Silver Scream (comic story)

Silver Scream was the first of four parts of a connected storyline that extended through Doctor Who Ongoing #10. It introduced the characters of Matthew Finnegan and Emily Winter, who would later become the final full-time traveling companions of the Tenth Doctor's life. Important to the overall Ongoing story arc, the Doctor saved Winter's life, even though her death was a fixed point in time. This act led directly into his trial by the Shadow Proclamation in Fugitive.

Summary
The Doctor arrives in 1926 Hollywood to investigate a static point in time and to visit Archie Maplin, who he has apprently already met "several times' but this is the first time Archie's met him. The Doctor also meets actress Emily Winter and a runner for United Acting Studios, Matthew Finnegan, at a party full of Hollywood producers and actors. He immediately becomes suspicious of actor Maximilian Love and director Leo Miller. The Doctor finds that he was correct, and that Leo Miller has been sucking the hopes and dreams out of young actors to fuel the success of Maximilian. The Doctor eventually manages to stop the machine allowing Miller to do this, but this starts a fire in the studio, a fire which is supposed to kill Winter. However The Doctor saves her life. He manages to catch Miller and Love, who are both arrested, but is in deep trouble with the Shadow Proclamation for saving Winter's life.

Characters

 * The Doctor
 * Archie Maplin
 * Matthew Finnegan
 * Emily Winter

Continuity

 * In Journey's End when Donna Noble is about to get her memories whiped by the Doctor. She suggests going to meet Charlie Chaplin. As noted above, rights issues prevented the use of Chaplin for this story, however the Doctor does make an oblique reference to "the fellow in the bowler hat", indicating that Maplin is intended to be a different individual existing in the same universe as Chaplin (which preserves continuity should Chaplin ever appear on the TV series).
 * In an interview, Tony Lee confirmed that the ongoing series featuring the Tenth Doctor occurs right before the final specials.
 * The characters of Matthew and Emily return at the end of the following story arc, Fugitive, at which point they become companions of the Doctor.

Timeline

 * Silver Scream occurs after any number of possible points. It certainly occurs sometime after the final DWM Tenth Doctor comic strip, The Crimson Hand, but it likely does not occur directly after those events. In the IDW line, it definitely occurs after The Forgotten, but it could also occur after The Time Machination or Room with a Deja View — although there is nothing to connect Scream with these latter two stories. There are several companion-less New Series Adventures novels and audios this could come after. Placement with respect to televised episodes is also a bit speculative. Fugitive includes a reference to the "he will knock four times" prophecy, and Tesseract refers to Malcolm Taylor from Planet of the Dead, thereby placing this story somewhere between Dead and The End of Time. Its precise placement with respect to The Waters of Mars is more difficult, as those events are not referenced. Nevertheless, it's possible to imagine that it occurred after Waters, as the Doctor is once again meddling with fixed points in time.
 * Silver Scream occurs before: IDW: Fugitive