Battle Event: Locke and the Merchant/Officer

Nope. Now he's not using a specific palette that I can tell, just some random colors.

Maybe a 80 (BRA) at C1/3E0B would skip to normal palettes?

What exactly do you want to do, set to his default palette? different palette?

EDIT: I see the problem is some kind of inconsistency with the palettes, are you using actor 01 with graphics 0E and sure about the event bit state.