  We address the consistency of Horava's proposal for a theory of quantum
gravity from the low-energy perspective. We uncover the additional scalar
degree of freedom arising from the explicit breaking of the general covariance
and study its properties. The analysis is performed both in the original
formulation of the theory and in the Stueckelberg picture. A peculiarity of the
new mode is that it satisfies an equation of motion that is of first order in
time derivatives. At linear level the mode is manifest only around spatially
inhomogeneous and time-dependent backgrounds. We find two serious problems
associated with this mode. First, the mode develops very fast exponential
instabilities at short distances. Second, it becomes strongly coupled at an
extremely low cutoff scale. We also discuss the "projectable" version of
Horava's proposal and argue that this version can be understood as a certain
limit of the ghost condensate model. The theory is still problematic since the
additional field generically forms caustics and, again, has a very low strong
coupling scale. We clarify some subtleties that arise in the application of the
Stueckelberg formalism to Horava's model due to its non-relativistic nature.
