Do you think that the logic of it would be “broken” if the mute feature was implemented as per @kisielk’s original suggestion (sequence continues with all the links and behaviors, but the final trigger is disabled) EXCEPT for the top row, which just stops the whole thing?..
The top row is already somewhat different from the rest, so a slightly different behavior might be justified, and not confusing.
BUT
(as an alternative possibility)
If we were to stick with the logic of “mute disables the trigger, while the mechanism continues” then muting the top row could function as a form of “meta mute”: disabling triggers on ALL rows, while keeping the whole mechanism alive…
Which sounds like a pretty “clean” solution to me 
What do you think?