Martha Toomey

Season: 1, Episodes: 1, Faction: N/A

Overview

Martha Toomey is the widow of Sam Toomey. She lost her leg in a car accident, and tells Hurley all the bad things that happened since Sam used the Numbers to win money at a fair. She also tells him not to blame his bad luck on the Numbers, and to “make his own luck”.

Death

Underworld

Fertility (Water)

1×18 – Numbers

   

Martha invited Hurley inside for tea while she relayed the background with Sam and the numbers. She said that one night — about 16 years before Hurley’s visit — a voice appeared in the static “repeating those numbers over and over again”. Sam used the numbers to win $50,000 in a “Guess the Number of Beans” (within 10) contest at the fair in Kalgoorlie. Martha said the jar “must have been big as a pony, and it’s filled to the rim”, commenting that the man “had been running the same scam for 40 years and nobody had ever come close” until Sam hit it exactly by using all the Numbers (4,8,15,16,23,42).

   

On their way home from the fair, Sam and his wife were hit head-on by a truck that blew a tire on the highway, and Martha lost her leg, while Sam escaped without a scratch. Toomey blamed that, as well as future unlucky occurrences, on the Numbers. Those occurrences continued until he committed suicide “to end the curse”.

Martha told Hurley that she didn’t believe that the Numbers had any power at all, and that there wasn’t a curse. She said Hurley makes his own luck, and blaming it on the numbers was just “looking for an excuse that doesn’t exist”. (“Numbers”)

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Related Character Images

   

   

Decoded Season 1 Characters

Hurley Reyes

Leonard Simms

John Locke

Jack Shephard

Danielle Rousseau

Nadia Jaseem

Key Episode(s) to Decoding the Character

1x18 "Numbers"










Wiki Info

Empusa is a demigoddess of Greek mythology. In later incarnations she appeared as a species of monsters commanded by Hecate (known in English as an empuse).

She is often associated or grouped with the demigoddesses Lamia and Mormo, who were likewise related as a kind of spectres in later mythology (the lamias and mormolyceas, respectively).

As a Demigoddess

Empusa was the beautiful daughter of the goddess Hecate and the spirit Mormo. She feasted on blood by seducing young men as they slept, before drinking their blood and eating their flesh. Empusa is pictured as wearing brazen slippers and bearing flaming hair. By folk etymology, her name was said to mean “one-footed”. This gave rise to the iconography of a one-legged hybrid, with a donkey’s leg and a bronze prosthetic leg.

Later Usage

In later Greek mythology, her role was reduced to a species of Hecate a spectre called an empuse or empusa (pl. empusae). The empusae were sent by Hecate to guard roads and devour travelers (Hecate was also the goddess of roadsides). According to Philostratus, empusae ran and hid, uttering a high-pitched scream, at the sound of insults. The empusae are best known for their appearance in Aristophanes’s The Frogs, in which they scared Dionysus and Xanthias on their way to the underworld.

Source 

Mythological Family Members & Associated Deities

HECATE (Mother)

DIONYSUS