A Dire Straits Classic in “The West Wing”
- Robert Hopkins
- Aug 6, 2025
- 3 min read
Updated: Apr 27
When “Brothers in Arms” by Dire Straits begins playing during the final moments of The West Wing, Season 2, Episode 22, “Two Cathedrals,” it becomes far more than background music. It becomes the emotional center of the episode.
The song is used almost in full, carrying us through President Bartlet’s grief, anger, faith, and resolve. It moves with the story so naturally that it feels less like a soundtrack choice and more like the episode’s heartbeat.
You won’t find the full episode on YouTube, but if you ever have the chance to watch it, do. “Two Cathedrals” is one of television’s great meditations on loss, loyalty, and the strange strength we sometimes find only after we have been broken open.
Mrs. Landingham is the quiet power behind Jed Bartlet. Her influence reaches deeper than almost anyone else in his life, even his father. She is a reminder that some people shape us so completely that we may not understand their full importance until they are gone. Their voices remain. Their lessons remain. Their belief in us continues to echo long after we can no longer hear them speak.
That is the emotional force behind the episode. Bartlet is not simply grieving an old friend. He is standing in the aftershock of a life that helped form his own.
Below are two videos. Watch the first, then the second.
I’m sharing this because I’ll be re-recording the background music from that pivotal scene. Today I began learning the guitar parts. I never try to play something like this note for note. I want to follow the feeling of it instead.
My approach is to play a song as if it is being discovered for the first time: lights low, eyes lifted, fingers searching for the next note by sound rather than memory. There is a kind of magic in that. You chase the melody as though it is still being written.
Mark Knopfler captured that feeling in the original recording. It cannot truly be duplicated, because music is not only the notes. It is the moment, the room, the emotion, the breath before the next phrase. That is what makes this song so rewarding to play, and so humbling.
Late in the episode, after Mrs. Landingham’s funeral, Bartlet stands alone in the cathedral and has a few words with God. It is the kind of confrontation many grieving people have imagined, even if they would never say it out loud.
Martin Sheen is extraordinary in this scene. His performance carries faith, fury, sorrow, and defiance all at once. Sheen is a deeply religious man, and I have always felt that this gives the scene an added weight. He understands the language of belief from the inside, and that understanding makes Bartlet’s anger feel painfully human rather than theatrical.
It is a rare scene: a man arguing with God, grieving a friend, questioning the cost of service, and trying to decide whether he still has the strength to keep going.
And through it all, “Brothers in Arms” plays like a prayer, a lament, and a final push toward the next step.
This video captures the certainty Bartlet reaches later in the episode: nothing is going to stand in his way in the next election.
Even when he says God can have John Hoynes, his current Vice President, the meaning is clear. Bartlet is choosing to fight. This is his act of defiance, his revenge against God, and against the “feckless thug” he believes God can sometimes be.
Most of us have felt some version of that anger at some point in our lives. Grief can make us furious at the universe, at fate, at God, at anything that seems responsible for what we have lost. We may not know how to say it, but we know the feeling.
That is why the scene lands so hard. And, the song sets the tone perfectly.
