Headscratchers / Men in Black II

Serleena

• So after Serleena eats that guy alive she barfs him up and takes his clothes, since she's just running around in a bra and panties at the moment, but how the heck do they wind up fitting her? Better yet how does this big bulky dude's outfit wind up so form fitting on Serleena?
  • Serleena's human shape is a simulation anyway, so she probably adjusted its height and foot size to fit the clothes rather than vice versa. Everything else about them fitting her well is just Hollywood being Hollywood.
    • That, or she just laid them out somewhere, figured out how to fit them, and mimicked them onto herself like she did the underwear.
  • She's forming the clothes herself. Jay vaporizes her at one point and she regenerates, clothes and all.
  • Then why does she take the mugger's clothes in the first place? And before getting vaporized she seems to be wearing his clothes. You can even see her wearing the same rings he had on when he tried to mug her; rings she didn't have on until after she ate him and barfed him out.
  • It might be something like the T-1000 where she can't shapeshift into something she hasn't at least seen or touched. Or she put on the clothes, then absorbed them.

Would the neuralyzer have worked on Laura?

• It's stated in the animated series that the neuralyzer only works on humans, but Laura is (at least half) Zartinean, so, would the neuralyzer have done anything if J had tried it?

Kay misses a Spot Check

• In How does Kay (okay, Kevin) not notice the smell of cigarette smoke coming from the sorting machine? Unless it's airtight, which I doubt, he ought to smell something; cigarette smoke is notoriously pungent. Given how he reacts to a coffee spill, I can't see him not doing something if he suspects someone's smoking inside a government building, which is a big no-no. Plus, they must open it from time to time to load more mail into it. (For that matter, the alien inside is lucky he never set the mail on fire...)
  • Maybe the other aliens cover for the guy.
  • Maybe Kevin thought the machine just gave off really bad exhaust.
  • The guy is an alien, so it might not be tobacco he's smoking. No, that's not a weed reference, he could be smoking an alien plant that is less smelly.
  • Or maybe it's one of those electronic cigarettes.
  • More importantly, why can't his very loud music be heard from that big slot he's throwing mail through?
  • MIB has technology for that. Same reason the little aliens in the locker can make noise without being heard, although Grand Central Station would ostensibly be much louder.
  • Most likely , since that person is an alien.....he is probably smoking some home rolled alien tobacco , that just happen to smell like......the exhaust (or heating smell...who works at a office that got a over working copier/printer will know that smell) from a normal earth sorting machine does. (Or since the "sorting machine" is most likely already there before "Kevin Brown" starts work there , he might think that's the normal smelling for that machine).
  • Or maybe the place is so suffused with cigarette smoke he can't smell one more source.

Was Laura K's kid?

• So... was Laura K's kid with the alien princess? It's never explicitly stated, but I was kind of getting that vibe. Especially at the end where he's convincing her to leave Earth.
  • Yep. That's why she looks like a human but has emotions that affect the weather.

What happened to K's wife?

• Whatever happened to K's girlfriend during MIB and MIB II? She's suddenly forgotten and we get a (sort of) alien relationship out of nowhere.
  • Listen to the dialogue when J first goes to get K back. He says exactly what happened.

Newer neuralyzer model?

• Why do they change the colour of the neuralyzer from red to blue? are we just supposed to forget that the bulb used to look completely different for no reason?
  • Newer model?
  • Yes. *FLASH*
  • Blue light penetrates the eye better than red, so MIB probably upgraded the neuralizers to be more effective.

Shape of the World

• So what is the real shape (for lack of a better word) of our world? Are we part of an alien kid's super-marble? Are we sitting in the locker of an alien rail station (or so)? Both at the same time?? How does that work?
  • As stupid as it sounds it appears as if we are sitting in an alien locker sitting in an alien marble. Remember that it is the Earth that is meant to be in a locker at a terminal just like the aliens who guard K's wristwatch whilst it is the Milky Way that some kid is playing with somewhere in the multiverse.
  • To be more precise, we are sitting in an alien locker sitting in an alien marble in a timeline where Kay remembered to leave a tip.
  • Althought this troper has always believe that the movies' endings are just funny gags to end the movies and should not be taken as canonical, let say they are. In the case of the marbles containing one or more galaxies each is actually (although probably unintentionally) a very fun way to explain the dark matter/ dark energy controversy in Real Life astrophysics, in the way that scientists still don't really know what is causing the galaxies and galactic clusters to split away from each other and in some cases to clash. Some even had theorized that a possible explanation is the action of a super advanced alien civilization. So, the reason why galaxies act weird like that is because some super alien is playing with them (or maybe the marbles are meant to contain universes, not galaxies but this was visually overlook in the movie). But anyway. Regarding planet Earth there is, again, two possibilities; that what the movie meant is that we live in some sort of pocket dimension, in the sense that the door opens to a giant dimension that contains Earth (or the galaxy or whatever), or that very large portions of Earth are actually inhabited by these giant aliens and we don't realize. There're plenty of big inhabited zones on Earth; deserts, the poles, the oceans, etc. where a civilization a giant aliens could live without humans knowing. Earth is really huge and the human civilization is much more concentrated that you might think; large cities and urban areas are generally around 3% of space in a country. Just take for example Australia, Japan and the US and check in a map how much population is concentrated in small coastal areas and how much large unoccupied space there is too.
    • Actually the script of the movie says that each marble contains a universe, they just stop at galaxy level during the visual effect probably for time reasons.

Workaholic

• In the second film, Zed accuses J of basically being a workaholic. But what exactly are MIB agents supposed to do, aside from work all day? They can't have families. No friends either, aside from work relations. Aside from video games and movies all day, there's nothing to do. If I was MIB, I'd be a workaholic out of sheer boredom.
  • Video games and movies all day doesn't sound that bad to me.
  • There seem to be plenty of diverse people and beings working at MIB, plenty of people to make friends with... it's even implied that Jay occasionally hangs out with the Worms. But they can do plenty of things... go to the theater (live or movies), go out to eat, go get a massage, even take a vacation and go on a cruise. Basically they'd just have to live like single people without a terribly active social life at worst, which is not a fate worse than death despite what tropes might say.
  • "Sleep late, watch the Weather Channel."
  • In the third movie, Jay says he's the MIB's league champ in bowling, so clearly there's activities and stuff organized, probably by the agents themselves.
  • There's the other angle to being a workaholic - you wind up keeping the other people in the organization from doing as much work as they might need to. Sure, J's an excellent agent, but he might be preventing other agents from getting the experience they need to be excellent as well. Especially with how he's implied to be a little trigger-happy with his neuralizer.
  • There are two thing behind J's workaholic behave. A.He literally put too much effect into work , which had already started to hurt the company.(Both <Hot Fizz> style "You made us look bad" , and fired too much agent for not fit his standard.) B.There is a reason behind this behave , and it's unhealthy , and Zed knows it. So he want J to stop doing it , and got the real problem that bother him(J) solved.)

Just eat him

• Why doesn't Serleena just eat J or K when they got in her way? We've seen that she can swallow people whole with no effort, so why not just take care of them that way?
  • Remember what happened to the last guy who tried to swallow K whole?
  • Seems like a nitpick, but K did have a BFG in there with him. He didn't when facing Serleena.
  • Noisy Cricket. The gun doesn't have to be big to be powerful, and Serleena would be foolish to assume that just because she didn't see a big honking space gun, the MIB didn't have weapons on them. Especially since K had already been proven to be carrying a grenade on him when he was fighting that heavily-armed trash can.
  • Remember when she devoured the mugger at the start of the film? That man was inside her stomach for less than a minute, and yet he's quite certainly dead when she regurgitates him. Now presuming that being swallowed alive didn't kill him first, her digestive system likely worked very quickly on him and killed him in under a minute. If this same fate befell either Jay or Kay (and its implied she was going to eat Kay before Jay stopped her) it's unlikely they would even have a chance to blast their way out before they succumbed.
    • She might have no way to know if MIB agents have some sort of device that explodes if the agent dies.

Jeff

• What was Jeff doing in the underground? Why would MiB ever be ok with a giant aggressive worm inhabiting the same space as the trasport system that carries millions of people every day?! Yes, it seemed somewhat intelligent, but obviously not nearly enough to be safe, and besides, it wasn't disguised in any way. People on the station just ignoring him was a chuckle-worthy gag, I suppose, but surely not the actual setup they had in place!
  • J speaks very casually to Jeff, and the MIB had given him limited transit privileges, so that implies that Jeff had been behaving decently so far. The dialogue also implies that Jeff got that big only very recently, which could be the reason why the creature started exploring outside of its restricted area (as in, his home got too small).
• What I want to know is, what was Jeff thinking when he was being so destructive? He's on an alien planet full of billions of people who can kill him very casually with the right weapons, he's presumably there on the equivalent of a visa or greencard, yet he's behaving in a way that is likely to get him deported at a minimum, and very possibly killed. What exactly did he think was going to happen once the many tiny but extremely well-armed natives became fearful of him?
  • Hadn't a new agent, who was a total asshat, just messed quite considerably with his sensory organ? Put another way someone has just spent the past few minutes poking you repeatedly in the eye and you get pissed off enough to push back. Jeff just happens to he large enough that pushing back means consuming something very large. After all when J raised the stakes, threatening real harm, Jeff came to his senses and calmed down. Given he didn't actually hurt anyone Jeff is most likely going to have his travel privileges restricted as punishment for his out burst but nothing more.

Deneuralyzing

• A big part of the plot is getting back agent K by deneuralizing him. In spite of it being done with Jeebs' clandestine deneuralizer, it works, K remembers the MiB... And promptly mentions that he doesn't know anything about the light of Zartha because at the end of the mission he neuralized himself. This brings up a lot of questions :

1. Why did the deneuralizer, which worked wonders to recreate K's lifetime of experience with the MiB, not also revive his memories of this specific mission ?
   • If neuralizing works in layers (which this suggests it does), the deneuralizer would, too — so Kay neuralized away the mission (one layer), then later was neuralized (now the top layer) and the deneuralizer only undid the top layer.
2. How did K remember he'd neuralized himself ? For that matter, how did he remember anything about the light of Zartha
   • He didn't. He surmised that he did. He says, "I must have neuralized myself to keep the information from myself."
3. At the end of the film, K finally remembers some stuff about the light of Zartha. How ? Did working on the case a second time revive the memory of the first ? If that is so, doesn't that make the neuralizer a lot less effective than it's meant to be at keeping up the Mascarade ?
   • His memory was jogged. Remember how in the first movie the coroner starts saying things like, "You know, you look familiar" and Zed even says you'll become "deja vu"? Neuralizing is imperfect, apparently, and repeated exposure to the things you were neuralized of will jog your memory.

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