Headscratchers / Men in Black: International

• In the flashback establishing Molly's backstory, two MIB agents arrive at her house because they know an alien is there. They neuralize her parents, then proceed to leave without making any attempt whatsoever to find the alien and leave it to run free, possibly creating dozens of more witnesses.

• So is there not a Paris office? There's a freaking wormhole in Paris and they have to rely on the London office when things go pear-shaped? Granted, MIB's tech makes it a short commute, but still...
  • MIB is probably not an especially large organization, enough to have a handful of offices around the world but not one in every major city.
  • I think, MiB London is probably the European main branch, remember in the original films the office in New York was tasked with covering alien stuff all over the USA, to the point that one alien taking over the office basically sent J & K having to go on the run with no backup, probably one office covering europe is enough, seeing as generally MiB acts more of an immigration office, with things like the Bugs or the Hive being a rarity rather than the norm.

• Who DID give away Vungus's location to the alien twins? High T wouldn't take the risk of them getting their hands on the weapon, and no one else has motive to.
  • Supposedly this was what the scene with Pawney and his queen was about. That is going by his initial introduction, when H and M arrive the movie forgets about that plot point.
    • When H identifies the poison, he says it only exists in one place in the world. They then go to the same pawn shop (OMG "pawn" shop because they got pawny there, I just got that!) the aliens went to, so this is presumably where they got the poison used to kill Vungus.

• So, was it ever mentioned whether or not H needed/was going to get Deneuralized? because it seemed implied that H's being a dumbass was less to do with him resting on his laurels and more the neuralization messed him up.
  • It wasn't explicitly, no, but it's my feeling that such processes would be done as a matter of course for any new promotions. Especially just after a mole hunt.

• How did the Hive get to Earth if Earth is still supposed to be protected by the shield from the previous movie?
  • The Hive are coming through a dimensional rift. Bypasses that shield.
  • Also, the shield was specifically intended to protect Earth from the Boglodites; if it was protection against every alien incursion the Bugs and Serleena would never have been a problem in the first place.

• Agent M's montage showed she did great in the course/evaluation on "alien languages", but at two points in the movie she didn't know what a certain alien phrase meant. What's up with that?
  • There are roughly 6,500 spoken human languages in Real Life; if one was picked at random I'd wager you're not going to understand it. Now throw on top all the different dialects, slang, grammar, and idioms specific to subgroups within a language. How many more alien languages are out there to pick from, especially considering that in all likelihood each one of them is much less likely to have common communication features because they all come from different backgrounds? It's much less likely that the second language you pick up can help you puzzle out a third in that kind of intergalactic environment (French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and Romanian are all their own languages yet all of them have common characteristics that allow some measure of being able to jump-start learning one if you already know another because they all come from Latin). As for M's foreign language proficiency, one can be excellent at linguistics (the study of languages) — you can perhaps decipher otherwise-unintelligible languages more easily if you can use Zipf's Law to take a guess of what a word used means — but that doesn't make you an omniglot, or even bilingual (c.f., Tom Scott, whose background is linguistics and has a YouTube series on how language works but only speaks English to his embarrassed admittance). In M's case, this is literally her first field assignment — little time to consult an English-Alien dictionary even if she knew which aliens she was dealing with.
  • Also, the screen showed that she did great in her first week of alien studies. That says nothing about her actual knowledge of some specific alien language.

• It's revealed that Agent H and High T when he was Agent T failed in stopping the Hive the first time, resulting in T getting killed/assimilated/replaced while H was secretly neuralysed. If both agents are taken out of the equation, what stopped the Hive from just invading the Earth right then and there?
  • Both agents failing to report back would have sent alarms throughout all of the MIB branches and gotten a stronger, more immediate response opposing them. Keeping a puppet T and a doesn't-know-any-better H back to report that the invasion was stopped with just their wits and Series 7 deatomizers gives the Hive plausible deniability as they set about to infiltrate the organization and put themselves in a better position to strike for real.
  • But what was different? The super-weapon wasn't there the first time, which apparently was the only thing capable of killing the Hive. Also, it doesn't look like T did a lot to undermine MIB, or anything really.
  • Perhaps the Hive figured Earth was a possible location of the weapon but did not have ironclad proof it was there yet and wanted assets nearby just in case. As for the apparent lack of undermining, even compromising the top doesn't guarantee anything when it comes to subterfuge — too obvious a move and the local system's immunity system (i.e., MIB's counter-infiltration protocols) will activate and could blow their cover. It's quite evident that an organization like MIB does not have that strong of a top-down hierarchy (presumably to avoid having a single point of failure whereby one compromised person cripples the whole organization) — in such a case even a compromised High T will only be able to do so much without getting caught. Maybe the Hive could have gotten away with more, but that's dependent on their particular risk tolerance, which until the superweapon showed up may not have been high enough to justify doing it.
• If the twins just wanted the super-weapon to kill the Hive, is there a reason why they never thought to negotiate with MIB and/or Vungus? Hell, why did they kill him at all?
• Isn't the assumption of the mole in MIB rather far-fetched? I get it, H and M are making it up as they go just to cover their asses, but Vungus was in a busy night-club full of aliens. Wouldn't the most obvious assumption be that one of them tipped the twins off? At least, wouldn't High T, being the actual mole, latch on to and push that verstion? Why would he want an investigation into the mole's identity?!
  • It may be that his assimilation by the Hive was a relatively subtle one in that most of the time they "allowed" High T to operate as he would have done if he was still himself. As a result, High T ordered the investigation because he would have organised such an investigation if he was himself.
• So, what did happen on the Eifel Tower that day? The flashback cuts to black with T and H facing against the mass of Hive's tentacles, and then what? Hive apparently defeated them and assimilated T but not H? Why?

• H and M ponder who knew Vungus was there at the club, saying it was only MIB agents who knew. What about the giant crowd at the club who could have contacted someone else?