Time travelers in Green River

As Ruby Sunday steps out of the TARDIS, she enters a lush prehistoric world, standing on a cliff overlooking a broad river with waterfalls and groups of roaming dinosaurs. As she admires everything in amazement after having traveled back in time, the Doctor explains where they are.

“The TARDIS stands for Time And Relative Dimension in Space. So we’ve moved location as well. This will be North America. One day this is Wyoming. Little town called Green River.”

This exchange happens in the first episode of the newest season of “Doctor Who,” which officially premieres this weekend. The clip was shared as a preview for the new episode, but it was just long enough to include the mention. Well, that and Ruby stepping on a butterfly and turning into a lizard-type creature, but that’s neither here nor there. Wibbly wobbly, timey wimey.

Green River getting name-dropped in an episode of the iconic British television series that premiered in 1963, has nearly 900 episodes over 39 seasons, and is loved all across the world, is honestly pretty awesome.

It’s especially exciting for me as a fan of “Doctor Who.” I’ve loved the show for about a decade, specifically after watching the “new Who” era. Sadly I haven’t been able to keep up with either “Old Who” or the last few seasons to come out (thanks to the way shows move around to different streaming platforms). But I’ve been keeping an eye on the news about the season that’s about to start, and hope I’ll be able to get back into watching it soon, because it’s a great show and the new episodes look fun.

But despite trying to keep up with the show in a general sense, I still might have missed this Green River reference if it hadn’t been brought to my attention by Tyler Hughs, who emailed the Star and shared the clip.

“I grew up in GR and started watching WHO on SLC public TV back in the 80s,” Tyler explained in the email. He said that the reference in the new episode is “a spectacular event for this nerd from GR.”

Tyler added - “One might wonder if the Greater Green River Intergalactic Spaceport factored into the mention.”

That’s a fair question, although if the Spaceport was part of the reason, they really should have done an entire episode based around the Doctor landing there! But for now, I’m still happy with just the naming of my community in of one of my favorite shows.

I honestly hope this little mention will give Green River some extra attention and love. I imagine some fans watching the episode will be intrigued by the reference and might look it up to see what and where Green River, Wyoming actually is. This could draw their attention to our beautiful community and all the different tourist opportunities nearby, and could bring in some new visitors.

This may not be the most conventional means for attracting tourism, and many people might overlook this little reference or wonder why it’s especially significant. There are plenty of great ways for Green River to get attention besides just being mentioned by a fictional time traveler. Still, for nerds like Tyler and me, and I’m sure many others in our community, it’s exciting that one of our favorite characters in one of our favorite shows, a time lord with access to all of time and space, would make a stop, in his own way, in Green River.