At the murder site of a suburban couple, the word Torchwood is written on the wall in blood. Police detective Kathy Swanson (Yasmin Bannerman) calls in the group, who discover traces of the primary ingredient in its own amnesia pill, Retcon, in the murderer’s hair. Captain Jack (John Barrowman) is forced to let Gwen (Eva Myles) use the Resurrection Gauntlet to temporarily bring back to life the latest victims. They discover that the murderer Max (Shend) knows of Torchwood’s former member Suzie Costello (Indira Varma), who killed herself in the first episode. Her possessions prove her to have been a member of a group called Pilgrim, as was Max.
They take Suzie out of the morgue and use the Gauntlet on her. They learn nothing, but she appears to be still alive. After she recovers, she identifies Max as someone she confided in about Torchwood, but always used the amnesia pills on him. She determines that all the victims were members, but one girl named Lucy MacKenzie is still alive and they arrive at her job to capture Max before he can kill her.
At the Hub, Max is in a hypnotic state, but raging violently at the mention of Torchwood. Though the rest of the team ostracize Suzie, who betrayed them and killed Jack, Gwen gets to know her. Suzie asks Gwen to help her see her dying father in a distant hospital, and Gwen smuggles her out of Torchwood. Upon discovering Suzie’s absence and finding that the Hub is in lockdown, Tosh (Naoko Mori) realises that Suzie had programmed the computer to react to Max, who had been induced to commit the murders. They ask the help of Detective Swanson when they realize the code to disable the lockdown is in the works of Emily Dickinson. They race to stop Suzie, still bearing the Gauntlet’s energy, from endangering Gwen.
The women arrive at the hospital. Gwen is becoming weak as Suzie’s fatal injuries are transferred to her. She can’t stop Suzie from unplugging her father (Badi Uzzaman) and killing him. Suzie takes Gwen to the car in a wheelchair. Torchwood arrives in time to stop Suzie from taking a ferry to the outer islands. Bullets won’t stop her, so Jack destroys the Gauntlet, which kills her, and Gwen recovers. As they return Suzie to the morgue, Ianto (Gareth David-Lloyd) points out that gloves always come in pairs.
The clue to the code being in the works of Emily Dickinson is that fact that Max keeps reciting “Because I could not stop for death.” There is no explanation why Suzie wants to kill her father, but it is widely posited that he was abusive. Guess what: Jack is having an affair with Ianto. About the afterlife: Suzie says that something moving in the darkness is coming for Jack. Suzie’s morgue drawer is 006, the same number as Alec Trevelyan, the turncoat agent in James Bond’s Goldeneye.