What to Show?

A comment on last week's episode of Lost from my local paper's weekly summary of the show got me to thinking.

(Lost spoilers follow.)





In the episode, characters who had left the island a week or so previous on a raft were reunited with some of their fellow castaways unexpectedly. The question was why one of the characters - Mike - didn't just explain what had happened to him and the others from the raft. For those familiar with the show, why Mike didn't explain to Sayid what had happened to him, Jin, and Sawyer during the week since they left on the raft. Here's my question. Are we to assume he didn't? What the writer was asking for was basically for Mike to provide Sayid with exposition--by telling Sayid what had happened to him and Jin an Sawyer since the beginning of the season. Boring stuff, in other words. Now, the episode - 42 minutes or so of actual show - took place over presumably the better part of a day. That's a lot of time unaccounted for. Couldn't the wished-for conversation have taken place during those unaccounted-for hours? In other words, in any filmed entertainment, TV show or movie, how much is the filmmaker allowed to leave unsaid? Given that a show or film showing every second of what happens is vanishingly rare, shouldn't the filmmakers have some leeway as to what is going on during the time in the character's lives we are not seeing--including shuttling off boring exposition to those times? Or is that cheating--is it cheating to not show us Mike explaining what had happened to the tied-up Sayid? Thoughts?

Until Whenever