Having watched this, I'm under the impression the professor had sex with a monkey and had the hairless ape daughter (the monkey was the head near the stairway).
Is this other people's impression? If so, I wonder how an 80s show got away with references to bestiality like that. This was back during the family ties generation of TV. Back when Jessie on saved by the bell had to get addicted to caffeine pills because the shows didn't want to reference real drugs.
have you seen the movie Creepshow? the actor plays a college professor in that movie. he also encounters a simian-like creature in a crate. i think that's the daughter's mother.
This doc was Fritz Weaver, the one on Creepshow was Hal Holbrook. Besides, the creature in The Crate was far too vicious for any kind of physical encounter with a human, which is why he knew it would kill his wife. Also, after it killed her he chained the crate and sunk it in a quarry.
Actually doing some work on some horror stuff, I managed to bump into Tom Savini and I picked his brain on this episode. This was a long time ago - like the mid 90s when I asked him but he more or less commented that the creature in the closet is Fritz Weaver's daughter who he had done some experiments on and ended up turning her into the creature by accident.
This is alluded to at the beginning when they're showing scenes of his lab and they show a bat head displayed on the wall alluding to that he does animal experiments. Also the fact that he was the head of the veterinary college.
What's even funnier is that Tom was awestruck by my ignorance. To him, this was completely evident in the episode and he couldn't understand how I didn't get it.
...For every man who has ever lived, in this universe, there shines a star. -Arthur C. Clarke
I had no idea either. I always thought he found it while on some expedition, I think he mentions something like that but I could be wrong, it was a long time ago.