Spoilers for "Boardwalk Empire" season 2....
It was random because Nucky was told "you can't be half a gangster", and he succeeded doing exactly that. He outsmarted everyone on the show, came out on top, and after the fact shot arguably the second most important character on the show. For what exactly? He'd already won his way.
It seemed seemed kinda cheesy and tacked on. Like the writers wanted to end the season with amoment and threw all logic out the window.
Then to make matters worse he commits the murder in front of Eli, who already betrayed him once, and is facing jail time Nucky asked him to take. So what's to stop him from snitching to avoid his sentence? Nucky ain't smart enough to think of that?
shyt made no sense at all.
And it's not as if I'm the only person. Fans went nuts talking about "fukk this show, no Jimmy no show!" after that ep. So nah, you can't kill off important characters just for the hell of it.
Fred.
I see your point but Jimmy was one of the only main characters that was completely fictional so I didn't make too much out of it. At some point he had to go. Not to mention his actual intent was to kill Nucky to further prove his point. But this is Nucky's show...not Jimmy's, who never existed.
but then you nuke it and the cheese on top is like eating a scab 
its bad advertisement, yo" 
... did he tell you about my affair" 
!!!! ..... 
"Mike about to die!" or "Jesse's dead, watch"....if you do that shyt every ep then yeah, it's gonna seem like the show is scared to kill off characters. To put it into perspective Gus just died 6 episodes ago. I don't know of any other show where fans demand characters die off within 6 eps of each other.
status.
If you get murked you get murked. I don't know what the difference is between your brother killing you in a private setting, and your surrogate son hiring a hit man. Dead is dead....the main difference is it's your brother, which should be far worse. Nobody gives a fukk if they kill off Eli, so they killed Jimmy. That's why he "had to die".
I'm not even one of these super-critical fans that stopped watching the show over it, but a few things in season 2 were
Fred.
and slapping the shyt out of Eli
before Eli even responded to defend himself. After that, shyt was just a fight that got out of hand. Nucky provoked the actual fight himself, so it makes sense that he might be able to have prospective on the whole thing in the aftermath. Yes he could go either way with the decision, but it's understandable if he lets Eli live from all that Nucky knows.
i wanted to see him keep goin. todd is loose cannon. the way he reacted to everybody proves to me that there's no real control over him. and the fact that he still had the boy's spider afterwards... idk somethin aint right there. 
but that whole scene reminded me of one of my fav lines from phonte: "and they say that money change you, but money don't change you, it just make you more of what you already are" 
i smell a war comin on with the phoenix dude as a result too. walt bout to have a lot more blood on his hands 
was just about to post that same pic