With the release of Star Wars: The Bad Batch season 1 episode 2 cut and Run, we finally revisited the Clone deserter, Cut Lawquane and his family on Saleucami after so much time and discovered that he managed to defy Order 66, something only a rare few clones managed. Cut was soon after able to escape Saleucami with the help of the Bad Batch, after the shockingly fast imperial crackdown on the planet, and search for a better life, somewhere more remote… But there is one major question still remaining. Does Cut Lawquane still have his inhibitor chip? So, lets find out.
So with it being made pretty clear that Cut Lawquane had no idea about the inhibitor chip in his head, or the behavioural modification programming that affected the Clones and caused them to turn on their Jedi generals, he obviously didn’t execute Order 66. So why not?
Well the first and most obvious answer is that he likely didn’t receive the activation message at all, considering he was pretty much off the Grid and disconnected from anything related to the Republic, for security reasons. If he was discovered by the Republic, he’d be executed for his desertion very quickly. It’s possible that Palpatine simply sent the signal through the actual chips themselves, rather than requiring an actual audio signal with the words “execute order 66”, but we’ve seen no real examples of this, so that’s probably not the case.
The need for an audio queue in order to activate the programming inside of the inhibitor chips is actually backed up by the fact that Tech and Clone Force 99 heard a single, repeating command being repeated over and over again on the comm channel, which was specifically “execute order 66”. If palpatine could simply transmit the order through the chips themselves, then he probably would have repeated the command through the chip, rather than through the comm channels.
So if this is the explanation for Cut Lawquane not executing Order 66, that would mean he still has his inhibitor chip in.
The next possibility is that he did somehow receive the Order, but there simply are no Jedi around to kill. This one is definitely possible since he was force to live on the outskirts of Town on a farmstead, away from much attention, but there certainly were Jedi on Saleucami, as we know from Revenge of the Sith and the comics. This is probably not the case, since Cut didn’t seem to have any clue about behavioural modification, so when the Bad Batch and Omega brought it up, he probably would have at least mentioned hearing a strange command.
Now moving on from that, we have the theories that involve him not having the chip or having a damaged chip due to some incident. We know that Cut Lawquane deserted from the Grand army of the Republic at the first battle of Geonosis. Lawquane was fighting proudly and fiercely for the republic aboard a gunship, when he and his men were attacked by a separatist gunship, badly damaging the vessel and causing it to crash down harshly into the sandy surface of Geonosis.