What kind of spectacle would be made of someone was forced to be a villain, if their initial gambit failed? If the audience - of whom we don't even know - found our ending to be wrong, would it not be written worse?

[ it would have been cruelty, to draw it out any longer, let alone to whatever these higher forces might be planning. it's not his place to give judgment. it never is. ]

I don't disagree with you. It often is. [ ... ] I thought through every contingency plan I could, in the time and space we had. For every potential, there was a way to shut it down. And in the end, the only call I could make was the path of least suffering available.

There is no fair answer to any of this, no matter how much there ought to have been. It never should have been this way from the start.