Peter Weller on Fringe’s time travel episode and the new Robocop

This week’s episode of Fringe has a special guest star, particularly in the sci-fi world. Peter Weller, Robocop and Buckaroo Bonzai himself, is the subject of Thursday night’s episode “White Tulip,” playing a time traveler who Walter Bishop (John Noble) and his Fringe team investigate. “The thing that really turned me on about it is, it’s a romantic,” Weller said in a conference call with the media. “It’s a guy who is going back in time and he’s making some serious sacrifices in terms of other people’s livelihood and well being, to get back and save his wife from dying in a ridiculous moment, a mistake that he made. He’s trying to find redemption and go back to the only person that really means anything to him. It’s just tremendously romantic and very moving. That alone was enough to make me want to jump in it.”  Time travel is a popular concept in science fiction so it will be exciting for viewers to see how Fringe deals with it. “Also, particularly the way they’re handling time travel, what the electrical field does around the person who’s time traveling, it’s sucking the energy out of the physical space where one lands so the energy gets rerouted, is just fabulous to me,” Weller said. “I don’t understand science that much but science fiction is an extraordinarily imaginative trope. The great science fiction is sort of like an autobiography of the world. If you follow history, you have a linear sort of record of the great events in the world. Then you have intersecting it vertically or thematically science fiction, the what ifs. What if we did this? The whole thing outside of our sort of linear experience, that’s the great gift of science fiction. It’s fun. If you have any kind of inventive mind at all, you go racing with it.” Fringe doesn’t just take Weller back to his sci-fi roots though. It also puts demands on his acting muscles like the best of his theater work. “There are scenes that are four pages of explanation and dialogue but really well written. They’re not just expository but they’re dramatic scenes to justify love and need and family. Those were challenges. Those are challenges to make come alive. The thing is predicated on losing the person you love so I come from the method. I come from Elia Kazan and Uta Hagen. You’ve got to plug [...]