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'Walking Dead's' Daryl says he's 'ready to kill everybody'

Negan and his bat Lucille had better start running, because Norman Reedus warns his character is coming for them.

Gael Cooper
CNET editor Gael Fashingbauer Cooper, a journalist and pop-culture junkie, is co-author of "Whatever Happened to Pudding Pops? The Lost Toys, Tastes and Trends of the '70s and '80s," as well as "The Totally Sweet '90s." She's been a journalist since 1989, working at Mpls.St.Paul Magazine, Twin Cities Sidewalk, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and NBC News Digital. She's Gen X in birthdate, word and deed. If Marathon candy bars ever come back, she'll be first in line.
Expertise Breaking news, entertainment, lifestyle, travel, food, shopping and deals, product reviews, money and finance, video games, pets, history, books, technology history, generational studies. Credentials
  • Co-author of two Gen X pop-culture encyclopedia for Penguin Books. Won "Headline Writer of the Year"​ award for 2017, 2014 and 2013 from the American Copy Editors Society. Won first place in headline writing from the 2013 Society for Features Journalism.
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Gael Cooper
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If Daryl dies, we riot. If Daryl makes people die, we applaud.

 Gene Page/AMC

(Warning: Spoilers for "The Walking Dead" ahead.)

Daryl Dixon fans can be forgiven if they've been incredibly frustrated by the way their favorite "Walking Dead" character has been treated lately. Kept in a jail cell listening to insane music and eating dog food? Sure, he's still Daryl (played by actor Norman Reedus), so it doesn't really seem to get to him, but is this really a good use of one of television's best characters?

Well, raise a glass of peach schnapps, because Daryl is BACK. Reedus told Entertainment Weekly this week that once the zombie show returns with its midseason premiere Feb. 12, the Daryl we know and love is back in action.

More 'Walking Dead' news

"He wants revenge," Reedus told EW. "He's ready to fight. When he goes back in that last episode and hands Rick (Andrew Lincoln) back his stuff, it was like, 'Let's go! Let's go beat this guy up. Let's go take what's ours and fight this monster.' So, you know, he's in kill mode."

Daryl's not the kind of guy who enjoys sitting around musing on things, especially if those things are the brutal murders of two of his buddies. "I feel like he spent his time in the hole thinking about Glenn and thinking about Abraham," Reedus said. "He took it very personal, and felt like it was his fault...Now he's ready to get revenge. He's ready to go kill everybody."

And "everybody" starts with an "N" and ends with an "E-G-A-N."

"I think you're going to start to see a little fear in that bad guy's eyes," he says of Jeffrey Dean Morgan's creepy character with the barbed-wire wrapped lovely named Lucille. "He's been walking tall long enough wielding his little toy bat around. Time to bring that guy down a notch."

How did that annoying jail-cell torture song go? Oh yeah, we're "breaking out the good champagne."

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