The Final Season opens with scoring that immediately tells you Clem has grown up and the stakes are different now. Jared Emerson-Johnson's Walking Dead Season 4 Part 1 balances quiet school-life moments against brutal raider tension better than it has any right to.
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"Ericson's" has this youthful, almost hopeful quality that the series hadn't earned in years. Then "Louis' Song" is genuinely tender, just piano and vulnerability. But "Lilly Returns" drops all of that warmth instantly, cold and threatening.
The whiplash between "Dinner and a Game" and "The Raiders Raid" is wild. If you've been with Clem since Season 1, this first half of the farewell already starts twisting the knife.