The Mayan Long Count Calendar became a global talking point when researchers pointed out that one of its major cycles ends in 2012, and this film sorts through what that actually meant to the people who built the calendar versus what pop culture did with it. Anthropologists, authors, and professors sit for interviews explaining the calendar's structure and its place in Mayan cosmology, weighing two competing readings: a marker of spiritual renewal, or a countdown to catastrophe. The film traces how the doomsday reading spread through books, television, and internet forums well beyond anything Mayan scholars claimed, and asks its experts to separate the calendar's actual mathematics from the apocalypse narrative built on top of it. Rather than settling on one verdict, it lays out the evidence on both sides and leaves room for the viewer to weigh the anthropology against the hype. The subject is less the end of the world than how a calendar date became one.