At the end of the Clone Wars, Anakin was sent to Mustafar, where he deactivated the entire separatist droid army and with it, put an end to any hope of a separatist victory for the true believers of the cause… But not all of the battle droids of the Confederacy obeyed the shutdown order, and many separatist leaders still believed in what they were fighting for. Surprisingly some droids were able to resist the shutdown order, some were too far from the source to receive it and others just simply malfunctioned… So, lets find out why the separatist Holdouts will feature in Star Wars: The Bad Batch.
We will soon see all of the separatist holdouts come face to face with Wrecker, Echo, Tech, Hunter and Crosshair from The Bad Batch, clone Force 99 as they come head to head with Tarkin, Palpatine – alongside Omega, the female clone! Immediately after Anakin slaughtered the leadership of the Separatists on Mustafar and delivered the shut down order to the majority of the droid army, Palpatine very quickly dissolved all of the Confederacy’s major commercial organizations like the commerce guild, trade federation and retail caucus. After backstabbing all of the Confederacy’s major backers, Palpatine immediately forced the surrender of almost all remaining separatist planets and forts to the empire, basically putting an end to the separatist movement. Of course this wasn’t the end of the confederacy however, as Palpatine couldn’t eliminate every single one of its leaders and those with strong planetary defence forces, which were made up of human or alien soldiers, rather than droids.
Now this is our first potential tie in to the Bad Batch series. In the second trailer for show, we see Clone Force 99 going head to head with a group of B-1 battle droids on an unknown snowly planet. This could simply be a flashback to before Order 66 was executed, or it could be right at the beginning of the show, when the squad are still fighting in the final days of the Clone Wars. More likely however is that these Battle droids are some of the Separatist holdouts who manage to either disobey the shutdown Order from Mustafar, or avoided it in some other way, like being too far or just having something go wrong in their circuits.