Headscratchers / Men in Black: The Series

• "The Head Trip Syndrome" involves someone retroactively altering history so that the MIB never existed. Only J is aware it's happening because he fiddled with alien tech that gave him extrasensory abilities. After they stop the villain from changing history, J takes a detour to prevent his younger self from fiddling with said tech. But that leaves us with a rather puzzling paradox; if J never got the intelligence boost from that tech, he couldn't have known anyone was changing history, so the villain should have succeeded, by the very "ripple effect" rules the episode establishes. What gives?
  • Not sure what to say, Time Travel Tropes (especially Time Paradoxes) are often confusing and don't make much sense.
  • At the end of the episode, we see the villain, Moffat, is now standing with the original founders of MIB in the photo, implying that he became of one them in the new alternate timeline since J and K left him stranded in the past. It's not very clear what happened next as it's left to interpretation. But if we assume Moffat joined MIB back then, he must have become an Agent and he may have eventually figured out that he was sent back in time and he may have met his past self. The most reasonable explanation is that Moffat, now a changed man, made sure to stop his younger self from trying to destroy MIB. Of course, that just makes another paradox since the future Moffat would never have gone back in time if he stopped his past self, so... who knows?

• Alpha is repeatedly referred to as one of the original Men in Black and Z's predecessor as head of the organisation, as well as having trained K. However in the Season 1 episode "The Head Trip Syndrome", the five later six original Men in Black are stated to be D, T, H, Q and K and Moffitt. It's unlikely Moffitt became A(lpha) given his first initial does not match nor does he look anything like Alpha's human form, nor does there appear to be more than maybe a decade between Moffitt and K, when there was a sizable age gap between the latter and A and the two did not meet until after the MIB was established.
  • My interpretation is that Alpha was head of the predecessor organization that became MIB after the official first contact. That organization sent D, T, H, and Q to where they were fairly sure that aliens would land to ensure future good relations. The "founding agents" are a somewhat symbolic distinction, as they consider MIB as they know it to have been founded at the moment of first contact, even though the precursor organization basically changed into the modern MIB immediately (with one new member). The non-symbolic distinction being that if those five hadn't been there, first contact would never have happened, and the precursor organization would've been disbanded before they had another chance. It's still full of holes, but that's my personal canon.
  • Makes sense, or at least as much sense as MIB's fluctuating canon will allow. Perhaps Moffitt went on to become Z and that changed up the timeline a bit as well. Dude had to go somewhere.
  • Hang on... just trying to establish all the facts. Did they say for explicit certain that Alpha was a founding MiB member? I only remember them saying he used to have Zed's position.
• When Alpha is reduced to a frail human in “The Out to Pasture Syndrome”, the MIB don’t consider neuralyzing him like any other human, whether it be a civilian or former MIB agent. Presumably, the cosmic integrator permanently altered his DNA so he is still capable of grafting body parts to himself, and perhaps he discovered a method to keep his memory from being wiped out.