During the Bad Batch’s travels, they were rapidly and violently ripped out of hyperspace, sending them on a sharp collision course with a nearby moon. During the Crash, Wrecker took a large blow to the side of the head, which continued to linger as their mission went on. Now if this was a regular human, you’d brush it off as a pretty bad head injury, but nothing more… With a Clone like wrecker however, this could mean something much darker. Did wrecker’s blow to the head activate his inhibitor chip? Lets break it down.
At the beginning of the episode, in the middle of their journey, Tech is ignoring his duties in keeping the in a good state in order to work on a mysterious new device. This device looks like it will be a scanner that can help him assess just much much of a grip the Bad Batch’s inhibitor chips have on them. We already know that for some reason, possibly during the Cloning Process for these enhanced Clones, the strength of the chips was not distributed evenly among them. Crosshairs was powerful enough to make him follow Palpatine’s directive of Order 66 against Caleb Dune, Kanan Jarrus, while wrecker and hunter had absolutely no clue what Order 66 even was. Echo is also in another camp, since the separatists damaged his chip so that it wasn’t operable during the order.
Seeing Tech create this device already tells us that it will be returning, and the Bad Batch will likely be having their chips taken out at some point, probably with the help of Rex, when they meet up. We already know they will come together at some point, since we see them together in the trailer, so there’s no way he doesn’t try to get their chips out when they meet. Especially since Cut Lawquane recalled Rex frantically going on about behavioural modification, when he visited Cut on his farmstead, the day before Clone Force 99 arrived there.
But either way, as the ship goes down, the bad are vionelty jolted and rocked until Wrecker eventually bangs his head on his restraint. It happens to make contact on the side of his head in a very bad location. As we can see from the photo on screen now of Wolffe, Rex and Gregor, who all had their inhibitor chips removed, this is the exact spot where inhibitor chips are usually taken out, a clear hint to what really happened during the crash.
Once the group safely touches down, Wrecker begins groaning and clutching the same side of his head with complete agony. Now you can brush this off and say it was just a concussion and head pain is to be expected after a hard hit to the head like that, but what can’t be brushed away is how similar Wrecker’s reaction is is to Tup’s situation from the Clone Conspiracy arc. And there’s one similarly which is so striking and so chilling that it almost confirms Wrecker has had his chip activate, which i’ll show you a clip of in just a second.
For those of you who don’t know, Tup was a Clone Trooper serving under General Anakin Skywalker in the late stages of the Clone Wars, during the battle of Ringo Vinda, against Admiral Trench. At the Battle of Ringo Vinda, Skywalker’s forces were fighting alongside twin Jedi sisters, tiplee and tiplar, and Tup was sent with General Tiplar to back her forces up. As the battle was raging on, Tup began to experience extreme head pain and reported that he wasn’t feeling like himself anymore. His good friend Fives quickly noticed this, and tried to hit Tup out of it, but sadly nothing could be done. Tup then recited the all too familiar line, ‘good soldiers follow orders”, before turning his weapon on General Tiplar and pulling the trigger, much to the shock of everyone at the battle, including Admiral Trench.
Now the one telling sign which is completely unmistakable is the small glitch or tremor that Tup experienced when his chip malfunctioned and activated by a way other than Palpatine’s order. If you look at the screen now, you can see tup tremoring for a slight second, almost like he has a glitch in his programming, which we know from the Bad Batch that he literally does, because the inhibitor chips are not just devices that force you to follow an order, but they literally install behavioural modification programs into the Clone’s brains just like Rex explained to Cut.