With such a massive cast, Lost is ripe for the picking when it comes to finding a new Cult Spy Icon. There’s the heroic Jack, the sneaky Sawyer, the hilarious Hurley and many more, but we’re plumping for the lesser-known and deliciously devious figure of Ethan Rom. Okay, so he was a murderous cradle snatcher, but what the hell - he was simply a joy to watch.

Cast your minds back to the first season and remember how the very mention of his name or a glimpse of his brooding face would send a shiver down the spines of island inhabitants and viewers alike. The beach camp was full of paranoia surrounding the presence of The Others, but for a long time they were oblivious to the fact that they had been infiltrated by one of their number. They were effectively sitting ducks all that time.

Ethan spearheaded this callous campaign after being ordered by Ben Linus to pose as one of the plane crash survivors with the aim of keeping tabs on any pregnant women. Of course, neither the audience nor the characters knew this at the time. When Hurley carried out a census Ethan was exposed as a fraud, making him head to the Dharma Initiative medical station after kidnapping Claire.

With Ethan’s ruse now rumbled and Claire managing to escape, there followed some memorable rain-soaked confrontations in the jungle with the angry survivors, particularly poor Charlie who was almost hung to death by The Other. That’s a fair punishment for some of those godawful Drive Shaft songs we’ve been subjected to. Alas, the drug-addled rocker exacted his revenge by stabbing Ethan to death, but he has continued to posthumously live on in the show thanks to occasional appearances in flashbacks.

In the third season it emerged that perhaps Ethan was more benevolent than malevolent. We’d previously seen him drugging the Claire and compelling her to hand over her child, but we then learnt through Juliet how pregnant women faced death on the island and that The Others were exploring the means to cure cancer. So could Ethan, as a surgeon, have actually been concealing a more altruistic motive when abducting Claire? There’s nothing like a bit of ambiguity to secure a place in the Cult Spy Icon list.

Played by William Mapother, Ethan’s rumpled facial features gave the character a sinister air that formed a stark contrast to the pin-up qualities enjoyed by Jack and Sawyer. Yet, stunningly, Mapother is only a tiny alteration of DNA away from being a proper matinee idol himself - as he’s no less than Tom Cruise’s cousin! Still, Ethan Rom will always be our true Top Gun…