Killing him off in the middle of Season 1 wouldn’t have felt nearly as meaningful or shocking if the villain was immediately replaced with a character that shared all the same championable qualities as Ali and/or Cottonmouth.
Cheo Hodari Coker makes a lot of sense with his answer there, which was given during an interview with Empire’s PilotTV magazine (via ComicBookMovie).
Not that we’re saying anyone else could have done it with quite the same excellence, but it’s smart that the producers didn’t even try for anything comparable.
As Cottonmouth, Mahershala Ali carried with him an immeasurable gravitas shared by Alfre Woodard’s Black Mariah, and every move he made carried the weight of the character’s ego combined with the weight of what Cottonmouth stood for within Harlem.