Soundtrack

Contents

The Soundtrack of We Can Fix Pawbert is made up of end credit songs that play over selected episodes and featured songs that appear inside them. Most of it comes from musical theater.

Twenty-one of the numbered main-series episodes carry an end credit song, roughly one in five, because the cues are kept for the episodes that have earned one. That comes to twenty-two songs, since the finale takes two in sequence, and the post-credits scene adds one more. Three are from Dear Evan Hansen, and they bracket the whole series: "Words Fail" over Pawbert's breakdown in the first episode, "Finale" over the last. He begins convinced he is beyond saving and ends knowing he is enough.


Main Series

Season 1

S01E01 - "The Weakest Lynx"

"Words Fail" (From 'Dear Evan Hansen'), Ben Platt

In the musical, Evan Hansen sings "Words Fail" at his lowest point, admitting that everything he did came out of a desperate need to be loved and to belong somewhere. The parallel is exact. Pawbert did not attempt murder on anyone's orders; he did it because he believed that protecting the family would finally make them claim him. The song's confession that he never meant to make such a mess of it runs under the whole episode: the silent tears behind the muzzle in the holding cell, the admission in the evaluation room that he chose all of it, and the apology whispered to his mother's photograph when there is no one left to hear it.


S01E06 - "Convalescence"

"You Matter to Me" (From 'Waitress'), Sara Bareilles & Jason Mraz

In Waitress, "You Matter to Me" is a duet: two people who have both been treated as incidental say plainly, without ceremony, that they count to each other. The episode is built on that claim. Pawbert arrives keeping a ledger — Luther's injuries are a debt, his mother's kitchen is a room he was told he had no right to touch, joy is something he has not earned yet — and nobody settles the account, because the answer he gets is that there was never an account. Dr. Fuzzby tells him it was never a thing to be earned, Nick holds a spatula out until he takes it, and Luther, asked whether he can be loved at all, says yes. The duet runs both ways: Pawbert is the one changing the dressings and cooking.


S01E13 - "Stay"

"Not While I'm Around" (From 'Sweeney Todd'), Ken Jennings & Angela Lansbury

In Sweeney Todd, the song is a boy's vow of protection to the woman who took him in: nothing will get at her while he is there, sung in complete ignorance of what that house is doing. Luther makes a promise of the same kind here, and everything before that moment explains what accepting one costs Pawbert. He hands Luther the rest of the Soren story — three months of meeting him in secret, a father who called it an aberration, a lynx who stopped answering his calls and was signed off with the phrase the family used to close its leverage operations. So when Pawbert finally names what he wants and Luther answers that he is staying, it is a promise nobody has kept for him and one Luther cannot guarantee. He stays until dawn anyway.


S01E18 - "I Choose to Stay"

"I'm Here" (From 'The Color Purple'), Cynthia Erivo

In The Color Purple, Celie sings "I'm Here" after a lifetime of being told she amounted to nothing, and the song is a claim on her own existence rather than a request for anyone's approval. The episode is one long argument against that claim. Mawl never instructs; he suggests, and he keeps returning to what Pawbert costs the mammals who love him. When the counter-scripts hold, he stops making the case himself and asks Pawbert to supply Milton's words for him. Pawbert repeats the sentence, calls his father wrong, and answers the rest of the night in language nobody wrote on a card. The certainty the song carries is still ahead of him: he finishes the night at the window telling Luther he cannot believe any of it, and Luther offers to hold the belief until he can.


S01E20 - "Mandated Joy"

"For a Moment" (From 'Wonka'), Calah Lane & Timothée Chalamet

In Wonka, "For a Moment" is Noodle's song. She catches the sadness lifting and immediately instructs herself to distrust it, to stay unattached, because nothing good has ever stayed. Willy sings nonsense over her, a silly thing made of her name, and her resolve fails anyway. Here the moment arrives as an order. Bogo pulls the pack off the case for forty-eight hours, and Fuzzby puts it in writing on the grounds that a witness who arrives at trial depleted will testify badly. They spend it on a matinee, a night Pawbert asks Luther for because there will not be many more, a card game Nick cheats at, and breakfast at a kitchen table. The cue also comes from the picture they sit through that afternoon, about a chocolatier who keeps making something good after losing everything.


S01E24 - "Last Morning"

"Found/Tonight" (From 'Hamildrops'), Ben Platt & Lin-Manuel Miranda

"Found/Tonight" is a mashup of "You Will Be Found" from Dear Evan Hansen and "The Story of Tonight" from Hamilton. The first half continues the Dear Evan Hansen thread the series opened on in "The Weakest Lynx", where the same show's "Words Fail" scored a mammal convinced he was beyond saving. Its promise is that someone alone on the ground gets found, which is the answer Pawbert spent the season refusing to believe he was owed. The Hamilton half is a toast raised among friends who expect to see each other again, and that is how the pack sends him off: Luther refuses the word goodbye and gives him a date instead. He ends the season behind a locked door with proof that the mammals outside are counting the same days he is.


Season 2

S02E06 - "Unconditional"

"I'll Cover You" (From 'RENT'), Original Broadway Cast

"I'll Cover You" is Angel and Collins's duet in RENT, an offer of shelter rather than a verdict: the promise is to be the thing the other one lives under, on no terms at all. RENT later reprises it over a funeral, so the shelter promise doubles as a lament. That is the argument the whole episode makes. Dr. Fuzzby's morning session establishes that forgiveness cannot be earned or paid back, and Judy, Nick, and Luther give it to him anyway, one after another, which turns a duet into a relay. Luther's turn is the one nobody else could take: he was never Pawbert's victim, so what he covers is the harm Pawbert has been doing to himself. Pawbert sleeps that night without dreaming and wakes to the pack making breakfast.


S02E21 - "Found Family"

"One Of Us" (From 'Paddington The Musical'), Tom Fletcher

In Paddington the Musical, "One Of Us" is the case for keeping a bear who turned up with nothing, put to a holdout. It concedes there are reasons to send him away, refuses to contest a single one of them, and answers instead that the house was incomplete before he arrived and nobody had noticed. The episode moves the holdout. The pack never deliberates: it bars Pawbert from his own kitchen, a Sahara Square camel thanks him instead of blaming him, Judy returns the green sweater with the mending left showing, and Gary crosses the city to name what he finds there. The one who still needs convincing is Pawbert. The cue comes from the musical they take him to that day, and it carries the title's answer: if he is looking for family, he is already one of them.


S02E24 - "Clean Slate"

"Seasons of Love" (From 'RENT'), Original Broadway Cast

"Seasons of Love" opens the second act of RENT, sung by the whole company in a line across the front of the stage: it asks how a year is measured and answers that the measure is love. The episode is built out of ways to count that year. Nick sets the terms at the curb as a visit every Wednesday and Judy confirms them, the property officer logs the sweater and the keepsakes into a storage bin for the year, Dr. Venn restarts therapy on the old schedule, and Luther carries the soup pot home to keep practicing until Pawbert is back. That night, in his old cell, Pawbert writes the countdown's first line in pencil. The song is an ensemble number, and the pack closes the season in three separate places, all four counting the same year.


Season 3

S03E08 - "A Wanted Mammal"

"For Good" (From 'Wicked'), Kristin Chenoweth & Idina Menzel

Glinda and Elphaba sing "For Good" at their last parting in Wicked; each tells the other that knowing her has changed her permanently. Two confessions in this episode make the same claim. Luther admits on live television that he was one of the wolves who took mammals to Cliffside Asylum, and Pawbert does not forgive him. He answers with a measurement: the wolf who did that would not have given the four years since to undoing it. Pawbert has come as far the other way, from a lynx certain he was beyond saving to one who turns down an open door and goes back inside to serve out eight months. The duet form carries the rest, since neither of them changed alone and each is the reason the other did.


Season 4

S04E01 - "Release"

"Journey to the Past" (From 'Anastasia'), Christy Altomare

Anya sings "Journey to the Past" as she sets out after a family she cannot remember, with nothing but the hope that a home waits at the end of the road. Pawbert walks out of prison with two hundred dollars, a release card good for a hundred and twenty days, and no plan. The episode then inverts the title: his own journey to the past is the drive out to the desert tent he bought years earlier with his own money, and he finds it collapsed, picked clean and drifted over with sand. The home he gets is the one Luther offers him in the wreckage of it. That answers "Last Morning", where "Found/Tonight" sent him into isolation already surrounded by the mammals who would wait.


S04E06 - "Day Pass"

"Happily Ever After" (Full Version), Jordan Fisher & Angie K.

The song is the theme of a Disney parks fireworks show, an anthem about reaching for a happy ending rather than being handed one. Nick's prescription for a week of refreshing an empty inbox is joy that accomplishes nothing, and the day supplies it: churros at seven dollars each, height limits that defeat two of the pack, their chief caught off duty in a gift shop. Then the evening show turns the sky into the one thing Pawbert's body still hears as gunfire. Judy tells him that staying and leaving are equally allowed. He falls back on Dr. Venn's breathing, holds onto the colors rather than the noise, and stays through the finale. He reaches for the ending, under the kind of fireworks the song was written for.


S04E14 - "Case Study"

"Both Sides, Now" (From 'CODA'), Emilia Jones

In CODA, Ruby Rossi sings "Both Sides, Now" at her audition, a hearing daughter of a deaf family claiming a place she has spent the whole film standing between. That position runs under this whole episode. Pawbert is both the lynx a seminar would file as a case study and the lynx who lives with Nick and Judy, the couple on Sloane's opening slide, and the argument lands because he is both: the four counters at Snarlbucks hand him accommodation against segregation, options against mandates. Dillamond takes the framework and changes his course policy on the spot, because no student should have to argue for their own life in class. The song carries that half too: nobody gets both sides for free. By that night he has claimed enough of the second side to say "Always." before Luther does.


S04E19 - "Operational Surprise"

"Home" (From 'The Wiz'), Stephanie Mills

Dorothy sings "Home" at the close of The Wiz, having gone a long way to learn that what she wanted was a place where love was already waiting. Luther gets there without moving. Fifteen years in intelligence taught him that a birthday is a personal detail and personal details are exposure, so he trained himself out of having one. The pack throws him a party regardless, and gives him The Chart in a mahogany frame because proof is what he was always going to believe. Pawbert names the gift for him: evidence of love. The episode says the word home once, about the precinct, on Luther's first morning back. It takes until the patio for him to tell Pawbert this is the first birthday in thirty-four years he has wanted to remember.


S04E23 - "From Now On"

"Tightrope" (From 'The Greatest Showman'), Michelle Williams

In The Greatest Showman, "Tightrope" is Charity Barnum's song rather than her husband's: the one who stays behind, watching the life she agreed to walk get further off the ground. The pack watches The Greatest Showmammal all afternoon and reads itself into the showman; the credits hand them the other part. The cue scores the last scene exactly — four of them folded onto one couch, two already asleep, Pawbert asking whether something this precarious can hold, Luther answering that he wakes every day expecting to lose it, then decides it will not be today and stays. The episode's last line puts all four of them on the wire and keeps them walking, which is where the cue picks up.


S04E24 - "Loud and Determined"

"Bella Notte" (From 'Lady and the Tramp'), Peggy Lee & Sonny Burke

In Lady and the Tramp the song plays over the shared spaghetti dinner, and its Italian title means beautiful night. The night is what it scores here. A day of doorbells, guests, and a single green candle winds down into quiet: the two of them upstairs, sleep, and then Pawbert dreaming his way into his mother's kitchen, where Lillian looks up from the dough and tells him "Loud and determined. Just like I always knew." The tune reaches back to Zootopia 2 as well, where an instrumental cut plays over Russ the Walrus's belly-ride ferry while Nick and Judy are on the run. A gag then, scored for two fugitives; here the full vocal version closes the birthday of a lynx who has stopped running.


Season 5

S05E01 - "Golden Age"

"Audition (The Fools Who Dream)" (From 'La La Land'), Emma Stone

Mia sings "Audition" in La La Land at the tryout that decides everything, in praise of the ones who chase what they will probably never reach. The episode gives it no closing scene to score, so the wistfulness runs the length of it instead. Perkins and Botasky were recruited out of a Bunnyburrow bar fifteen years earlier by a ZSI officer offering work that would matter, and they die in a Vladifrostok corridor with their sniper White already gone and their intel still pending on a device that never finds a network. In Zootopia the pack watches La La Lamb in the last hours of the golden age, Luther takes the call in the hallway, and the credits go on playing the film he stepped out of.


S05E21 - "Final Position"

"Ne me quitte pas" (From 'Sans Attendre'), Céline Dion

The song is a plea to someone already leaving: don't leave me. It is the first non-English cue the series has used, and it scores one thing only. Luther kills Icener, asks whether he got him, and goes down on the tunnel floor. Nick works compressions in Luther's blood, Judy shouts coordinates into a radio and is promised a medical team in two minutes she says they do not have, and Pawbert holds a paw and begs. The series has a standing reason not to put music over a cliffhanger, which is that the tension should carry forward unbroken. This cue does not release it. Céline Dion sings the plea Pawbert is already making, and the credits become the rest of the vigil.


S05E22 - "Complacency"

"Le Festin - English Version" (From 'Ratatouille'), Annapantsu; Original composition by Michael Giacchino, original performed by Camille

The song scores Remy's first days in Paris in Ratatouille, and it travels: hunger and a life you were not born to at the start, celebration at the end, the worst behind — which is the half that matters here. In the episode it plays diegetically, over the closing credits of the cooking competition on in the living room, where Remy and Lionguini — carried over from a Zootopia 2 Easter egg — have been judging soufflés. The cue answers the whole episode rather than its last shot: Luther out of surgery, Shaw and Mr. Big buried, the weather-station rebuild all but three stations done, Bogo back at Precinct 1 on a permanent cane, Nick promoted to Detective, the house still under scaffolding. The pack never notices it start.


S05E23 - "Golden Again"

"I See the Light" (From 'Tangled'), Mandy Moore & Zachary Levi

In Tangled, Rapunzel and Flynn sing "I See the Light" on the water during the lantern release, where each of them works out mid-song that what they were looking for is in the boat with them. It scores the two proposals rather than the dawn the credits roll out of. Nick abandons the dinner and the sunset beach he had planned and kneels beside the bed on the last morning in Los Zangeles; Luther, who kept holding out for a date worth remembering, kneels in a foyer he has strung with fairy lights, holding a band engraved with the word he once used to keep Pawbert from disappearing. Neither couple knew the other was doing it, and both had known the answer for years.


S05E24 - "Always"

"No One Is Alone" (From 'Into the Woods'), Original Broadway Cast

"Finale" (From 'Dear Evan Hansen'), Original Broadway Cast

"No One Is Alone" is sung in Into the Woods to two children who have just lost their parents, and its argument is that nobody is only what they did and nobody faces the consequences by themselves. The epilogue montage is cut straight to the song, a fragment of it landing ahead of each scene — and the line about witches being right arrives over Fru Fru beneath the portrait of her father, a crime boss who died defending ZSI command. "Finale" then carries the dedication, and it answers "The Weakest Lynx" five seasons on. "Words Fail" was Pawbert's confession from the bottom; "Finale" is the letter that tells him being himself is enough, and it still addresses him by the surname he gave up to marry Luther.


Post-Credits

S05E51 - "Post-Credits Scene (Pawlawan)"

"Somewhere" (From 'West Side Story'), Marni Nixon & Jim Bryant

"Somewhere" is sung in West Side Story by lovers imagining a place that would let them be together, a place the story never gives them. The post-credits scene grants it twice over, at opposite ends of the same family. The pack has two weeks of beach and nothing scheduled past a village restaurant. Cattrick and Kitty made theirs out of exile, living up in the hills as Patrick and Kay for the four years since the prison breach, on an island that asks nothing about a new arrival's past. The song lands on both of those at once rather than on the honeymoon alone, and Pawbert names it at the path split, telling his brother he is glad he found a place where he could be Patrick.


Featured Songs

Songs and score cues that appear inside an episode, distinct from end credit songs.

S05E19 - "Tundratown Requiem" (featured)

"Kronos Unveiled" (From 'The Incredibles'), Michael Giacchino

Michael Giacchino scored both The Incredibles and Zootopia 2, and "Kronos Unveiled" sounds a great deal like his Gary themes from the later film, which is most of why it fits this world so easily. He wrote it for the moment Mr. Incredible opens the Operation Kronos file and works out how long the plan against his own kind has been running. It does the same job here. The music comes up on the cut to the command center in Mr. Big's mansion, where Costa runs the fight off a tactical display with his arm in a sling and all three sectors read green. Mr. Big is the one who names the problem: the attackers are testing the defenses rather than committing to them. Nothing has gone wrong yet. The music is ahead of them.


S05E23 - "Golden Again" (featured)

"I'll Stand By You" (From 'Hope For Haiti Now'), Shakira

"I'll Stand By You" is a Pretenders song from 1994, and the recording the cue names is Shakira's, from the 2010 Hope for Haiti Now telethon. Shakira is also Gazelle's voice, which makes the scene a close repeat of the recording's own occasion: a pop star singing it at a disaster-relief benefit. Gazelle performs it at the Rebuild Reptile Ravine relief concert to a house packed past the aisles, Fru Fru and Clawhauser in the front row, ZPD officers out of uniform and surviving ZSI agents and ZFD firefighters filling the rest. The split screen gives the other panel to Gary, moving down the Ravine's one finished road past Agnes's statue. One side is the promise to stay; the other is three months of proof that somebody did.


S05E24 - "Always" (featured)

"Come What May" (From 'Moulin Rouge! The Musical'), Aaron Tveit & Karen Olivo

In Moulin Rouge! The Musical, Christian and Satine make their promise in a song they have to keep hidden, because the world around them will not permit the love it describes. The processional inverts that. The quartet stops, a guitar starts, and the same vow is sung in the open as Nick and Luther come down the aisle and Judy and Pawbert follow. The choice is keyed to cost rather than to romance: Luther almost died a few months earlier, and Pawbert watched it happen. Sung to a garden of guests who lived through the same crisis, a promise to love through anything is less a hope than an account of what these two have already done.


W-Series

Every W-Series episode carries a closing song, in contrast to the main series' roughly one in five. The one exception is "Scare Tactics", which ships no song by design and closes on a question mark instead.

End Credit Songs

S0WE01 - "Bunnyburrow"

"A Whole New World" (From 'Aladdin'), Peabo Bryson & Regina Belle

In Aladdin (1992), Aladdin takes Jasmine up on a carpet and offers her a world she has only ever seen from a palace window; what she finds up there is that the view changes when somebody shares it. Peabo Bryson and Regina Belle sing the pop duet over the film's own credits. The episode is built the same way, as a day of being shown things and then claimed. Judy hands the pack the train she left home on, Bonnie hands Pawbert a kitchen and his mother's name, and Stu says on the porch that the lynx in his kitchen never had a family and that he intends to fix it too. On the platform, Pawbert — raised under weather walls, then under a prison ceiling — stops and looks up at the first sky with nothing built between him and it.


S0WE02 - "Closed File"

"Soft Kitty" (From 'The Big Bang Theory')

In The Big Bang Theory the lullaby is what somebody sings when a friend is sick and nothing else can be done for them — always a little off-key, always meant — and the cue carries no performer credit because the song belongs to whoever happens to be singing it. That is the episode's argument. Luther comes home carrying something he is not cleared to explain, and every ordinary instrument fails on him: Nick's jokes, Judy's questions, a dinner he cannot eat. What reaches him is Pawbert with a tune his mother sang worse than he does, on the understanding that the singing was never what did the work. It ends on the sound a cat makes when it is finally safe, sung by a lynx whose mother picked it for him, and by morning he is humming it over the dishes.


S0WE03 - "What If... the Weakest Lynx Chose Differently?"

"In Another Life" (From 'Everything Everywhere All at Once'), Son Lux

Son Lux scored a film about a woman shown every life she did not live, where the one that costs her most is the plain life she is close to throwing away: laundry, taxes, and the husband doing them beside her. The cue starts on the last beat here. The Watcher has just finished counting the realities in which the lynx walks out that door and takes years to come back, needing someone he has not met yet — in one branch a wolf, in another a coyote, in another a quokka. Then a gray wolf with no rank on his vest crosses a frozen living room and holds out a paw. Every road the Watcher named ends at that paw. This one just got there first.


S0WE04 - "Under the Weather"

"Baby Mine" (From 'Dumbo'), Betty Noyes

In Dumbo (1941), Mrs. Jumbo has been chained in a circus wagon for defending her son, and all she can still give him is her trunk through the bars and a lullaby. Comfort is the whole offer; there is no cure in it. The episode works the same way. Pawbert and Judy spend two days on a wolf and a fox they cannot make better, and Judy says so out loud at midnight: she can time a dose to the minute and she cannot arrest a virus. Pawbert answers her out of his first weeks at ZCF, where the visitors who fixed nothing were what carried him through. He hums his own mother's lullaby over a sleeping Luther, and at the end he is the last one awake, pulling a blanket higher.


S0WE05 - "Recruit Grumpiski"

"Go the Distance" (From 'Hercules'), We The Kings

In Hercules (1997), the song belongs to a boy stronger than everyone around him who fits in nowhere, and what he is willing to cross any distance for is somewhere he belongs. The episode runs four versions of that search at once. Packard, youngest of seven, has only ever been noticed by being loudest; Savage takes the ice wall headfirst for weeks, climbing it the way the big cadets do, until he solves it alone at dawn; Miles holds the edge of every formation so a red fox draws no attention; and Luther, enrolled under a name he despises, finds the first room in years he has no reason to sort into threats and assets. The Academy is the distance, and the episode ends with Miles at a desk in the middle of the Precinct 1 bullpen.


S0WE06 - "The Prodigal Son"

"So Big / So Small" (From 'Dear Evan Hansen'), Rachel Bay Jones

In Dear Evan Hansen, Heidi Hansen sings this to her grown son. She goes back to the afternoon his father drove away and left a house that had gotten too big for the two of them, and she tells him she was there then and has not gone anywhere since. Vivian makes the same case with a front door she has not locked since the night Nick walked out of it, twenty clippings backed with cardboard she cut by paw, and a scout patch she went back for the morning after he was muzzled. The episode belongs to Nick and runs on his fear of what she will find in him. The song is her side of it, and the first Dear Evan Hansen cue in the series sung by a mother rather than a son.


S0WE07 - "Twelve Angry Mammals"

"You've Got to Be Carefully Taught" (From 'South Pacific'), Richard Rodgers

Lieutenant Cable sings "You've Got to Be Carefully Taught" in South Pacific as an indictment of his own inherited prejudice: hatred is not instinct, it is instruction, delivered early and deliberately to children too young to weigh it. The episode is that argument put in a room. Juror 10's outburst about hyenas is a lifetime of lessons repeated aloud; Juror 6 voted guilty because he was taught that a predator survives by performing distance from his own kind; Juror 5's landlord convicted a mammal on his neighborhood and his species. Even the photo array teaches — six pictures, one hyena, a witness shown what to confirm rather than asked what he saw. Pawbert, who was carefully taught himself and got out, spends an afternoon helping a room of mammals set down what they were given.


S0WE08 - "Mawlaysia"

"Rasa Sayang Eh (Malaysia)" (From 'Recollecting Frances'), Frances Yip

"Rasa Sayang" is a traditional Malay folk song, one of the best-known in the Malay-speaking world, built on pantun — the quatrain form that opens with an image and closes with what the image was for. Its title names a feeling of affection. The choice is the first in the series made for where a story happens rather than for whose arc it completes: the episode carries no pack, never leaves the ship or the port city, and takes its closing music from there instead of from Western theater or film. The last image is five mammals at a rail in the dark, saying nothing, as Zootopia comes back into view, and the credits hand them the music of the port they have just left.


S0WE09 - "SSA"

"That Would Be Enough" (From 'Hamilton'), Phillipa Soo

In Hamilton, Eliza sings "That Would Be Enough" to a husband already reaching past her, asking only to be written into the story he is making and telling him a life together would be enough. There the plea goes unheeded. Here it arrives already answered. Costa offers Luther permanent command of the Crisis Coordination Center, which runs on his own doctrine, and he has turned down three earlier versions of the ask without ever bringing one home. Pawbert never asks him to stay. He says plainly that the post is a good idea, then asks whether the refusal is Luther's own or a kindness meant for him, and the answer keeps the song's shape while turning it around: Pawbert is not what causes the refusal, only what makes refusing easy.


S0WE10 - "Nighthowler"

"Belong to Someone" (From 'The Lost Boys'), Santa Carla Sessions Cast

The Lost Boys is a story about someone turned into a predator against his will, with a clock on how long that can still be undone and a family that refuses to give him up. The song is his — a plea for a home and for rescue from himself. This episode is built the same way: a compound rewrites Luther in a warehouse, and a lab gives the city twelve hours to get him back. The title names the part the chemistry never reached. Luther runs all night on a single bearing with no way left to say why, and the answer is that he belongs to someone — which is why every leg of the route points at his own house, and why the private name and always are what surface when Pawbert walks into the field.


S0WE11 - "The Shape of It"

"You'll Be in My Heart" (From 'Tarzan'), Phil Collins

Phil Collins wrote the song for Kala, a mother of one species telling an infant of another that she is his family and isn't going anywhere. The song knows nobody outside will accept the arrangement, and its answer is that she keeps it anyway. This episode puts that promise up against its opposite. Pawbert's blood father spends a nightmare telling him the pack walked out and that everything he built was invented, and the answer he gets is presence — Luther catching his wrists in the dark and moving one paw onto his own heartbeat, then Luther, and later Nick and Judy at the kitchen table, each handing him a nightmare of their own until the window goes yellow. The song's family is chosen rather than born, and so is the one that answers him.


S0WE12 - "Deep End"

"Swim On" (From 'Peter and the Starcatcher'), Summer Rep Theatre

Peter and the Starcatcher closes its first act with a number telling shipwreck survivors to keep swimming while the sea is winning. An episode in which a wolf learns to swim closes on a song called "Swim On," and the match is that plain. Luther's lap is what gives the cue more than that. The form improves only grudgingly, his body argues with the water the whole length of the pool, and he refuses to stop — which is new, because his method for this particular fear had been a career quietly routed around it. The cue lands on the lap rather than the lesson, because the lesson failed. Judy's method produced four sunk floats and a wave over three meerkats. What got Luther moving was Pawbert walking backward with both paws out, then letting go one finger at a time.


S0WE13 - "What If... Nothing Was True?"

"Ezio's Family" (From 'Assassin's Creed II'), Jesper Kyd

Jesper Kyd wrote it for Assassin's Creed II and it became the franchise's signature theme. The episode is an Assassin's Creed crossover, so it closes on the franchise's own music.


S0WE14 - "Pawthorne"

"Children Will Listen" (From 'Into the Woods'), Bernadette Peters

The Witch sings it near the end of Into the Woods, having locked her daughter in a tower to keep her safe and lost her anyway; the warning is that children absorb what the adults around them do, including the lessons nobody meant to give. Maris runs the smaller version of the same mistake: she holds the news of her husband's injury so her son can stay settled, and loses control of it inside two days. Harlan names the habit for both of them — they are mammals who manage things, and this time what they managed was Luther's reaction. The lesson took. Luther is his parents' work, down to the security audit he opens before he leaves. So is Pawbert, who reads two days of silence in his own kitchen because Milton taught him how, and who ends it.


S0WE15 - "Coup"

"Kabar Ma Kyay Buu," Naing Myanmar

The cue is a Burmese protest song, and it belongs to the mammals the pack left behind rather than to the pack. The episode gets its four principals out — three days on foot and a boat across to Madripaw — and then closes on Pawbert at the kitchen counter with the news from Naypyipaw still running. Paul never left his hotel. The civet is still working the whisper chain, and the clouded leopard went back to her war, which she measures in a mango cart on Thiri Street and one morning when nobody stopped her walking home. Handing the credits to their music is the episode admitting that its own ending belongs to only four mammals.


S0WE16 - "Zooniversal Studios"

"Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?" (From 'Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?'), Larry Marks

The theme is sung at Scooby rather than about him: it calls him by name, and it coaxes a coward into helping anyway. That is the lesson Luther hands the costumed performer late in the afternoon, the one he took from the show at four years old — that being scared is survivable when somebody is standing next to you. The cue is his. A day of rides and queues pulls the wolf out from under the agent: a tail he cannot stop, twenty minutes of fidgeting in a line, a paw held gently enough not to break the moment. The credits roll out of a lamp clicking off beside a plush with a crooked grin.


S0WE17 - "Open Door"

"Wild" (From 'The Lost Boys'), Santa Carla Sessions Cast

In The Lost Boys, Lucy Emerson sings this about herself — a mother looking back at the daring young woman she was before caution set in, and asking whether that self can still show up in her life now, alongside her sons rather than instead of them. The episode has been loading that word all day. On the porch Vivian tells Judy that she and John used to call each other wild and that both of them were right. The family name sits one letter from it. Nick spends the morning braced for his mother to weigh the mansion against the house she raised him in, and she never once does. What the visit hands back is the fox underneath the worrying: alone that evening, she turns a slow circle in lamplight with a photograph pressed against her cardigan.


S0WE18 - "Bitter"

"Oompa Loompa" (From 'Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory'), Oompa Loompa Cast

The Oompa Loompas sing a verdict after each child breaks a rule in the factory. This episode is Dahl throughout: a victim named Salt, a housekeeper named Bucket, a quality chief named Charlie, and a killer named Beauregarde.


S0WE19 - "Headcount"

"Stay Awake" (From 'Mary Poppins'), Julie Andrews

Mary Poppins gets two children to sleep by instructing them to stay awake, and the song is over before they work out what she has done. The episode runs on that inversion. Everything the pack announces fails on contact: Judy's color-coded zones, Pawbert's numbered stickers, Nick's candy distribution, a roll call that never survives past seven. Everything that lands arrives sideways instead — carrot sticks slid one at a time under a barricaded door, an acted fairy tale that ends with the whole cast going to bed, an hour of shelling peas beside a kit who has no words for what is wrong. The count is never settled, sixteen against seventeen on the couch after the vans have gone, and the three days work anyway.


S0SE01 - "Fright at the Museum"

"What's New Scooby-Doo" (From 'What's New Scooby-Doo'), Simple Plan

Simple Plan recorded the theme for the 2002 revival. The episode opens on the 1969 song and closes on this one, so it sits between the franchise's two eras.


S0WE21 - "The Guest List"

"Dos Oruguitas" (From 'Encanto'), Sebastián Yatra

The song scores the flashback that explains why the matriarch of Encanto holds her family so tightly, and its refrain is addressed to two caterpillars in love: stop clinging, grow apart, keep moving forward. They come out of it as butterflies. Maris is who the instruction lands on here. She built a table around her son to keep him safe by making him visible, and the evening ends with her naming the pattern herself, unprompted, and setting this dinner beside the greenhouse in "Pawthorne". She promises to ask next time. Harlan takes the other side of it, out of forty years of standing behind his wife at tables like this one: what his son built is the point, not a waste of him.


S0WE22 - "Touch Grass"

"The Bare Necessities" (From 'Country Bear Musical Jamboree'), Country Bear Musical Jamboree Cast

The song is Baloo's, an argument that the simple things are enough, and the episode puts it to the test. The ad Judy brings to the table sells exactly that, and what the pack gets is a campground whose staff cannot grip a tent pole, a night spent sealing a tent against mosquitoes, a plate of live grubs, and a walrus who ferries them across the water on his belly. Pawbert calls it wonderful and means it. The joke sits in the recording rather than the song: this is a bear band's theme-park revue, not the film version — park music, which is what Nick campaigned for at the kitchen table and lost the vote on. He was caught humming on the drive home, and the credits hand him the park anyway.


S0WE23 - "What If... a Guardian Fell from the Sky?"

"Infinity War" (From 'Avengers: Infinity War'), Alan Silvestri

Alan Silvestri's cue is named for the film it scores, and it brings that film's ending with it. The Watcher's prologue had promised this reality was spared the road there — the Asgardian distress signal never arrives, and what finds the Guardians instead is a rift his own reroute tore open — and the ending arrives regardless. The music comes up out of the smash to black on a kitchen where Pawbert and Judy are dissolving into light and Luther and Nick are closing their paws on air, and a score written for that exact catastrophe finishes what the episode cuts off. Then Stan Lee grabs the lens to say none of it counts and that everyone comes back, which turns the verdict into a wait.


S0WE24 - "Diplomatic Immunity"

"Soviet March" (From 'Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3'), James Hannigan

Red Alert 3 writes its own Soviet march as broad parody of the anthem form, which is what keeps the joke safe: it lands on the pomp, never on Vladifrostok. An anthem of overwhelming might sees out a delegation whose week amounted to burning holes through its own blazers and over-ordering dumplings.


S0WE25 - "The Call"

"In Whatever Time We Have" (From 'Children of Eden'), Mario Frangoulis & Stephen Schwartz

In Children of Eden this is the duet Japheth and Yonah sing on the eve of the flood, two lovers who know the world is ending and choose to spend what is left of it together. It is keyed to the whole hour, because that is the choice almost everyone in it makes. Nick calls his mother to hear her voice, Hen reaches Karen, Eddie's message to his son sits undelivered, Judy's shelter-in-place language sends the city home to hold its family, and Elizabeth McHerd turns down the seat that would survive the night to stay at her own table. The episode adds a turn the source lacks: the flood never comes, and whatever time they had turns out to be all of it, which the kitchen already knows when Pawbert asks and Luther answers with a single word.


S0WE26 - "Porch Test"

"Heaven" (From 'How I Met Your Mother'), The Walkmen

The Walkmen's song closes How I Met Your Mother itself, playing out the 2014 series finale "Last Forever," which makes it the one cue this crossover could hardly avoid. What it carries into the episode is the group reading rather than the couple one. Lily's test asks who is still in the chairs when everything else is finished, and the song is about holding on to the mammals you already have as the years run on, rather than about any one pairing surviving them. The garden room ends before anybody answers out loud, and the cue answers for the reader what the four of them no longer have to say to each other.


Featured Songs

S0SE01 - "Fright at the Museum" (featured)

"Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?" (From 'Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?'), Larry Marks

The 1969 theme is a summons, somebody calling Scooby in because there is work that needs him. It plays under a title card that strikes out this series' own name, then strikes out a Scrappy-Doo joke, and settles on the borrowed one.


Forewords

Each of the three forewords carries a song. None of them plays inside the story, and they appear on no landing page.

S00E00 - "Foreword"

"Pure Imagination" (From 'Wonka'), Timothée Chalamet

Wonka sings it as an invitation, walking visitors into a world he built. The cue follows the series' dedication and a reader's line about the pure hope to be found in it — an invitation in the same register, held out to whoever is about to start reading.


W-Series Foreword (S0WE00)

"You Never Know" (From 'In Pieces'), Joey Contreras

Two voices trade verses at a threshold — one about to walk into a story he has only watched, one leaving a life she kept too neatly ordered — and both choose to go without knowing where it lands. The foreword ends by asking readers what they want next, then welcoming them into a continuation whose shape isn't settled.


P-Series Foreword (S0PE00)

"As Long As You're Mine" (From 'Wicked: For Good'), Cynthia Erivo & Jonathan Bailey

Elphaba and Fiyero take a night they both know cannot last, and the song wants nothing beyond the hour it is in. It closes the foreword to a collection that stays inside those hours.

Song Sources

Source Songs Episodes
Dear Evan Hansen 3 S01E01, S01E24, S05E24
RENT 2 S02E06, S02E24
Into the Woods 1 S05E24
Wicked 1 S03E08
Waitress 1 S01E06
Sweeney Todd 1 S01E13
The Color Purple 1 S01E18
Wonka 1 S01E20
Hamilton/Hamildrops 1 S01E24
Paddington The Musical 1 S02E21
Anastasia 1 S04E01
Disney Parks 1 S04E06
The Wiz 1 S04E19
The Greatest Showman 1 S04E23
Lady and the Tramp 1 S04E24
CODA 1 S04E14
La La Land 1 S05E01
The Incredibles 1 S05E19
Ratatouille 1 S05E22
Tangled 1 S05E23
Sans Attendre (Céline Dion) 1 S05E21
West Side Story 1 S05E51
Moulin Rouge! The Musical 1 S05E24
Hope For Haiti Now 1 S05E23

Thematic Patterns

Individual song choices are argued on each episode's own page. What follows is the material that only shows up when the cues are read against each other, which is why it lives here rather than there.

The Dear Evan Hansen Spine

Three of the twenty-two end credit songs come from the same show, and they carry Pawbert's arc end to end. Words Fail opens the series on his breakdown, a confession that everything he did came out of needing to be loved. Found/Tonight keeps the thread alive at the end of Season 1 by folding the show into a Hamilton mashup as he goes inside. Finale closes the series on the opposite of where it started: that being himself is enough. The whole five seasons sit in the distance between the first and the last.

The Transformation Answer

Words Fail is a confession nobody answers. Two seasons later For Good answers it, over Luther confessing on live television. Pawbert does not tell him the harm was nothing; he says outright that it was not okay, and then measures the distance the wolf has travelled since. The pairing is deliberate, and it is why the Season 3 finale takes a duet about two people permanently changing each other rather than any other transformation song.

The Prison Bookend

Found/Tonight plays Pawbert into prison already surrounded by mammals who intend to wait. Journey to the Past plays him back out three seasons later in "Release", walking toward a home rather than being found in one. The two cues are built to be heard together, and the later page says so outright.

The Golden Age Bookend

Season 5 opens on Audition over three dead operatives and a pack that does not yet know what is coming, and closes on No One Is Alone and Finale over a city putting itself back together. The season is the trip between them.

A Withheld Cue and Its Echo

"Charter" ends on the single word Home. and carries no song at all — the cue is withheld on the grounds that the closing line is already its own statement. Seven episodes later "Operational Surprise" takes "Home" as its end credit song. The word is refused where the episode has just said it, then handed to the episode that needed it.

Songs Over Cliffhangers

The stated rule is that cliffhangers do not suit credits music, because the tension should carry forward unbroken. Two episodes break it, and both use the cue to sustain rather than release. "Clean Slate" closes the second season on a question nobody answers, and plays Seasons of Love over it. "Final Position" closes on an emergency still in progress, and plays Ne me quitte pas over that. Neither song resolves anything; both hold the moment open past the cut.


Distribution

Season Episodes Songs Percentage
Season 1 24 6 25%
Season 2 24 3 12.5%
Season 3 8 1 12.5%
Season 4 24 6 25%
Season 5 24 6 25%
Total 104 22 21%

Notes

  • The series prefers musical theater over pop music, with the majority of songs drawn from Broadway shows.
  • Songs are reserved for major emotional peaks. Not every episode receives one.
  • "Ne me quitte pas" (S05E21) is the only non-English end credit song in the main series. The W-Series adds three more: "Rasa Sayang Eh" (Malay), "Kabar Ma Kyay Buu" (Burmese) and "Dos Oruguitas" (Spanish).
  • "Le Festin" (S05E22) plays diegetically within the episode rather than purely over credits.
  • S05E24 is the only episode with two end credit songs, played in sequence.
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