A timeless classic plays as Wayward reaches its ending: Time by Pink Floyd, a song that encapsulates the very meaning of the Netflix series.
Throughout the first season, you watch Wayward’s plot unfold before your eyes, wondering what will happen in the end. Each character is fighting their own personal battle, facing impossible goals and the hardships tied to the place they live in. The young people of Tall Pines all deserve a chance at a real life, yet escaping that place seems impossible. And they’re not the only ones trapped — Alex, too, eventually realizes he’s caught in a nightmare with no way out.
And as all this unfolds, one song keeps echoing in our minds: Time by Pink Floyd — the rock classic that accompanies the ending of Wayward and, on its own, might shed light on the true meaning of the entire series. More than a full explanation of the plot, it offers something deeper.
Wayward: what happens in the ending
Two threads of events run in parallel in Wayward’s ending: the first is the daring escape of the three teenagers from Tall Pines — Leila, Abbie, and Rory — while the second revolves around the tragic realization that overtakes Alex after Laura gives birth to his child.
In different yet similar ways, Leila, Abbie, and Rory are perfect examples of young people who deserve a real life. Their time at Tall Pines has been anything but therapeutic: the school has tamed their instincts, but it hasn’t helped them grow or prepared them to become whole adults. It’s clear to all of them that the only imperative is to escape — and, in fact, the plan works. Abbie sets up a foolproof mechanism and, with Alex’s help, gets the chance to drive away from that place.
There’s a major problem, though — a bitter truth that hits Leila head-on just as she glimpses freedom at the end of the tunnel: escaping from a place only truly matters if there’s somewhere else you desperately want to go. But when you realize you no longer have a home or a family waiting for you, the world outside becomes frightening. It takes immense courage to dive into complete uncertainty, especially when behind you lies a community that, however toxic and manipulative it may be, still has its own way of taking care of you — or at least seems to.
And so, Leila decides to stay and let the police take her back to Tall Pines. Abbie, on the other hand, has the courage it takes and is determined to escape at all costs. It will require Rory’s sacrifice — he distracts the authorities, allowing Abbie to slip away unnoticed. In the end, she reaches the car that Alex had left for her, and there her path crosses with that of Wayward’s other main character.
Alex, too, lives in a trap — a nightmare he never expected. His partner, Laura, has always had a secret plan he was unaware of: their move to Tall Pines was driven by a dark ambition, to develop a parallel cult to challenge Evelyn’s power within the community. Laura is using the child she is about to give birth to for this purpose, which means Alex’s entire life has been built on a lie: he was there out of love and wanted to raise their child in a healthy environment and be a good parent, but that’s no longer what is going to happen.
In the finale of Wayward, we see Alex summon the courage to make a bold choice: to take his child and escape from that cursed town, trying to offer the baby a healthy future. We see him get into the car with Abbie, joining her in their shared plan to leave the place as quickly as possible. But in the final scene, we realize that this is only what Alex wishes he could do deep down in his heart. In reality, he doesn’t have the courage to make such a choice, and the last time we see him, he is closing the door on the outside world, resigning himself to living trapped.
Time by Pink Floyd and the series’ meaning
As we become fully immersed in the ending of Wayward, one song once again makes its way into our ears: Pink Floyd play Time, and suddenly the meaning of the series is illuminated in a whole new light.
Time comes from their most famous album, The Dark Side of the Moon. It’s a song about lost time — the feeling that life can pass by very quickly if you don’t realize you’re wasting it, especially during adolescence.
Time by Pink Floyd contains many of the themes we see in Wayward: the desire for a way out, the endless waiting, and the feeling that someone or something must arrive before you finally make the decision to take action. Here some of its most meaningful lyrics:
Ticking away
The moments that make up a dull day
You fritter and waste the hours
In an offhand way
Kicking around on a piece of ground
In your hometown
Waiting for someone
Or something to show you the way
Time presents the perspective of a young person on the verge of adulthood — but that transition won’t happen unless something inside them is triggered.
You are young and life is long
And there is time to kill today
And then one day you find
Ten years have got behind you
No one told you when to run
You missed the starting gun
That’s exactly what happens to the teenagers of Tall Pines. The days pass one after another, and the urgency to change things eventually turns into a race against time. If you don’t act quickly, the escape that should taste like victory turns into a bitter chase to reclaim lost time.
And you run, and you run
To catch up with the sun, but it’s sinking
And racing around
To come up behind you again
The sun is the same in a relative way
But you’re older
Shorter of breath
And one day closer to death
Pink Floyd’s songs have always carried exceptional poetic depth, and their music remains a timeless cornerstone, often still resonating with the passions of today’s teenagers. Time was released in 1973, more than fifty years before Wayward arrived on Netflix, yet it still perfectly reflects the feelings that humans experience in the contemporary world. That’s what happens with masterpieces, and if Wayward has managed to introduce Pink Floyd’s music into the imagination of even one more teenager, it has already accomplished something meaningful.
There’s much more to discover about Pink Floyd for those who are curious. And The Dark Side of the Moon is the best place to start — explore it further with us.
