First of all, there are several instances of what a viewer might construed as a loophole in terms of the Director's Grand Plan, whether it's because the Director was created by man ("programmers"), The Director may continually be learning and updating (new future created, Archivist send nanite-encoded blood to update the Director on the current state of the 21st Century, watching The Travelers, Connecting to Ilsa), the Travelers decide to not follow Missions and/or the Protocols, and/or with third party intervention (The US Government, The Faction, Traveler 001, other 21st Century People).
The Protocols are really the first line of defense against things going wrong
- Protocol 1 - The Mission Comes First
- Protocol 2 - Never Jeopardize Your Cover
- Protocol 3 - Don't Take A Life, Don't Save A Life
- Protocol 4 - Do not Reproduce
- Protocol 5 - In the Absence of Direction Maintain Host's Life.
- Protocol 6 - No Interteam/Deep Web Communication, Except in Extreme Emergencies or When Sanctioned
- Protocol Omgea - The Director will no Longer be Acting in this Timeline
- The Director can "overide" a host or another traveler.
However, as generally mentioned above all of these protocols get contested, one way or another, so there really are no "guarantees" of success, because so much *can go wrong.
The series is written this way for a few reasons:
- Generates suspense/keeps us on our toes (there are a lot of fake-outs/double twists too)
- Creative freedom (mythology constantly expanding)
- Explore the imperfection of man vs a man-made IA left in charge
- To spawn debates about predeterminism/faith vs free will in a human survivalist story
However the series so far as been written in a way, where despite any of loopholes created, including the end result of season 3, we see that the creators of the TV series always give many of McLaren's team "a way out" of detrimental situations with either help from the Director OR little reprimanding from the Director, suggesting that McLaren's faith in the Director is justifiable, especially because of how the Faction and Vincent Ingram/001 have been written to defeat their own purpose by going about "free will" in an inhumane way.
The Director, a Quantum AI, has calculated a series of actions both
large and small that will mitigate the destruction of the earth and
the near extinction of humankind. This is known as the Grand Plan,
also referred to as the Master Plan or The Director's Plan.
Even when The Director gives out Protocol Omega, it's still possible that it still is counting on a response to that Protocol, so even a non-action can produce a reaction or desired outcome and that is allegedly what the story is relying on, faith in The Director and the goodwill of Grant McLaren's team.