Resurrection gauntlet

The Resurrection Gauntlet was a metal gauntlet (also known as The Glove and given the joking name of Risen Mitten by Ianto Jones), had the ability to bring the dead back to life for a limited time.

History
The gauntlet was recovered from Cardiff Bay by Torchwood 3 circa 1967. (TW: Everything Changes) It had a strange but unspecified connection to the "Life Knife", an alien artefact made of the same type of metal. (TW: They Keep Killing Suzie)


 * The Cardiff Rift would seem the most obvious explanation for the glove's presence in 20th century Cardiff.

The gauntlet could revive the dead, though only for a few minutes before their second, permanent death. Jack Harkness put Suzie Costello in charge of testing the glove. Costello became obsessed with the possibility of being able to bring people back to life, though only for minutes at a time. She began buying goldfish in bulk and killing them to test out the gauntlet. (Torchwood website) The Glove was more effective on recent, violent trauma victims. Suzie Costello began to murder residents of Cardiff with the Life Knife in order to improve her proficiency in using the glove (TW: Everything Changes). She conceived an elaborate plan to use the glove, the Life Knife and the gauntlet to bring herself back from the dead, permanently. (TW: They Keep Killing Suzie)


 * Costello must have worked this out as a contingency plan, in case her murders got discovered, meaning that she had planned her suicide for some time.

Following the exposure of Costello as a murderer, she shot herself in the head, killing herself. The Glove was placed in Jack's safe and sealed with a "DO NOT USE" tag. Jack theorized that whoever had "lost" the glove wanted to lose it. (TW: Everything Changes)

Costello had already set into motion murders committed on her behalf so that Harkness would revive her, enabling her to come back to life, permanently. Gwen Cooper was the only Torchwood 3 team member at that time with the degree of empathy required to operate the glove without Suzie. When the glove was used on Suzie, Gwen's life force was slowly drained from her into Suzie and she even began developing the same wound as Suzie in the back of her head where Suzie's was. The only way to break this connection was to destroy the glove, which Toshiko Sato did, saving Gwen and killing Suzie again. However, Ianto Jones pointed out that "gloves come in pairs", implying that there may be another glove. (TW: They Keep Killing Suzie)

After Cooper's love, Rhys Williams, had died, she briefly asked whether they could use the glove to make him come back to life. (TW: End of Days)

After the death of Owen Harper, Jack Harkness used the help of a psychic to locate the other glove (Ianto had remarked that gloves come in pairs) in order to resurrect Owen for the standard of two minutes so the team cold say their goodbyes. However Owen did not die after two minutes. Unlike Suzie, Owen remained clinically dead, showing no signs of life, but remained fully animate and cognitive and he was also not drawing power from Jack (the person who revived him). The team soon discovered that a strange energy was slowly transforming Owen's cell structure. The team researched the second glove, and found that its use in the past allowed the 'grim reaper' or 'death' to enter the world and if death then takes 13 lives, it can remain in the living world. The team tried to stop Owen's transformation by injecting embalming fluid into his body, but the second glove became animate and stopped them by attacking Martha, and drains her life away, leaving her at the age of 80. The second glove was destroyed like the first, with a gunshot, but it's remains then turned to a powder that formed death's physical form. (TW:Dead Man Walking)

Characteristics
Suzie's research showed that the glove was slightly radioactive and that the glove possesses "low psych levels" which allows it to directly respond to brain activity It was later established it has an empathic link in the form of energy with its wearer, which showed up on video cameras, like "a rope from [the] heart to the glove" and that transfers the life force of the wearer to keep the dead alive. (TW: They Keep Killing Suzie)

the second glove turned out to be fundamentally different from the first, instead of using the 'lifeforce' of the wearer to reanimate the dead, it taps into the power of the personification of death from the 'otherside' to reanimate the subject. in this sense it can be seen to be a ying/yang quality to the two gloves. the first keeps a balance by exchanging one life for another, but the second uses an unnatural force to create a type of 'zombie' the second glove itself seems to be far more sinister in nature and is able to move under its own power, and poses a limited amount of intelligence (as shown in its attack on the team when they tried to stop the transformation process) however this may have been the entity from which the glove drew its power manipulating it.