In video games, when you are offered a choice between two horrible options which both have the same outcome, you quickly realize that you either have either done something terribly wrong prior to this event and that’s led to this bad ending, or you are being pushed to search for the secret third option.

I think in this case the same thing applies. We can either accept the bad ending and quit, or search for the third option. Neither of those two choices are going to solve these problems. There’s one that maybe offers a few more minutes of dialogue before you get there, and maybe the secret option is down that path, but we’d better start searching for it now instead of assuming that things are going to turn out okay if we pick the less-bad option.