Take A Third Option / Live-Action TV

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• In The 10th Kingdom, a frog guards the exit to the dungeons, and warns the party that one way is the way out, and the other is a painful death. The heroes are given one question, with the caveat that the frog always lies. Tony frustrated with the tropes of Fairy Tale World, hurls the frog through one of the doors in a rage. When this kills the frog, they choose the safe exit.
• Repeatedly subverted in The 100.
  • The Ark space station's life support is failing, and the governing Council is faced with the choice of either letting everyone die of oxygen deprivation or killing a large chunk of the population to cut down on oxygen use, hopefully (but not definitely) buying them enough time to fix the problem. The third option would be for everyone from the Ark to evacuate to Earth, but that will only happen if the kids on the ground can let the Ark know that Earth's surface is livable again. The kids set up some giant flares to signal the Ark that they're alive and that Earth is safe . . . but it's too late. By the time anyone on the Ark sees the flares, they've already put over 300 people to death.
  • In the second season, Bellamy is undercover in Mount Weather, and gets word to Clarke that the Mountain Men are going to launch a missile at Tondc. Clarke could evacuate the village, but that would reveal she has access to inside information on Mount Weather, blowing Bellamy's cover. However, if she doesn't give the order to evacuate, then hundreds of her allies will die. She briefly considers a third option (killing the soldier on the ground who's guiding the missile towards Tondc, thus stopping the attack altogether), but once again, there's just not enough time: she can barely begin looking for the soldier before the missile hits and Tondc is destroyed.
  • Also in the second season, the Grounders give the Ark survivors an ultimatum: either give Finn up to be tortured and executed, or the Grounders will attack and slaughter their entire camp. The episode "Spacewalker" is devoted to the characters desperately trying to find some sort of third option they can take, but ultimately the best they can do is have Clarke kill Finn herself, so at least his death will be quick.
  • In the Season 2 finale, Maya realizes that, if she leaves Mount Weather, she'll die of radiation poisoning, but if she stays, she'll be executed for being a traitor. A couple of options are considered for saving her (Option 1: Assassinate the Mountain's leaders so they won't persecute her; Option 2: Get her to Camp Jaha and let her stay in the radiation-proof air lock). Neither of those options can be attempted, however, before the Mountain is flooded with radiation, killing everyone, including Maya.
  • In the same episode, Cage and Dante insist their only options are to kill the Sky People and use their bone marrow as a radiation cure, or to let their own people slowly die from radiation sickness. Kane suggests that he can get the Sky People to willingly donate bone marrow in large enough numbers to save the Mountain Men, but by that point, so much blood has been spilled in the war for the bone marrow that Cage isn't willing to consider any other options, and he orders the marrow extractions to continue.
• In the Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. episode "A Hen in the Wolf House", Coulson beats Raina's Sadistic Choice (to hand over Skye or allow Simmons' position as The Mole to be revealed to HYDRA) by already having a Third Option in place, another Reverse Mole, Bobbi Morse, already within HYDRA, ready to extract Simmons if anything when wrong. So he allows Raina to reveal Simmons' identity to HYDRA, trusting that Bobbi will be able to get her out safely.
• The sketch show Almost Live!, parodies this with the sketch "You Make the Call" (which was recycled for the show Haywire). Someone would have two choices, such as whether to run a red light and risk either a ticket or being late for work again. The third option was to just take a bazooka to the traffic light.
• A weird inversion occurred on Arrested Development. In the episode "Sad Sack", the FBI suspects that Michael knows where his fugitive father George is. While investigating the Bluth Company computer network, they discover a photo which appears to show the locations of WMD's in Iraq, establishing a connection between George and Saddam Hussein. Michael now has the difficult choice of whether to turn in his father for treason or go to prison in his place. Family lawyer Barry Zuckerkorn sits in on the preceedings as Michael is about to announce his decision. Then Barry sees the photo for the first time and notices something that renders Michael's decision moot: the photo is actually a close-up of Tobias' genitals. Thus, the third option takes him.
• In Auction Kings, Joel owns a pawn shop down the road from Gallery 63. When he buys something he'll have trouble reselling (hoping the original seller will come back for it), he'll often bring the piece to Paul to auction instead.
• Babylon 5:
  • In the conclusion of the main story arc, Captain Sheridan is asked to choose between the Vorlons and the Shadows. He tells both to "get the hell out of his galaxy" instead.
    • All of the commanders in charge of the space station (Sinclair, Sheridan, and Lockley) are all VERY fond of this trope.
  • When Delenn is facing flak from other Minbari for her choice to marry Sheridan on racial purity grounds, Delenn goes on a vision quest which eventually causes her to realize that she is descended from Valen aka Commander Sinclair, a human turned Minbari. She threatened the guy involved that either they will accept her choice, or she will blab how many Minbari are not as pure as they thought they were, something that would throw Minbari society into chaos. Just before Delenn storms out, he offers a third option: invoking an old Minbari tradition hailing from the bad old days when they still killed each other: that someone from each of the clans would marry each other after the fighting stopped, as a symbol to help rebuild.
  • Delenn did this twice more in one episode. First, given the choice of the Religious caste surrendering or lots of people dying, she pulls out an ancient Minbari test of dedication and publicly shames the Warrior caste leader into taking part. She then takes a Third Option for the entire Minbari caste crisis by putting the Worker caste in charge.
  • Delenn likes these. She gives the Command Staff a third option when they must deal with a psychic Bester. Their choices are killing him or imprisoning if he violates PsiCop rules about unauthorized scans. Delenn offers them some Minbari telepaths to block Bester until he is drugged and power inhibited.
• In the Battlestar Galactica (2003) episode "Bastille Day", Lee Adama and some other Galactica crew members are taken hostage by inmates aboard a prisoner transport led by a Your Terrorists Are Our Freedom Fighters character. The leader demands the immediate resignation of President Roslin (formerly the Secretary of Education who was sworn in due to Cylon-induced You Are in Command Now) and elections; Lee's father Commander Adama orders Space Marines to breach the prison ship and rescue the hostages. Lee stops Starbuck from sniping the prisoner leader and offers a compromise: the prisoners will take the prison ship as their own and work for their freedom in the fleet, and elections will be held on the normal constitutional schedule seven months from now.
• Beverly Hills, 90210: Kelly is in love with, and pursed by, two guys: Brandon and Dylan. Simultaneously, Brandon proposes marriage to her and Dylan asks her to go travel around the world, and she must choose between those two paths. After deliberating an entire episode about which man to chose, she gives both the wedding ring and the plane tickets back to both men, declares she doesn't want a relationship with either of them, and says "I choose me".
• One episode of Benson has the guys talking about their biggest romantic encounter. Clayton talks about the time he was in the Foreign Legion and romanced a Middle Eastern noblewoman. When it came time for the next step, she gave him a choice of two tents to enter. One had her and their wedding party while the other was full of snakes. He was not told which was which. When asked what he did, he says he took the next flight out of the country rather than choose a tent.
• On one episode of Blossom, we find out that Joey recently cheated on a test because failing would have meant getting kicked off a sports team. Unfortunately, he does too well and gets promoted to a more advanced class. His options are to either try the course, fail, get sent back to his original class, and get kicked off the team; or admit he cheated, get sent back to his original class, and get kicked off the team. While discussing his problem with Anthony, they discover that the next test has a grade that has to be achieved to stay in the class which is slightly higher than passing. So, Joey decides to do well enough on the test to pass, but badly enough to get sent back to his original class. This proves to be harder than he thought.
• Big Time Rush: In "Big Time Returns", Carlos is caught in a disagreement between Griffin and Gustavo over whose favorite song to play on Jojo Wright's radio station: either "Love Me Love Me" or "Elevate". He ultimately chooses neither, instead selecting his favorite new song, "Windows Down".
• Frank Reagan in Blue Bloods is very good at finding the middle ground between Lawful and Good.
  • Faced with public outcry against a brutal dictator coming to New York for medical treatment, Frank has the police protect him before and during his surgery, then as soon as he's able to be moved he puts him on a plane back home, where a popular uprising has just deposed his government.
  • Faced with a white supremacist radio host making a live broadcast from a New York theater, Frank ensures the show can technically go on, but puts the man's police protection inside the theater and staffs it entirely with non-white officers led by a VERY large black sergeant.
  • Faced with finding a way to protect a Turkish violinist in danger of an honor killing if she returns home (the State Department's representative had wanted to grant asylum but the higher-ups vetoed it), Frank works his contacts and gets the New York Philharmonic to hire her, and the representative is only too glad to get her a work visa.
  • When an off duty police officer, who has had a few drinks, stops a robbery at first he is a hero - then he is in trouble for pulling his gun after drinking. Frank is advised to stay out of it. Instead he calls a press conference and announces the man will be punished, but gets to keep his job.
• The Borgias:
  • If Florence doesn't let the French enter their city, the French will probably destroy it. However, if they "surrender", they will be excommunicated. So what does Machiavelli do? Let the French come in "as friends", with their lances angled backwards to indicate they are not conquering the city. (The lances pointing straight up kept them from coming in at all, hence angling them backwards as a "symbol of Your Majesty's infinite resourcefulness," a neat turn of phrase as it was in fact Machiavelli's idea and not the king's.)
  • He always finds the third option. In another episode, some followers of Savonarola come to Machiavelli's door demanding vanities to be burnt in a bonfire. He doesn't want to give them books, which is what they first ask for, but they'll break his windows if they don't get anything. So he decides to give them a stuffed owl so they'll just go away and not get anything important.
• The Brady Bunch:
  • The Season 3 episode "Dough Re Mi" had the Brady kids deciding among themselves whether or not to let Peter sing with them after his voice starts changing. Greg and Jan decide to dump Peter while Marcia and Bobby elect to keep him. Cindy's option:
    Cindy: I couldn't decide so I voted twice!
  • The Season 4 episode "Greg's Triangle" saw Greg as head of the cheerleader selection committee, whose primary duty was to select cheerleaders and then a captain. His sister, Marcia, and his girlfriend Jennifer Nichols are two of the candidates. Jennifer - a babeliciously beautiful but conniving girl who uses her sexual charms to get what she wants - can't cheer her way out of a paper bag, as it turns out. While Marcia is decidedly better, it is a third contestant, Pat Conway (played by Tom Hanks' future wife, Rita Wilson) that has exactly the performance required of a varsity cheerleader and captain. So when the votes of the three-person selection committee are tied 1-1-1, Greg gets to cast the tie-breaking vote, and he ultimately picks Pat as the winner. Marcia agrees with the decision, admitting she (Pat) was the best, while Jennifer dumps Greg like a sack of garbage.
• At the end of Season 5 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Buffy's apparent choices, if she and The Scoobies cannot stop Glory from starting the ritual that would end the world and kill all human life, are to kill Dawn and save the world, which Giles tries and fails to convince her is the best action, or to save Dawn temporarily but let the whole world be destroyed, which is what her deontological instincts tell her is still preferable. The ritual is not prevented, and Buffy sacrifices her own life, her blood being similar enough to Dawn's, to save the world without killing an innocent.
• The first three seasons of Community end with these:
  • The first season ends with Jeff moving on after breaking up with Professor Slater by getting back with Britta. Then Slater decides to get back with Jeff leaving him to choose between her and Britta. While the entire crowd argues over who he should choose, he walks out of the cafeteria and hooks up with Annie.
  • The second season sees Pierce's behavior become increasingly erratic. In the finale, the group holds a vote on whether or not to expel him, but they disregard the results because they're not unanimous. They continue to mull it over during the events of the finale where Pierce saves the day. They decide to let him back in, but he leaves of his own accord.
  • The third season sees Pierce and Shirley about to establish a sandwich shop in the cafeteria, but they argue over who will be the official owner. This ends up going to trial where Jeff has a choice between taking Shirley to victory or letting Pierce win and getting his job at the law firm back. Shirley tells him it's okay for him to put his job first which inspires him to suggest Shirley and Pierce become co-owners.
• Coop & Cami Ask the World: "Would You Wrather Be The Weakest Link?" focuses on Cami making a hard decision for the NPC Dance Company when Peyton wants to join but can't because of the seven dancers limit: Either cut the Plucky Comic Relief Delaware from the team and replace her with Peyton, or keep both Peyton and Delaware, but cut Cami herself. At the end upon discovering the leader Tara betrayed them to try out for the rival team, Cami decides to keep Peyton and Delaware while cutting Tara, supplanting her position as leader.
• Crazy Ex-Girlfriend: The final arc of the final season focuses on Rebecca having to choose one out of her three Love Interests: Jerk with a Heart of Gold Nathaniel, Kindhearted Simpleton Josh and Old Flame Greg. The entire town gets involved in this, with a huge betting circle of people trying to guess which one she'll pick. After going on three dates, one with each guy, Rebecca turns them all down, deciding that she intends to stay single for a while longer and keep working on herself. The finale even makes it ambiguous whether she has any interest in any of them even a year after these events.
• In Criminologist Himura and Mystery Writer Arisugawa, Moroboshi forces Himura to play a Deadly Game with her. She sets out glasses of wine, blindfolds Himura, and then deposits a lethal dose of aconite into one of the glasses. Either Himura takes a poisoned glass, killing himself, or he takes a non-poisoned glass and Moroboshi takes the other, killing her. Not wanting to die or to give in to his murderous impulses, Himura finds a third way out: when Moroboshi isn't looking he pours all of the wine together and then redistributes it. That way, they both take a non-lethal dose, and Himura has enough time to call for an ambulance before they both lose consciousness.
• Defied in an episode of The Daily Show where, while debating Fox News's intent on a recent story, Wyatt Cenac argued that Fox was evil and John Oliver argued that they were stupid. When Jon suggested the existence of a third option...
  Oliver: These are the only two possible explanations, because if they're not as stupid as I believe them to be, they are really f*cking evil.
  Cenac: And if they're not as evil as I think they are, they are STUPID.
• On one episode of Diff'rent Strokes, Arnold takes karate. Later, he has a "fight" against Willis to demonstrate his skill. Willis loses on purpose, but lets Arnold think he beat him fair and square. Then, he watches in shock as Arnold calls up "The Gooch" and challenges him to a fight. He's left debating whether to let Arnold fight "The Gooch" and possibly get seriously hurt or tell him he let Arnold win their fight and hurt his feelings. He ends up calling "The Gooch" and telling him that Arnold is taking karate. "The Gooch" ends up abandoning the fight.
• Doctor Who:
  • "Doomsday": Faced with the choice of either helping the Daleks or watching them kill Mickey, Rose instead takes the opportunity to reveal how she personally disintegrated the Dalek Emperor. Dalek Sec immediately forgets they need her alive and threatens to kill her on the spot.
  • "Journey's End":
    • The Doctor is able to avoid regenerating by siphoning the energy off into an appropriate receptacle: his severed hand. This also gives him an unorthodox means of resolving his relationship with Rose: pair her up with the clone created in the process.
    • The Daleks, faced with several of the Doctor's friends threatening to blow up either Earth or the Crucible to stop their plans, instead teleport them all into the Vault, thwarting both plans.
  • "The End of Time": The Doctor must choose between killing the Master (and supposedly severing the link Gallifrey has to Earth) or killing Rassilon to end the threat. After seeing a certain Time Lady reveal her face, he takes a third option: shooting the White Point Star Diamond and the machine that serves as the actual link Gallifrey had to Earth, sparing the Master to perform his sacrifice.
    The Doctor: Get out of the way.
  • Subverted in "The Beast Below". While two of the Doctor's options are horrendous (press the "Abdicate" option to release the whale, presumably killing everyone onboard, or let the Space Whale suffer for eternity), his third option is equally horrible (lobotomise the whale). Lucky for us, Amy notices that the whale is actually doing this voluntarily. Realising that the first of those options won't have the results everyone assumed, she presses the "Abdicate" button stopping the whale's torture and leaving it free to escape... and the ship actually goes FASTER. Five bucks, the Doctor is probably feeling very humiliated.
  • In "Amy's Choice", the "Dream Lord" forces the Doctor, his companion, and his companion's fiancé to pick which of two worlds is reality. They're both dreams.
  • "The Day of the Doctor":
    • The Doctor(s) pull this off when figuring out a way to peacefully deal with the Zygon invasion of Earth, and then spectacularly when they figure out a way to end the Time War, get rid of the Daleks, and still save billions of innocents on Gallifrey.
    • The special also takes a third option to the dilemma of "Gallifrey Rises"/"Gallifrey Falls" from "The End of Time": Gallifrey Stands.
  • "The Magician's Apprentice"/"The Witch's Familiar" kicks off with a tragic subversion: When he realizes that a boy he's trying to rescue from a war zone is a young Davros — creator of the Daleks — the Doctor has two choices: save him, or kill him. His third option? Abandonment. The problem with this is that doing that after giving him hope and encouraging him to survive at all costs may well have been the start of his evil, and the Doctor from this point on is trying to atone for his mistake, even at the cost of his life. In Part Two, he gets a chance at this decision again, but which of the two options will he choose when he's at the Despair Event Horizon?
    • The answer? He saves kid Davros because, earlier in the story, he was able to rescue Clara when she had been trapped in a Dalek casing by Missy because she was able to say "Mercy". He realizes that saving Davros as a kid helps him learn the concept, so he will pass it on, in some fashion, to the Daleks.
  • "The Ghost Monument": Angstrom and Epzo are the last two contestants in a race with a hefty amount of prize money. After working with the Doctor and her friends to traverse the planet Desolation, the two are nearly at the finish line and are arguing over who should win. The Doctor persuades them to claim a tie instead.
• The Everybody Loves Raymond episode "A Job for Robert" had Robert stuck deciding whether he should keep his new job of being a salesman for a home security alarm company, or go back to being a police officer. Being the indecisive character he is, Robert tries to appeal to his family members to choose for him, who quickly divide into two camps on the issue. Raymond tries to force him to decide on his own, taking him away from the others and asking him once and for all what he wants to be: a cop, or an alarm salesman. Robert initially replies "I wanna dance."
• On Family Law Randi and Dani each represent half of a bitter divorcing couple whose raging fights make everyone else despise them. After accusations of infidelity, the judge orders a blood test which proves the husband isn't the father of their son...and the wife isn't the mother as the kids were Switched at Birth at the hospital. When they go to meet the other couple and their true son, the pair have another huge fight. This leads the other couple to decide neither boy should be with them and sue for custody of both. Randi cites the trope verbatim by pointing out the pair have spent two years and a few thousand dollars making each out to be the worst parent imaginable. As she says "nobody likes either one of you" and the judge only put up with them because one of them had to have custody "but now he has a third choice."
• In the season 1 finale of Forever Henry reaches a difficult situation when it finally comes time to confront Adam. He can't kill him, as Adam is immortal and would just come back anyways. But he can't let Adam go and continue killing, nor can he arrest Adam without exposing his own immortality. Solution? Inject him with a syringe full of air, giving him an embolism that leads to locked-in syndrome. Thus Adam is trapped in his own body, unable to move or speak but still alive.
• Friends:
  • In "The One Where Rachel Smokes", Joey and Ross get into an argument over whether Joey or Ross' son Ben should film a commercial for soup. ^note  They can't both shoot the commercial because the producers don't think that Ben can pass for Joey's son. At one point, Joey tells Ross that Chandler agrees with him. Ross asks him if that's true. Instead of taking a side...
    Chandler: Hey, who's that at the door? (walks over and opens it) Oh hi, no one! (steps out)
  • In another episode, Ross and Chandler get into an argument over who should be given credit for a joke Ross submitted to a magazine. They both present their case to Monica, Ross' sister and Chandler's love interest. Instead of taking a side, Monica tells them that the joke is terrible and says neither should be proud of it.
• Game of Thrones:
  • Jorah tells Daenerys that she needs to take command of the Unsullied. Not just because they're a Badass Army, but also because they don't rape or sack. Barriston disapproves because the Unsullied are effectively an army of slaves. Both disagree that Daenerys should trade one of her dragons for command of the army. Daenerys has a third solution: 1) Give the slavers one of the dragons and take command of the Unsullied. 2) Have the slavers killed by the Unsullied and the very dragon that she just sold to the morons. 3) Set the Unsullied free. She walks away with both the dragon and the Unsullied, and because she set them free, they're even more loyal to her than they would've been as slaves. Result, Dany. Result.
  • She becomes pretty good at doing this, with her latest feat occurring in The Spoils of War. While both Tyrion and Jon advise that she should not use Dragons to burn down cities and Daenerys is not intent on killing civilians, she does use her dragons in combat against armed forces such as Cersei's army.
  • In "Battle of the Bastards", when the Masters attack Meereen and her armada is destroyed, Dany's options appear to be 1) surrender and lose everything she fought to achieve or 2) crucify the Masters, destroy their ships and burn their cities to the ground. Not wanting to see Dany go down the path of her father the Mad King Aerys, Tyrion instead suggests using her dragons to launch a surgical strike. The dragons burn down the flagships of the Masters' fleet while the Dothraki army make short work out of the Sons of the Harpy, and Grey Worm executes two of the three "Wise Masters", leaving the third behind to tell the other masters of Slaver's Bay what happens when you mess with the Mother of Dragons. By the end of the battle, Daenerys has won with a minimal body count, and has the Masters' remaining ships to rebuild her armada. Again, result, Dany. Result.
  • In addition to being totally impervious to conventional weapons, the Wall contains magic to prevent the undead / white walkers from ever crossing south of it. So in the very last scene of Season 7, the Night King uses his shiny new Dracolich and its magic fire breath to melt the Wall completely.
  • In the final episode, after Daenerys wantonly burned down a surrendered Kings Landing and congratulated the Unsullied and Dothraki on their victorious campaign, believing she "liberated" the people of King's Landing, Tyrion urges a hesitant Jon — who is struggling with what Daenerys has become due to his personal feelings for her — that he must kill Daenerys as she has now become the people's greatest threat. Jon goes to the Red Keep and pleads with Daenerys to stop killing but when Daenerys doubles down, resolved to destruction to build her ideal world, Jon reluctantly assassinates her to stop her. After being imprisoned for some time, the lords and ladies of Westeros convene and decide to sentence Jon to the Night's Watch as a compromise. The reasoning is Daenerys's supporters want Jon executed while the North and the Starks want Jon freed. Tyrion says either option would start yet another war, and so Jon's banishment to the Wall was their best chance for peace.
• Gilligan's Island:
  • "Plant You Now, Dig You Later", Gilligan digs up a chest while working on a barbeque pit for the Howells. Faced with deciding whether Mr. Howell or Gilligan owns the treasure chest, the Professor decides to treat the chest like all the island resources they've found so far — belonging to everyone.
  • "Beauty is As Beauty Does" involved the castaways holding a beauty pageant and Gilligan ends up being the deciding vote between the three girls with some strong-arming from their supporting men. At the end, Gilligan grabs the Smart Ball and takes the fourth option by having the winner being an island chimp, pointing out that beauty pageant contestants can only be natives of the place they were born, which the chimp was and none of them were.
• The Good Guys: When two office workers discover their boss is a Corrupt Corporate Executive, one of them wants to go to the police. The other is terrified of being fired and black-balled and wants to bury their evidence. Their friend Kyle proposes that instead of giving the information to the police or ignoring it, they sell the information to a corporate competitor, who will naturally reveal the information to discredit his rival. That way, their boss faces justice, their names stay out of it, and the three of them get a nice bundle of cash from the competitor.
• Paul McDermott of Good News Week, on the controversy over whether the New Millennium would start in 2000 or 2001:
  "Thankfully, there's always the Australian solution: We start drinking on the 31st of December 1999, and we finish on the 1st of January 2001!"
• In the climax of Good Omens (2019), it seems like the only options are for Crowley and Aziraphale to let the Apocalypse happen, or to kill the Antichrist. But because the Antichrist was raised by a good, normal human family, he chose to avert the Apocalypse, and renounce his biological father, using his reality-warping powers to make his adoptive human father his real father.
• The Good Place:
  • Mindy St. Claire had an idea to start up a charitable foundation, but died in an accident before she could enact her plans. Her sister discovered those plans and set up the foundation in her name. The Good and Bad Places couldn't agree on whether Mindy should get credit for the foundation, so the Judge took a third option and had the Medium Place created just for her. Although given that we later learn that the "Good Place" is actually the Bad Place and the qualifications for the Good Place are so complicated that no one has gotten in for over five hundred years, it's questionable how much of this is true.
  • When Michael is taking ethics lessons from Chidi, he's given the Trolley Test where the participant is in the role of the operator of a trolley who has to decide between two people to hit and kill. (The trolley cannot stop and the potential victims can't get out of the way in time.) They go through several variations of this without a solution. In a later episode, the group is trying to access the Judge's chambers and they need special passes to get there. Only Michael and Janet have them, so Eleanor, Chidi, Jason, and Tahani have to acquire some. When Eleanor fails to get one, Michael reveals that he's realized there was a third solution to the Trolley Test: crash the trolley and sacrifice yourself. He then gives his pass to Eleanor and allows himself to be captured.
• Attorney Diane Lockhart is forced into this in one episode of The Good Wife. Diane is currently working for a very wealthy conservative activist, despite being a life-long liberal (her job is to provide the liberal point of view on cases he is considering taking and funding as sort of a test, to see if they are worth it and if the case is winnable), but agrees to actually defend one of their clients in court: A pro-life activist group who secretly recorded a video of a doctor casually discussing reusing organs from aborted fetuses after an abortion and wish to release it. Despite being staunchly pro-choice, Diane agrees to defend the release of the video on First Amendment free speech grounds. However doing so causes her to fall out with other clients of the firm, which also handles many liberal activists, and personal friends of her, and she even receives a private tongue-lashing from the liberal judge overseeing the case advising her to drop it. However, withdrawing from the cases would likely cost her the very lucrative position with the conservative activist. Her solution? Openly bring up the judge's discussion with her in court while asking him to thus recuse himself from the case. The judge refuses to do so, but this allows Diane to make the point she is now so tainted in regards to this case she should be released from it, which she is.
• Highway to Heaven had one of these in a priest's sermon:
  Recently, a man came to me and asked if I'd rather face a Christian with a gun or an Atheist with a gun. I told him the truth. I told him I'd rather face neither.
• House
  • In one episode, House announces he's choosing a team leader from his four minions. Three of them promptly begin competing and are soon stuck in what amounts to a game show for House's amusement. Taub stays out of it an offers to split the pay raise with House; he is promptly made team leader.
  • One episode with a focus on backstory shows how House got his leg in the shape it is: a clot in his thigh cut off blood to the muscle. Faced with the choice between having his leg removed and risking death due to the dead tissue, House stubbornly refused amputation, and asked to be put into a coma until he was either dead or healed. Stacey, being his girlfriend and medical proxy at the time, took advantage of him being incapacited to approve another option: removing only the necrotic tissue. This kept him alive, but left him with chronic pain and limited use of his leg (and caused him to leave her). The question of whether the third option was the right one is left as an open question.
  • Invoked in the series finale: House is trapped in a burning building and has two options: escape, but be arrested for wrecking an MRI machine in the previous episode, go to jail, and not be there for his best friend Wilson in his last days as he is dying of cancer; or stay in the burning building and die. The option he took? Escape out the back of the building, fake his death, and abandon his old life so he can be there for Wilson.
• How I Met Your Mother: Lampshaded in "Happily Ever After" when Ted simply walks away after seeing Stella, who left him at the altar in the previous episode, embracing the father of her child.
  Future Ted: Kids, you may think that the only solution is to either swallow your anger or explode it in someone's face, but there is a third option: just let it go.
• iCarly: In one episode Carly and Sam get into an argument and force Freddie to decide who is correct. Freddie decides on an internet poll. After Freddie reveals who won out of the two girls, he reveals the third option which was both girls were being stupid and should make up. It won more than 200 times as many votes than the other two options.
• Iron Chef: In normal circumstances, in the event of a tie there would be a thirty minute tiebreaker battle to determine a winner. However, three times there was a third option taken:
  • In the 1995 Iron Chef World Cup no tiebreaker round was ever fought and the battle was declared a draw. It's implied this unfinished business was why the challenger, Alain Passard, was the very last challenger in the series.
  • In the 2000th Dish Special Chairman Kaga decided to indulge himself for once and cast a vote. He sides with Team France.
  • The tiebreaker battle also ended in a tie. Rather than stage a second battle, which would probably lead to exhaustion on the chefs' part and overindulgence on the judges' part, Kaga declares both chefs winners.
• Just the Ten of Us: When Wendy's prospective date Ed is having dinner with the Lubbocks, Graham holds a plate of fried chicken and asks, "What does a red-blooded American boy like yourself prefer to sink his teeth into? Leg or breast?" Ed knows what Graham is up to and casually says he prefers wings.
• Kaamelott: Merlin keeps everyone up at night over discovering the moonstone, a magical artifact that magicians have been trying to make for hundreds of years. It turns goat meat into water. On seeing Arthur's less-than-impressed expression, Merlin asks him to imagine what he'd do if he was stuck on a desert island with only a goat for company and no fresh water in sight.
  Arthur: I drink goat's milk.
• Kamen Rider:
  • In Kamen Rider Blade, Kenzaki is left with a Sadistic Choice at the finale. He can ether choose to seal the Black Joker, thus sealing away the innocent Hajime persona he and the others have befriended and who isn't responsible for his actions or allow the Black Joker to complete the destruction of humanity. So, what does he do? He deliberately overuses his King Form so that his DNA is affected by the Undead power it draws upon, turning him into a second Joker. Since there are now two Undead, they can put the Battle Royale in a permanent stalemate...but this requires Kenzaki and Hajime never to see each other again, lest The Powers That Be compel them to fight. Still, much better than the other options.
  • Kamen Rider Gaim ends with a rather large one: Kouta has finally obtained the Golden Fruit and achieved godlike power. His choice essentially boils down to this: remake the Earth in his image (which would kill off most of humanity and betray everything he fought for), or do nothing and allow humanity to self-destruct with in-fighting as happened with the last race who had the Fruit. Instead, he uses his power to transport Helheim Forest and the Invase to an uninhabited planet at the edge of the universe, saying he'll shape that world instead and sparing the Earth. DJ Sagara, the human avatar of Helheim and the "administrator" of the Golden Fruit "test", is sufficiently amused by this choice, and tells Kouta and Mai "Be fruitful and multiply!" before saying his goodbyes.
  • In Kamen Rider Ex-Aid, the heroes are given an ultimatum by the Ministry of Health: eliminate Kamen Rider Genm, or the Cyber-Rescue Ward will be shut down. Genm has killed and endangered countless lives all for the sake of his God complex, but Emu still refuses to kill him because, as a doctor, he's supposed to be protecting lives rather than taking them. When the moment of truth comes, Emu finds another way: he uses Maximum Gamer's virus-hacking power to eliminate Genm's ability to transform. Without his Rider powers, his plans come to a screeching halt and he can be brought to justice. But then Pallad, Genm's erstwhile ally, renders the entire thing moot by killing Genm himself.
  • Kamen Rider Zi-O is put in the position at the end of his show of having to choose who's going to live from among himself and the only friends he's ever had. All of them are from mutually incompatible timelines, brought together by trying to stop the Bad Future where Zi-O becomes the despotic ruler of the world, but any solution will end with all but one of them having never existed. The real villain revealed to be the power behind Oma Zi-O's throne notes that Zi-O does have a third option, because there's one timeline where everyone lives: the bad future. Zi-O's answer is to become Oma Zi-O to destroy the Big Bad, then sacrifice his powers to repair the Time Crash. Resulting in a new timeline where he, his friends, and former enemies live happy ordinary lives.
• Minor example from Las Vegas: Sam is told that a whale with extremely sweaty palms must leave the casino because he's grossing people out, but doesn't want to hurt his feelings by expelling him from the last place he hasn't already been kicked out of. She solves the quandary by setting up a high-stakes game in the hotel swimming pool, with a floating table and waterproof cards.
• In one episode of Law & Order: Criminal Intent, Evan Chapel, a doctor who killed his wife and tried to kill his preteen daughter, is framed for the murder of his brother by his girlfriend (who had come to love his daughter and wanted to protect her). Prosecutor Ron Carver lacks the evidence to convict Chapel for his wife and daughter, so he's faced with a choice of letting Chapel walk or else bringing him down for a crime he knows Chapel didn't commit, which would go against every piece of professional ethics Carver believes in. So Carver uses the frame job to bluff Chapel, implying that he is willing to take Chapel to trial for his brother's murder, which would be an almost certain conviction, unless Chapel takes a plea to manslaughter and attempted murder for his wife and daughter respectively. The ruse works, and Chapel agrees to take the plea deal.
• Let's Make a Deal: Often made part of a trading deal — to wit, the trader now has three options from which to choose. Such deals take one of several forms, with the contestant (of course) made to decide:
  • A guaranteed first deal at the outset (usually, up to $1,000 cash), with the second prize also revealed (equal or slightly greater value) and a third, unknown prize. Sometimes, the third prize will be labeled "Big Risk" or "Big Prize," etc. ... only to eventually reveal a Zonk.
  • The guaranteed first prize, with the other two unknowns, one or both which may be Zonks.
  • All three are unknowns. Often these will be accompanied by some sort of clue as to what they may win depending on their choice.
    • In each of the given deals, almost always one of the choices is a winner, although it is not unheard of for each of the three items to be zonks... meaning that prior to revealing the first of the threesome of choices, there was an initial "keep or trade" prize decision that the contestant should have made a right choice on. On the other hip, all three choices might be winners ... meaning the contestant couldn't lose by trading in his initial prize, which although not a Zonk is worth decidedly if not far less than the lowest-valued item of the three better prizes.
• Leverage:
  • In an episode, Moreau wants Eliot to kill a general to prove he's still the same Eliot, before he'll give the team the address of the auction they need to take down. If they don't take down the option, a nasty bomb gets sold to terrorists, and Moreau gets away. Eliot agrees - you see the assassination take place. Cut to the hospital, they've picked up the body - Eliot swapped the general with a corpse and "killed" the corpse, then Sophie posed as the grieving wife and ID'd the "general's" body. Course, the address led them to a trap... but still.
  • Parker also pulls off this in "The Long Way Down Job". When she and Eliot are trying to recover the body of the victim who was left to die on a mountain, they fail also losing the evidence for their case. However they do manage to recover his cell phone that sends a message once it is brought down, both incriminating the suspect and giving a message to the victim's wife.
• In Lost Girl, Bo is constantly doing this.
  • In the first episode, when she’s supposed to choose between Dark or Light Fae, she chooses neither.
  • In episode 3.08, Bo is offered two tarot cards to choose from, but she chooses neither. Instead she picks a card from the deck.
  • In episode 3.09, Bo is supposed to leave Dyson behind in the Temple, since two people can enter the Temple, but only one can leave, but she chooses to take him through the portal and bring him back to life.
    Bo: There’s always another way.
• In an episode of MacGyver, Mac chases a group of gang members through an abandoned building and suddenly comes across an open door and a staircase, not knowing through where the gang went. He then uses his penknife to open a nearby locked door... only to fall into a snare trap with a bomb (which turns out to be fake). It was all for the best though, as the gang's apparent military training coupled with the fact that they knew Mac would go through the locked door allows him to, with help, deduce the gang's ringleader's identity: (his police chief friend, who is also a former Marine).
• Malcolm in the Middle: One episode revolved around Hal agonising over whether or not to take a neighbour who was in a coma off life support. He eventually took a third option, but we never find out what it was, only that everyone agreed it was a wonderful solution that satisfied all parties involved.
• Monk: In the episode "Happy Birthday, Mr. Monk", Monk is given a choice: Hide in a Porta-John or a dumpster. His answer? "I choose death!"
• Monty Python's Flying Circus
  • The Spanish Inquisition has three options of punishment: 1. Torture. 2. Obtain a signed confession. 3. Nothing.
  Cardinal Ximinez: There is no third thing. Is that clear?
  • In the Twentieth Century Vole sketch, a film producer dismisses a room full of writers one by one for agreeing with him, disagreeing with him, and being indecisive. In a fit of panic, when asking one of the remaining writers what he thinks of his idea he blurts out "splunge" which he claims to mean "it's a great-idea-but-possibly-not-and-I'm-not-being-indecisive!"
• New Girl: A sad version. Schmidt is in love with two different girls; neither is better than the other, neither is secretly evil, and neither will accept polyamory as a solution. There is no magical third option that keeps everyone happy. There is, however, a wrong option; Schmidt tries to secretly date both girls at once, and it blows up in his face in no time at all.
• NUMB3RS: In the series's penultimate episode, Charlie and Amita get offers for visiting professorships in Cambridge, in the middle of their wedding preparations, leaving them stuck between either forgoing the professorship, getting married in England with major travel difficulties for their family and friends, or postponing their wedding to even later. In the end, they decide to take the fourth choice: [[spoiler:get Larry to marry them tomorrow.
• In Only Fools and Horses, market trader Derek Trotter is caught with a stolen microwave, and threatened with a charge of trafficking in stolen goods if he doesn't reveal the thief. If he won't talk, he and his family will suffer serious legal consequences. However, revealing the thief in exchange for immunity would make him a grass. When Derek agrees to the second option, his family is shocked... until, with full immunity in hand, he writes the name of the thief: 'Derek Trotter'
• Our Miss Brooks: Happens in "The Big Game". After Assistant Coach "Snakehips" Geary fails his makeup test to get his high school diploma, Miss Brooks must either flunk the old high school football hero from the "Big Game of 1912" or give him a fake pass. However, she uses Loophole Abuse and Takes a Third Option. Earlier Mr. Conklin told Miss Brooks, when marking the test, to give him full credit for his contribution to Madison, his winnning the big game forty years before. Miss Brooks adds the points Snakehips scored to his test results as extra credit. Snakehips gets his High School Diploma and remains the Assistant Coach.
• Name-dropped on one episode of Property Brothers: Forever Home. After Jonathan finished describing the two options for the home reno, the clients decided they really liked this piece of Option One and this other piece of Option Two, so what would it cost to combine those two pieces? The brothers promptly declared that Renovation Option Three.
• In one late episode of Quantum Leap, Sam's currently stuck in the guise of a lowlife married to two different wives and several kids. In order to get him to turn his life around, he and Al need to break up with one of them, but they don't know which one to do so in order to create a better timeline. Instead, Sam gets both of them to break up with him, allowing both women to fix their own lives as his host was making them both miserable. In turn, this event is what allows the host to turn his own life around.
  • With his third wife and kids, who show up at the end of the show.
• Red Dwarf: Early on, Lister finds himself with two choices: dealing with Rimmer as a superior officer indefinitely, or passing the technician's exam, which is laden with complicated science Lister doesn't understand. Then he realises that technicians are considered the lowest ranks on the ship, and any position could get him a promotion...so he takes the chef's exam instead. He fails that one too, but Rimmer's freakout over the prospect is a thing of beauty.
• In Revenge after Takeda murders Tyler in order to protect Emily's secret, he tells her that either her fiancé Daniel or childhood love Jack must take the blame and that she can't save both. She does, however, by setting up Grayson thug Lee Moran instead.
• On Saturday Night Live, one "Bill Swersky's Superfans" sketch had the superfans as contestants on a game show based around Chicago sports teams. The final question was "If the Bears took on the Bulls, who would win?" All three took this route. One wrote a third Chicago sports team as the victor. The second wrote something that started with "B" and ended in "s", but was completely illegible in between. ("What does dat say?" "What do you think it says?") The third, Todd (Chris Farley), wrote a long explanation of how the two teams engaging in competition would be a terrible thing that should never be allowed to happen. This won.
• Saved by the Bell: The New Class:
  • When Lindsay wins two tickets for a concert in the Season 3 episode "The Love Bugs", Ryan and Tommy, both of whom show interest in Lindsay and the concert, plant a bug separately in Lindsay's bedroom to eavesdrop on her while she, Maria, and Rachel talk over the decision in their slumber party. At the end of the episode, Lindsay, having found out what Ryan and Tommy had done, gives each of them a "The Reason You Suck" Speech before declaring that she'd take Maria, who expressed interest in the concert during the slumber party, to the concert instead.
    Maria: Yes! Yes! Yes! [to Ryan and Tommy] Thanks, guys.
  • In the Season 5 episode "Private Peterson", Nicky tries out for several different occupations in the Career Week, but none pans out. Drawing from his experiences, he decides to set his sights on becoming a career counselor at the end of the episode.
• In Scandal after Jake is released from custody following the failed attempt to capture Olivia's father, he once again tries to convince Olivia to be with him rather than the President. Olivia tells him that she's not choosing him nor the President, "I'm choosing myself!"
• Sesame Street:
  • The producers faced two options when the actor playing Mr. Hooper died: put him on a bus or use a different actor. They took a third option: they let Mr. Hooper die with the actor and used the situation as a learning experience.
  • In the "Birdy-Pox" episode, the Count happens to come at Big Bird's naptime and wants to count his spots, but Big Bird would rather have him sing a lullaby. So the Count thinks of the perfect way to cooperate by singing a special lullaby to help Big Bird sleep as he counts his spots.
  • In one episode, Big Bird and Alan are making birdseed cookies for Granny Bird; before they start baking, Baby Bear shows up for a bowl of porridge. Porridge happens to be one of the ingredients for the cookies, but there is only one box left; so the two are left with the decision to leave Baby Bear with no porridge or let him have the porridge, but risk having the cookies turn out not as expected. When they ask Baby Bear what other foods he likes, he brings up Papa Bear's favorite food is fruit salad; this leads to them deciding to take a third option and have Baby Bear order a fruit salad himself, which in turn allows Big Bird and Alan to keep the porridge and bake the cookies perfectly.
• Sherlock:
  • Sherlock tried to do this in answer to Jim Moriarty's Evil Plan in "The Reichenbach Fall". It didn't work.
  • Another example occurs in "A Study in Pink". At the climax, Sherlock is forced into playing a Russian-Roulette-style game with the villain, involving two pills, one harmless and one lethal. Sherlock instead chooses to be shot, having noticed that the villain's gun is in fact a novelty cigarette lighter.
  • In one episode, Sherlock and Mycroft discuss the "Coventry conundrum": whether to act on intelligence you've received and risk exposing the source of said intelligence, or to do nothing and allow hundreds of innocents to die^note named after the urban legend that, during World War II, British intelligence decrypted a German message about an upcoming raid on Coventry, but refused to act on it to avoid tipping the Germans off that they'd broken the Enigma cipher. It turns out that Mycroft has been informed about a terrorist plot to blow up a plane and kill hundreds of people, and can't foil it without the terrorists realising where he got the information from. His solution? Secretly replace the actual passengers with hundreds of corpses that were due to be cremated. The plane blows up, and the terrorists believe they've succeeded, but nobody actually died.
• Attempted and failed in The Sopranos. After Tony's cousin Blundetto kills Phil Leotardo's brother, the gang finds itself facing a gang war. Tony has two unpleasant options; give his cousin to Leotardo and avert the conflict (but giving his cousin a horrible, torturous death) or protect Blundetto and face a bloody war (costing numerous lives and resources and increasing the risk of arrest). Tony decides to try a third choice by killing Blundetto himself, quickly and painlessly. This fails and makes things worse, because Phil wanted to personally punish Blundetto; by denying him his revenge, Tony has just given Leotardo and his crew another reason to go to war. Tony's gambit would have worked if Johnny had remained in control of his crew. His cancer diagnosis after being arrested allows Phil the chance to consolidate power and go after Tony.
• Side Hustle: The episode "Altoonisburg Al" has the trio attend the "Possum Day" celebration where the eponymous possum is to predict the length of summer vacation. If he eats strawberries, then there will be six more weeks of vacation; if he eats blueberries, school will start next week. Lex votes for the latter option because her birthday is around the time school generally starts and wants to celebrate it with her classmates. After the possum escapes until lured back by Munchy's possum juice recipe, it has drank so much that it ends up choosing neither option, so the mayor decides to call it even and levels it down to three more weeks of vacation so Lex can have her birthday as she hoped.
• Stargate SG-1: Crops up several times until it's lampshaded within the show.
  • "1969": A freak accident involving a solar flare interfering with a wormhole sends SG-1 into the past where they're captured by the US military. While they're being transported, Jack tells them that they have two options. They can stay captive, where they'll be split up and interrogated until they tell the truth, or they can escape, find somewhere quiet to live and avoid impacting the future. Both options will affect the future because the second option means Teal'c will eventually become a Goa'uld when his symbiote matures. Jack asks Carter for a third option, but she doesn't know of any. The third option actually comes from General Hammond, who knew the whole thing was going to happen and sent a note to his past self that helps the team return to the future.
  • "Urgo": SG-1 have the choice between removing the annoying Urgo from their minds, destroying him forever, or living with him inside their minds for the rest of their lives. They choose to have him removed until they arrive on his home planet and meet his creator. Upon discovering that the creator race are an experience-starved culture, they take the opportunity to negotiate for the creator to accept Urgo into his mind. SG-1 get rid of him, Urgo gets to survive, and the creator's people now have the chance to learn new experiences with Urgo's help. Win-win for everyone.
  • "Fail Safe": An asteroid is on course to hit Earth, leaving SG-1 to try and set off a bomb in the asteroid's core to move it off course so that it misses Earth. The plans ends up failing. Their first option is to give up, leave for the Alpha site and hope they can reach a stargate before they're hit by the explosion from the asteroid hitting Earth. The second option is to leave the asteroid by enough distance for communications to come back online and hope they can contact the Asgard in time, convince them to intervene, and then have them arrive in time to save Earth. Neither option is realistic. Daniel and Sam cook up a third option, dragging the asteroid through the centre of the Earth via a hyperspace window, materialising it on the other side of the planet. They both agree it's completely ridiculous and both agree it's their only chance. Jack requests a fourth option. When the option does inevitably succeed, he lampshades the trope with the comment "third options always work".
  • "Moebius": SG-1's ship is discovered by the Jaffa in ancient Egypt. They can attempt to attack the Jaffa but then alter history, or they could just give up and spend their lives trapped in the past (with the added headache of having to live under Ra's rule). It's Daniel Jackson who comes up with a brilliant third option of burying the thing they came for so that they wouldn't have to go back in time to begin with. There's a reason he was The Smart Guy.
• Star Trek: The Original Series:
  • "Operation: Annihilate!" confronts Kirk with a choice between allowing body-snatching parasites to spread further or killing the existing victims (over a million people, including Spock and his own nephew). Kirk specifically tells Spock and McCoy, "I want that third alternative!" They research the parasites for a weakness and find out that they're vulnerable to ultraviolet light. They use that to defeat them easily.
  • In "Patterns of Force", Kirk and Spock are in a situation where a Nazi planet, inadvertently gone wrong by a Federation historian's interference, is about to launch a genocidal invasion on a peaceful planet. One of their allies pleads with them to have the Enterprise to destroy the fleet as a lesser evil than letting the slaughter begin. Kirk balks at this bloody option, wanting to help the Nazi planet get back to normal, as well as protect its potential victims. In the end, Kirk manages to make the drugged puppet-head Fuehrer cancel the invasion instead.
  • Another one was Kirk's Kobayashi Maru. Option one is respond to the rescue call and be destroyed while option two is to abandon the Kobayashi Maru, potentially preventing war but leaving the crew and passengers to die. Kirk decides to Take a Third Option and cheat.
  • In fact, Kirk's tendency to take one of these, combined with his usually choosing being Good over Lawful, is probably responsible for his Alternative Character Interpretation as a hubristic jerk, when he was supposed to come off as a serious, benevolent captain who nonetheless values doing "the right thing".
• Star Trek: The Next Generation:
  • In "Where Silence Has Lease", Picard is asked by Data, "What is Death?" Picard comes up with the two most common answers, "Some see it as a changing to an indestructible form. Forever unchanging. They believe that the purpose of the entire universe is to then maintain that form in an Earth-like garden, which will give delight and pleasure through all eternity. On the other hand, there are those who hold to the idea of our blinking into nothingness... [snaps fingers] with all of our hopes and dreams merely a delusion." When Data asks what he believes, he replies with something else entirely: "Considering the marvelous complexity of the universe — its clockwork perfection, it's balances of this against that, matter, energy, gravitation, time, dimension — I believe our existence must be more than either of these philosophies. That what we are goes beyond Euclidean or other practical measuring systems and that our existence is part of a reality beyond what we understand now as reality." As it turns out, it's not really Data asking anyway, but rather the episode's antagonist posing as Data.
  • In "The Emissary", Capt. Picard is told that a sleeper ship of Klingons is about to wake up with standard orders to attack the Federation. Ambassador K'Ehleyr gives only two options: let them attack with great loss of life, or kill them before they start. However, Picard orders her and Worf to come up with better options, and after considerable difficulty, they do come up with a better solution — Worf and K'Ehleyr dress up as a captain and his first officer and berate the rather surprised Klingons for not realizing that the war would already be over by that point, implying (but not directly stating) that the Klingons conquered the Federation.
  • In "Peak Performance", when Data is challenged to a rematch of Stratagema by a master he'd already lost to, Data decides to play for an impasse rather than let either side win. Since he's a tireless and emotionless android, he could keep this up virtually forever, while the organic master quickly becomes frustrated by the tactic and Rage Quits. Data is hesitant to call it a victory, but his shipmates assure him that it counts.
  • In another episode, Riker describes another Starfleet captain doing this at the Academy. There was a navigation test with three possible solutions. The captain in question (then a cadet) rejected them and offered his own. The test now has four solutions.
• Star Trek: Deep Space Nine:
  • In "Profit and Loss", three Cardassian fugitives hide from their government on Deep Space Nine while they plan how to escape Cardassian law completely. Garak is ordered by the Central Command to deal with this since he lives on the station and initially has the option of either capturing them or executing them. This option is reduced to executing them by the mission's overseer, Gul Toran, who winds up creating the choice between them being executed by Garak or himself (he prefers himself as he can take the credit). Garak solves the entire sorry mess with an option that is neither sending them back as living prisoners nor executing them: he kills Toran and helps the fugitives escape the station and Cardassian law entirely.
  • In "The Way of the Warrior", Sisko explicitly states they need a third option. The two available are to betray the Klingons and warn the Cardassians about an invasion, or do nothing, meaning things likely won't stop there. The option Sisko finds is to get measured for a new suit by the resident Cardassian tailor during a briefing, thus "accidentally" allowing him to warn the Cardassians while remaining officially neutral.
  • In "Sons of Mogh", Worf has to deal with the matter of his brother, Kurn. Because he turned against the Empire to side with the Federation, their house has been dismantled and Kurn disgraced beyond redemption. Under Klingon tradition, Worf would normally ritually sacrifice him to restore his honor, but that's murder under Federation law, so he's not allowed to perform it. Since the status quo is unacceptable, neither is carrying out the ritual, Worf has to find an alternative. The solution is to have Dr. Bashir alter Kurn's appearance and block his memories, allowing him to be adopted by a friendly house and be freed of Worf's dishonor without dying.
• Star Trek: Voyager;
  • In "Drive", the spirit of this is invoked when Voyager signs up for the Antarian Trans-Stellar Rally, a race between various alien races being held to celebrate the end of a long-standing period of hostilities. When the race organiser observes that he's having trouble choosing a vessel to host the pre-race celebrations as the long tensions between the various species means that any concession to one race can be seen as an insult to another, Captain Janeway volunteers for Voyager to be the hosting vessel, as they're completely new to the area and so have no ties to any previous side that might cause offence.
  • In "Author, Author", Neelix tries to invoke this when giving advice to the Doctor about the conflict of the episode (the Doctor has written a holonovel about holograms facing prosecution but the crew are offended as he basically used their likenesses in the narrative), mentioning a Talaxian saying that went "When the road before you splits in two, take the third path", encouraging the Doctor to request time to make some rewrites and change the fine details so that the characters won't resemble his shipmates.
• Supernatural:
  • Season five has Dean and Sam refusing to play along with Heaven's will that Dean become Michael's host and Sam Lucifer's host so the angelic brothers can finish the final battle and fight each other to the death. Saying yes would thus raze the world either way, but result in paradise if Michael wins (as the angels believe he will). Lucifer wants Sam to say 'yes' because he believes he'll win, at which point he'll kick the Apocalypse into full gear and kill everyone. If the brothers both say 'no', Lucifer will use his present inadequate host to continue the Apocalypse at the current pace. The solution is provided by Gabriel: trap Lucifer back in his Cage.
  • In a literal example by Michael, Dean is told to say 'yes' or 'no' to Michael (well, he's told to say yes or die, but he'll die if he says yes...) When he says 'yes' but takes it back so he doesn't disappoint Sam, Michael then uses Adam, Sam and Dean's half-brother, as a vessel instead (it had to be someone from that particular bloodline).
  • Castiel gets hit with this in season six, when Raphael decides to restart the Apocalypse. When Castiel tells Raphael that he won't let him, Raphael beats the crap of him and says that his two choices are "submit or die." Castiel chooses to ally with Crowley, who loans him enough soul power to keep Raphael at bay while the two of them work to open Purgatory and access the soul power there to stop Raphael for good. Unfortunately, this option also sucks, but Castiel doesn't see a fourth.
• The July 11, 1974 episode of Tattletales posited this question to the men: "If a stranger saw your one and only streaking down Sunset Boulevard, he'd be most likely to comment on her _______." Joanne Worley said that her hubby, Roger Perry would say "boobs." Roger came back on, and after nervous deliberation, he wound up saying the stranger would comment on Joanne's hair. Guest host Gene Rayburn asked, "What was your second answer, Roj?" Bert Convy interjected "Second and third answer!"
• That '70s Show: Red is recruited by the local Republican Party to ask a question of President Ford, who is touring the area as part of his re-election campaign. The GOP wants Red to ask a total softball question of the President. Red wants to ask a harsher, more pointed question about the state of the economy. When the time comes and Red steps to the microphone, he asks the question he really wanted to ask: "Why the hell did you pardon Nixon?"
• The Thundermans: In "Thundermans: Banished!", life at home becomes unmanageable after the family's secret is exposed to Hiddenville, so the family is forced to relocate to Antarctica to live undercover once more, and they are given an ultimatum by Kickbutt that if they return to Hiddenville, they will lose their powers forever. After Phoebe and Max defy her orders to fight the daughter of the house's new owners when she hypnotizes everyone to like her, Kickbutt sees how much they have risked everything to save their town and gives in a deal: The Thundermans move back to Hiddenville, but Kickbutt only pretends to take their powers away to fool the townsfolk so they can live undercover as before, with Cherry being the only one aware as per the norm.
• Torchwood: Children of Earth has a very dark example towards the end. By the start of Day 5, the options seem to be handing over millions of children to the 456 or fighting what is, from all available evidence, a losing battle to save them. Eventually, Jack finds his third option - destroying the 456 by exploiting the signal they used to control the children. However, his plan will result in the death of whichever child is at the centre of the resonance, and the only one available is Jack's grandson.
• The Untamed: While the Four Great Clans are celebrating the Wen Clan's defeat, Jin Guangshan brings up the dissolved Arranged Marriage between Jin Zixuan and Jiang Yanli and subtly tries to railroad Jiang Cheng into reconsidering his father's decision. Jiang Cheng knows that he can't just refuse, but there are just as much downsides if he accepts — his personal dislike for Jin Zixuan notwithstanding. Wei Wuxian then steps in and states that Jiang Yanli is the one who should decide since she's the one they want to have married off.
• In The Vampire Diaries, Katherine is faced with an extremely difficult decision drained of The Cure that made her human and is rapidly dying of old age. She gave Stefan advice on taking care of your personal problems or running from it. For her, she has to either find a way to save her life or endure her own aging until the end. Instead, Katherine attempted to commit suicide.
  Stefan: What are you doing?
  Katherine: I told you. You can either face your problems or you run. I chose Option 3.
• The West Wing:
  • In "Shibboleth", a group of Chinese Christians arrives in the US, requesting religious asylum. Bartlet doesn't want to refuse them, as it would risk sending them to prison or worse, but granting asylum would antagonize China (which denies that Christians are persecuted), and threaten some important treaties. The ultimate solution is to "accidentally" allow them to escape into the United States, denying them legal status or recognition, but keeping them safe from retribution. Since this solution embarrasses the US rather than China (since the US is admitting to inadequate security), the Chinese are mollified and play along with the story.
  • After Matt Santos is elected President, he has to choose between letting a political opponent be elected Speaker of the House or try to influence the election for the other candidate, who happens to be an old friend of his (which looks like blatant cronyism). They come up with a third option, convince his friend to withdraw and throw his support behind a dark horse candidate, who would then owe Santos a big pile of favors. Ultimately the example is averted, since Santos decides that such quasi-unethical political maneuvering is not how he wants to start his presidency, and refuses to interfere at all.

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