Daryl Gets New Weapons in ‘The Walking Dead’ Season 9

Daryl Dixon is set to take an even more prominent role in season 9 of The Walking Dead, and when he does he’ll have two new weapons at his command.

Dixon’s new weapons won’t be the only changes coming to the new season of AMC‘s hit show, and new showrunner Angela Kang recently shed a bit more light on the new status quo. That will include new weapons for Daryl, but rest easy because he isn’t ditching his trademark crossbow anytime soon.

“Since our characters are being more stingy with their bullets this year, we wanted to make sure Daryl had a good secondary weapon for hand-to-hand fighting (a crossbow is difficult to reload, so it’s not good for quick combat),” Kang told AMC. “Norman helped to custom design a pair of knives that he can use for two-handed combat. They’re saw-backed Bowie knives with finger rings that allow you to quickly twirl the knives into different positions (you can grip them in either direction).”

Daryl will be deadlier than ever with those two new additions, but the place he calls home has seen its share of turmoil since the All Out War, and it shows. In fact, some are even calling for a return to past leadership.

“We’re seeing graffiti in the Sanctuary for the first time since the war: ‘Saviors Save Us.’ After all the misery we saw at the Sanctuary when the Saviors were in charge, this is a surprising message for our people to see in the aftermath of the war. ‘We Are Still Negan’ is a nod back to the way the Saviors used to call themselves Negan, written in response to the call for help. In working on this story, the writers’ room discussed the appeal of authoritarian governments as a reaction to chaos and war. Andrew Lincoln picked up on that immediately when he saw this moment in the script and said, ‘Well, it’s the rise of fascism, isn’t it?’ (Read that in a British accent.) We don’t tend to write in reaction to current events because we start breaking our stories 10 months or more before the season starts to air, but we do look to history for lessons about how civilizations react to war, pestilence, natural disaster, etc. This season, we’re reflecting the way the characters in the comic book looked to the past to create a future, so it’s especially valuable for us now!”

Fear the Walking Dead is airing new episodes now. The Walking Dead returns for its ninth season on Oct. 7th.