In Praise This, Melissa originally leads the Oil Factory and abandons them right before the local competition, the first step to the Nationals.
Melissa is introduced to Sam as the daughter of the biggest donor of the church that Jess goes to. Apparently, she came to this church after following Aaron, a member of the church who is also known as Big Love on the streets. The rumor is that they are a couple.
Melissa isn’t that welcoming towards Sam, as she observes that Big Love has set his eyes on her. On their first meeting, she comes between Big Love and Sam’s conversation to establish that she is the captain of the praise team and that she runs things around here.
Melissa’s jealousy
Big Love continues to be nice to Sam, and Melissa, on the other hand, stays hostile towards her. When Jess’ parents punish Sam for lying by having her join the Oil Factory, Sam decides to enjoy her time on the team. She pitches creative improvisations to make their performance better.
Melissa doesn’t accept improvisation. She likes to think that every praise team has its lane, and their lane is real church music. She makes her point by reminding them what happened last year. They tried switching gears and embarrassed themselves in front of everyone.
Things become hard for Melissa when Sam starts stealing all the spotlight from her. At an arcade game, Sam shows off her talent for turning any song into a gospel, leaving everyone around her mesmerized.
Melissa starts having second thoughts about leading this team, and during practices, she forgets to sing her own lines, wondering about it.
Melissa joins Champion Life
At the local competition, Melissa doesn’t show up to join her team. When the Oil Factory’s rivals, Champion Life, begin their performance, one of their members is revealed to be Melissa.
At the very last moment, Melissa ditched her team to join Champion Life. Melissa’s move shocks the members of Oil Factory, who wonder what happened to her real church music. Anyhow, Melissa’s exit allows Sam to take the lead and make changes at the last minute.
Luckily, Sam saves the day, but the Oil Factory doesn’t forget that they might have lost for another year in a row just because Melissa decided to switch sides at the last moment.
Melissa spills the truth
After the show, the captain of Champion Life comes to meet the Oil Factory and asks them to stay in their lane. Once she leaves, Jess confronts Melissa and questions what happened to her real church music.
Melissa confesses that they all thought they are doing great with Sam, and that’s why she backed off. It is also revealed that Big Love and Melissa were never in love with each other.
Only Melissa had a crush on Big Love. She popped her tires every day, hoping that Big Love would give her a ride. Big Love only tried to be a good person and helped her.
Later, at the Nationals, Sam tried to mend things with Melissa by inviting her to join their performance and enjoy the music, but the captain of Champion Life stopped Melissa from doing so.
Also Read: Praise This review: Amusing performances make the musical appealing