Blood Over Water (TV series)

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Totally not trying to be Scarface. Now in 3D.

Blood Over Water was the brainchild of six TV practicum class students that began life as a drama project in the fall semester TVPR 389 class of 2009 at Ferris State University.

The plot is essentially this: A mob boss named Clyde Spendelworth moves into town, and takes control of the local Sleet Mountain water bottling factory, and nobody seems to notice at first. Clyde immediately hires George Lawence and Kyle Tugrass to be his enforcers at the factory, and blackmails bottling plant employee Chris Kennal into working for his conspiracy. Chris is friends with twin brothers Mark and Aaron Stefflin, and Mark works with Chris at the factory. However, Clyde grows over confident when he assumes Mark will be as corruptible as Chris. Mark, sure enough, isn't interested in Clyde's games - especially when he takes issue with pollution and cleanup fraud. Mark steals a "Confidential" envelope, then waits for the perfect opportunity to rat out his employer to the EPA.

Alas, Mark soon goes missing. He alerted his brother Aaron that he intended to go on a fishing trip with him. But when Aaron gets no response, he goes over to Mark's house to investigate. He finds it in ruins. Strange men begin chasing him around, and it grows difficult to tell friend from foe. Chris soon finds that Aaron - and other innocents - are being caught in the web of deceit and murder that Clyde has enacted to keep his cleanup fraud scheme from becoming the town's biggest scandal in years. But as more innocents get entangled and the body count starts piling up, Chris realizes he faces a difficult choice: Will he betray his company, or betray his friends? Or both? They say Blood is Thicker Than Water...But by how much? Also, Blood has been shed over water.

A novel is in the works to enhance / streamline / repair elements of continuity from the miniseries, as well as tie it in with the greater Gerosha Chronicles. Expanded material makes clear that the story happens over four months, rather than in a single week as the miniseries implies with its scene-by-scene narrative timeline. Clyde's ties to the Hebbleskin Gang, personal frustrations with the vigilante Navyrope, ties to the sex trafficking ring Gleeful-N'-Young, and Chris' journey to becoming an anti-hero known as the Purge-Flare are all either touched on or hinted at in the novel, whereas there wasn't time to explore those themes in the miniseries.

This incarnation of Blood Over Water should not be confused with the similarly-named book by David and James Livingston, nor the film based on it. More information about the mini-series can be viewed here. Information about the upcoming novel remake is here. A compilation of the five-part mini-series into a single film can be viewed here. The blooper reel can be viewed here. The miniseries' convoluted development cycle is discussed in detail here.

Tropes used in Blood Over Water (TV series) include:

• 3D Movie: On YouTube.
• Angsty Surviving Twin: Mark is very business-like and stuffy. And knows how to do everything...except avoid death traps that involve women. Aaron is more of a messy slacker, but seems to have a better sense of self-control with women - and awareness of his environment. But he does seem to trust Chris a little too much. When one twin goes missing, the other goes to crazy lengths to make sense of it.
• Bland-Name Product: Sleet Mountain in the place of Ice Mountain. At one point, "Scarface" would have been placed over the Starbucks logo, before those scenes were deleted.
• Censor-Induced Spoiler: The censor screen in one scene, for those who pay attention, gives away that Chris is a villain. Folders on the laptop's screen read such things as "Mark Must Die," "Project: DumpScam," "Abscond the Money," and "Cancun Beaches."
• Can't Kill You - Still Need You: In expansion material, Clyde keeps Ashley alive by having his goons hold her hostage. He does this so that in his spare time, he can watch the videos they forced her to make. Otherwise, he would have ordered her killed after her role as a Honey Trap for Mark.
  • In the miniseries itself, Ashley is never seen or mentioned again after she tricks Mark into opening the door.
• Cleanup Crew: Chris calls for one after Mark is killed.
• Corrupt Corporate Executive: Clyde.
• Conflicting Loyalty: Chris is best friends with Mark and Aaron...but also one of Clyde's most trusted men.
• Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: Chris.
• Destroy the Evidence: George and Kyle fail miserably at this, but not for lack of trying.
• Don't Tell Mama: In the reboot/remake, this is Ashley's motivation for going along with Clyde's plan to have Mark assassinated, since Clyde finds evidence of her having had an affair with a preacher. Although to be fair, she doesn't know that the plan is to actually kill him. The miniseries gave no background or motivation for her actions whatsoever, implying she's purely there for greed.
• Extremely Short Timespan: See Webcomic Time below.
• Even Evil Has Standards: When Chris decides he's had enough killing, he literally walks away from his job. Clyde is beside himself, believing that all his workers would jump at the chance to commit more and ever more murders.
• Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: Clyde is unable to understand why anyone would turn down an offer to work for him.
• The Faceless: Clyde. The one time in the 2009 videos that he is seen, at the very end of Part 5, only his right arm and the back of part of his head are visible...as he's talking on a cell phone. His Utterly Sims download was the first time his face had ever been shown.
• Get Rich Quick Scheme: Clyde's cleanup fraud, the motivation behind nearly everything else that follows.
• The Guards Must Be Crazy: Aaron slips into and out of Sleet Mountain undetected by everyone except Chris. And then reveals to Chris that Kyle and George told him everything. Inside the enemy's factory. Where there's likely to be a lot of hidden cameras and microphones.
• He Knows Too Much: The entire plot hinges on this trope being a prime motivation for its villains.
• Hilarious Outtakes: Only some of them were published.
• I Did What I Had to Do: Quoted verbatim by Chris in one scene.
• I Have a Family: Played perfectly straight by Monica when she's begging for mercy. George's response to both her and Aaron:

"Your time...is up!"

• In Love with the Mark: Literally. In the novelization, Ashley considers running away with Mark rather than simply sleeping with him and then stealing the folder back while he's asleep. However, she is unable to defect in time before Chris ambushes her and Mark both.
• Just Between You and Me: Kyle and George explain the entire plot to Aaron. They think he's Mark so it's understandable. However, one has to wonder about the fact that Chris never bothered to explain to them that Mark had a twin brother. One would also think that they'd check his pockets and ID, which would have tipped them off just as much as his ignorance that he wasn't Mark. For this one scene, George and Kyle were required to carry an Idiot Ball.
• Kirk Summation: The second time Aaron is captured, he delivers one of these to the villains who are bent on killing him. It works on Chris. On the others? Not so much.
  • One of them attempts a Breaking Speech but it fails miserably, only making the bad guy look like a Dirty Coward rather than doing anything to phase the hero's resolve.
• Large Ham: Kyle and George, one with No Indoor Voice and the other with a tendency to chew scenery with narmy death threats. The actor warned others several times that he's primarily a cartoon actor, not a live action one.
• Mood Lighting: The Dozerfleet edits use a lot of it to help tell the story, especially in the form of Color Wash.
• Narrating the Obvious: Chris does this in Part 5.
• Peer Pressure Makes You Evil
• Plethora of Mistakes: See Idiot Plot.
• Police Are Useless: Unless you are able to provide them with the location of a dead body and the smoking gun. But then, they only seem to be useful insofar as to name suspects. Never to actually apprehend the suspects.
• Psycho Party Member: George Lawence. While other Sleet Mountain employees are willing to commit murder to cover up the cleanup fraud scandal, their motivations are about money and about staying out of trouble. George is the only one who appears to be in it purely For the Evulz.
• Seeking the Missing, Finding the Dead
• Sliding Scale of Gender Inequality: The miniseries is at a 1 quite solidly. Ashley only gets two lines of dialog, and then disappears without a trace. Monica's only real role is to waste time getting her things, which buys Chris and Kyle just enough time to find her and Aaron and take them prisoner. Otherwise, women are fairly nonexistent in this world.
  • The novel is closer to a 2.5, with The Bechdel Test barely squeezing by as Ashley and Meredith briefly share a conversation about how their testimony will be used to dismantle Sleet Mountain and Gleeful-N'-Young as companies. Meredith and her mother Wanda are the only real "empowered" women in any sense of the word, and they rarely do anything until the final act. It's Meredith's purity that allows her to defy the general trend of All Women Are Lustful. Monica tries to make herself useful for something other than a lab rat / babysitter / sex object for Vance - but fails. Ashley serves little purpose other than to be used by Clyde as a Honey Trap for Mark.
• Stage Names: Cassie, who plays Monica Shelly, is credited as "Cassie Tilne" on DozerfleetWiki and as "Cassie T." in the video, due to her being uncomfortable with using her real last name.
• Team Killer: Happens in Part 4.
• Thicker Than Water: A central part of the plot. Chris was "treated like family" by Aaron and Mark, and has to decide if he's more loyal to them or to his greedy boss Clyde.
• Trouble Entendre: This lovely exchange between Kyle and George in a flashback in Part 5 reveals that while Kyle thinks George is rationalizing their intentions of covering up Mark's murder, what George really means is that he's done this sort of thing too often for any one instance to matter.

Kyle: "Man, I don't know about this..." George: "Relax! It'll all be over soon. We're gonna get paid for this; and we won't ever have to think about it again!"

• Unwitting Pawn: The proposed reboot/remake depicts Ashley Phillips this way, whereas in the miniseries shows her to be just as greedy as everyone else at Sleet Mountain.
• Viewers Are Geniuses: And don't need all the back-and-forth time skips explained.
• You Meddling Kids: When Aaron tries to talk the Sleet Mountain goons out of killing him and Monica, they blame his "snooping around" for forcing their hand...except of course for George, who would've probably killed them for some other reason anyway.
• What Is Going On?: Asked by Aaron several times, implying he is a lousy reader. Otherwise, he would've been able to deduce something for all the time he spent studying the "Confidential" folder paperwork.
• Webcomic Time: The entire story supposedly takes place within about a week. But the ever-shifting weather patterns indicate that it only took one week to go from summer to winter. In reality, it took four months to shoot all five parts. Analyzed in detail here.
• What Could Have Been: The DozerfleetWiki articles are littered with examples of all the possibilities that never materialized or were rejected.
• Why Don't You Just Shoot Him?: All Kyle and George would have really had to do was shoot Aaron in the back of his head. Instead, they threw a bag over his head to abduct him. Then tied him up (very poorly), then taunted him. And then, fought over who would get to actually pull the trigger.