Thanks to some time-travel mischief, the team have to solve a mystery over and over again...

Fringe has always been very good at hooking the audience in the first few minutes of each episode. This week's opening hook is one of their best as RoboCop himself, Peter Weller, suddenly appears in the middle of a train car and somehow manages to leave all the passengers dead. His expression of disappointment is priceless. It's like a magician waiting for applause and discovering to his disappointment that he has also made his audience vanish.

Weller plays an MIT professor named Alistair Peck who has discovered the key to time travel. This sets up a situation that plays out as a kind of Groundhog Day time loop. The Fringe team solve this mystery by the second commercial break but it proves futile since Peck's ability to go back in time means they will have to solve it a few more times before the end of the episode.

Weller is very good in his monster of the week role but his plotline takes a backseat to the real focus of the episode which is Walter's (John Noble) personal conflict in telling Peter (Joshua Jackson) the truth about his existence. He's written a long letter explaining everything to him but cannot bring himself to hand it over. He also finds it nearly impossible to even look at him and Peter is aware of this.

Olivia (Anna Torv) continues to keep her mouth shut while advising Walter to just tell Peter the truth. When Walter discovers that Peck is travelling back in time in order to save his fiance from being killed in a car accident he immediately realizes that they are very much alike. He demands that he be allowed to talk sense into the man rather than allowing the FBI snipers to just kill him. As he explains to Olivia, "grief can make people go to extraordinary lengths".

In the end it seems that Walter cannot bring himself to tell the truth. He burns the letter in the fireplace just as a posthumous letter arrives from Alistair Peck. It's a reference to something they discussed earlier: a drawing of a white tulip.

This episode was fairly effective in dramatizing the moral ambiguity of Walter's actions and the larger moral question of breaking the laws of nature. However, the Peck plotline was a little too contrived to ever convince. Since it seemed to be nothing more than an excuse to push Walter's dramatic buttons we can never become emotionally involved in the story and therefore remain immune to the ideas it carries. Something a little less obvious would've paid greater dividends dramatically.

Things are heating up with only 5 episodes to go. Next week we get shapeshifters and Peter asks a question: "I'm not from here am I?"

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