Quark (Richard Benjamin) is once again assigned to space garbage duty. He and his crew leave Perma One to rendezvous with their next garbage pickup. As they are traveling through space, they encounter an unusual anomaly. Ficus determines that they are being sucked into a black hole. The ship survives passing through the black hole; however, an unusual event happens that splits the spaceship into two separate ships. The black hole created an anti-universe, and the two ships contain duplicate crews but with opposite personalities.
At first Quark is unaware that there is another spaceship. The duplicate ship begins attacking other United Galaxy ships. Admiral Flint (Geoffrey Lewis) demands a meeting with The Head (Alan Caillou) to request weapons to destroy whatever is attacking his ships. When it is discovered that Quark’s garbage ship is responsible Flint sends his forces to destroy him.
Quark finds out that he has been accused of destroying galaxy ships and that his evil self is the one who is really responsible. To clear his name, he must have a showdown with his evil self. The evil Quark vows to kill the good Quark.
Episode four takes a lot of its ideas from the original Star Trek series episode "Mirror, Mirror". The title of the episode is a play on the film “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly”.
The phrase quoted by Quark, “It isn’t very pretty, what a galaxy without pity can do” is a little shout out to the early sixties singer Gene Pitney and his 1961 hit “Town without Pity”. The song was featured in the Kirk Douglas film of the same name. Pitney, who hailed from Rockville, Connecticut, lived one town over from me. I grew up listening to and loving his songs. Someone once said, “If heartbreak had a voice, it would be Gene Pitney’s”.
Episode
Gene Pitney "Town Without Pity"