Scream of the Shalka (2003) was a six-episode animated Doctor Who story produced to be serialized on the BBC website for the programme's 40th anniversary featuring Richard E. Grant voicing the Doctor. This sketch is the first Three Faces update in chronological order featuring any Scream of the Shalka character, demonstrating the parallel existence in The Hero of Three Faces continuity of the Shalka fiction plane and the proper Doctor Who fiction plane with the same effect as did the earliest chronological Curse of the Fatal Death cartoon, for yet another alternate fiction plane incarnation of the Doctor, like Fatal's, who takes focus of Three Faces continuity for a stretch of chronology.

In the contemporary absence of the production of proper tv episodes in 2003, this incarnation was touted by the BBC as the "official" ninth incarnation of the Doctor until just about the time the episodes began actually appearing on the website, because that was when it was announced that the proper tv series would be returning in 2005. The shalka Doctor was a gloomy personality, described by the writer as having become "tired of what he does", which serendipitously dovetailed rather well with the new tv series's new backstory that the Doctor had just fought in a Time War which he had been forced to bring to a finish by committing genocide against both his own people and their enemies.