As the Star Wars galaxy expands, the franchise has become self-referential to a fault. It’s no different in The Acolyte, a series packed to the gills with homages and Easter eggs. But despite its many callbacks and catchphrases, The Acolyte is also visually distinct and surprisingly accessible.

A lot of that can be attributed to Jennifer L. Bryan, the costume designer behind The Acolyte’s immersive looks. Bryan didn’t know much about Star Wars before joining the team — her work for Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul is a far cry from the stately frocks she crafted for The Acolyte. To showrunner Leslye Headland, though, an outsider’s perspective was just what the series needed.

“It was a lot of homework for me to catch up on,” Bryan tells Inverse. “When you have such an immense body of work and a timeline for the whole Star Wars galaxy — and you’re doing this prequel that’s a hundred-plus years before all that we know — to [maintain] a certain design freshness... it’s a lot.”

Several studies in recent years have found amino acids, some of the molecules that make up cell membranes, and other key pieces of the chemistry of life floating on grains of interstellar dust. But a recent experiment also found that the reactions that make nitrogen and carbon available for that kind of chemistry could have happened on early Earth — with remarkable efficiency.

So which is it? Did life crash-land on our planet or did arise from a bubbling cauldron of planetary ingredients? A growing body of evidence explains how the answer is, well, both. As the researchers explain to Inverse, it’s complicated — and a little bit mind-blowing.