The Tevatron sits beneath the Illinois prairie, a particle accelerator that spent decades smashing protons and antiprotons together in the hunt for the building blocks of matter. Its biggest find came in 1995: the top quark, the last fundamental fermion predicted by the standard model of particle physics. Then, on September 30, 2011, the machine shut down for good, killed by budget cuts and by the completion of a bigger rival across the Atlantic. CERN's Large Hadron Collider in Europe, more powerful and better funded, picked up the search and announced evidence of the Higgs boson that July, the particle theorized to give mass to everything else. The film traces that handoff, from an American machine that ran out of money to a European one built to outpace it, and asks what happens to a country's scientific ambitions when it can no longer afford to finish the race it started. The Tevatron's ring may be stripped for parts in future experiments elsewhere.