WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Star Wars: The Mandalorian, Season 2, Episode 1, "Chapter Nine: The Martial," available now on Disney+.
The Star Wars: The Mandalorian Season 2 premiere reveals how a sandy Tatooine town joins forces with the Tusken Raiders -- their traditional enemies -- to defeat a terrible krayt dragon. Mos Pelgo's citizens are very wary at first; they have been battling Tusken Raider incursions for years. Tusken Raiders also have every reason to be mad at the water hoarding settlers and miners.
However, Mando brokers an attractive deal: The Tusken will help them slay the dragon and promises never to raise a blaster unprovoked, if they can keep the dragon's carcass and ichor. The townies readily agree to this fantastic bargain.
Once the dragon is slain, the Tusken Raiders get to work. However, their first priority is not to collect the green ichor hemorrhaging into the Dune Sea, but to hack away at the dragon's meat until one of Tusken strokes a hard spot and cutss away a shining pearl the size of Baby Yoda's floating stroller.
Apparently, the Tusken are not worried about the krayt dragon eating their village -- they're nomads who have studied its digestion for centuries and know how to feed it to make it sleep longer. The Tusken want to kill the krayt dragon because they covet its valuable pearl.
The morphology of krayt dragons in the new Star Wars canon is very similar to the old. Krayt dragons are gigantic, carnivorous reptiles that need to ingest stones to help with their digestion. As seen in The Mandalorian, they also produce an extremely acidic spit which can turn the stones into large pearls over time. These stones get embedded in their flesh and gizzards and the only way to extract them is by killing the dragon, which is an extremely dangerous enterprise.
Tatooine's native inhabitants, the Jawas and the Tusken Raiders, put the Krayt dragon almost at the top of their spiritual pantheon. Slaying one -- and ideally scoring a rare pearl! -- is part of their rites of passage. For foreigners to Tatooine, krayt pearls are a ticket to instant riches or an incredible status symbol. In The Hutt Gambit, Han Solo uses a krayt pearl to buy into the sabacc game where he wins the Millenium Falcon and ex-senator Johhar Kessen is a hunter whose dream Tatooine souvenir is a krayt pearl the size of a paperweight.
However, krayt pearls are also powerful in the Force. Both the Jedi and Sith (but mostly the Jedi) can use them to attune their lightsabers. In Legends, this quality has more to do with the krayt dragon's attraction to places drenched in the dark side of the Force and the reflective quality of the pearls, which can be of many different colors. In the new canon, only some pearls are Force-attuned: Those that are formed around kyber crystals accidentally ingested by a krayt dragon.
Fans of the video game Knights of the Old Republic might have found this episode of The Mandalorian very familiar. The central conflict is extremely similar to one of Revan's missions, The Krayt Dragon. In KOTOR, Revan gets the pearl after killing a massive krayt canyon dragon. The player can choose whether to give it to the Tusken and forge a durable alliance, use it to upgrade their lightsaber or sell it for many, many credits.
In contrast, in The Mandalorian, Tusken Raiders rejoice when they find the pearl while everyone else is completely uninterested in taking it from them.
In Chuck Wendig's Aftermath trilogy, which is technically Star Wars canon, Sheriff Cobb Vanth brokers an alliance with Tusken Raiders to protect their area against takeover by the Red Key Crime Syndicate, offering the Tusken a krayt dragon pearl.
In The Mandalorian, the krayt pearl serves the same function as the infamous egg in the pilot: It illustrates that in Star Wars, the fiercest beasts always hide a precious treasure coveted by many and unknown to even more.
Created by Jon Favreau, Star Wars: The Mandalorian stars Pedro Pascal, with guest stars Gina Carano, Carl Weathers and Giancarlo Esposito. Directors for the new season include Jon Favreau, Dave Filoni, Bryce Dallas Howard, Rick Famuyiwa, Carl Weathers, Peyton Reed and Robert Rodriguez.