked into the formula now and it would be weird for it to actually stop. Richard Benjamin does go all-in on the ridiculous premise, embodying the increasingly frail version of his character with gusto. As senility incresingly takes hold, his voical pitch gets higher and higher while he takes to conversing by simply repeating words and phrases spoken to him. Again, it’s utterly dumb but Benjamin delivers the lines with such earnestness that those scenes develop a snappy rhythm to them.
There’s a couple of nice, throwaway moments early on when the other captains complain to Palindrome about their assigned missions, which are presumably more prestigious but front-loaded with downsides. This undermines the whole premise that Quark gets all the crap missions and the other captains get the glory, but sinnce nobody making this show gives a flip about continunity or logic, why should we?
Princess Carna and her handmaidens play their roles straight, so that helps the episode find a weird balance.
Gene/Jean, the taget of homophobic vitriol in earlier episodes, gets to let his/her own bigotry run wild when Gene furiously announces. “I ain’t taking orders from no clones!” during the Gorgon attack.
And the Bettys. Ah, the Bettys. The Barnstable twins are doing everything in their power to set feminism back to the dark ages. They pitch an absolute fit when they learn Quark is to have a romantic interlude with Princess Carna, and don’t give a fig that it’s an Important Diplomatic Assignment (Quark doesn’t help matters at all by being so gleeful about it). Then the Bettys utterly fail when given command of the ship—their constant bickering is supposed to be funny, but that gag grew stale before the end of the pilot. The best joke comes at the end of the episode, once Quark has shaken off the effects of the virus. Ficus determines that the virus remains in his system, dormant, but will reactivate unless it is permanently eradicated. There are two options for a permanent cure—another romantic interlude, this one lasting seven full days, or injection with a serum Ficus just synthesized. The Bettys are absolutely ecstatic at the prospect of an uninterrupted week of sex with their captain (it’s not clear if they intend to double-team, tag-team or fight each other for the sole right to a seven-day shag fest) but their glee instantly turns to fury when Ficus nonchalantly jabs Quark with the serum. The Bettys, in their prodigiously skimpy costumes, continue to embody some ill-defined teenaged sex fantasy out of the Penthouse Forum. There’s a great deal of potential with the Bettys but they’re reduced to walking sex jokes. Barbara Feldon was treated so much better on Get Smart. It’s baffling that this show came from the same creator.
Still, Princess Carna’s digs have a cool Logan’s Run vibe, so they’ve got that going for them. Carousel!
QUARK revisited: Vanessa 38-24-36
QUARK revisited: All the Emperor’s Quasi-Norms, part 2
QUARK revisited: All the Emperor’s Quasi-Norms, part 1
QUARK revisited: Goodbye, Polumbus
QUARK revisited: The Good, the Bad and the Ficus